Tapwave is no more...
Well tapwave has closed their doors. This wasn't totally unexpected but it was a suprise to come just at this odd time. But that is the way it goes, we thank them for giving us a device to make some fun games on and getting our start.
- posted by Shane @ 9:11 PM 0 comments

 
Cell phone adventures...
Well to mimick "God", I decided to blog about my cell phone adventures. Admitingly I am not coming where Mr. Carmack is coming from, as he knows the ins and outs of a billion systems im sure, so my gripes aren't as fully realized as his. In fact, minus what he says on his blog about J2ME development, I have been enjoying it. It is easy to get up and running, and free, plus the knowledge the market share is there its very nice to know. Why am I doing this? Cause I need a change of pace from coding for the zodiac, its fun, its C++ but I haven't the tools nessecary to properly debug and so debug sessions of even the simplest issues take an hour sometimes...its annoying me so I shifted focus for a bit.

I got a good book on coding J2me MIDP2.0 and its called: Beginning Mobile Phone Game Programming. I am to chapter 10 out of 19, so more than half way and it looks to be getting good talking bout Tiled Game Layers. So I am excited to get rolling into this and subsequent chapters.

The number 1 complaint I agree with in John Carmack's blog is the fact that buttons for cell phone gaming suck, the dpad and the action button in the center. My first test game was going to be somewhat of an old action game, but ick...the more I think about the control scheme even the most basic of action games begin to look flat. I would like to then do a strategy game, but dang, coding the AI sucks. Since I just got jade empire though, I can safely say I am wanting more and more to do a RPG game, and I have some good references and experience doing those, so perhaps if a good story inspires me, I can code one up. I am thinking a super whimsical game where you can level up to ungodly porportions in minutes is something that could be mega cool...

hmmmm

Oh well, sorry for the long update, how bout a comment from someone once in a while to even know that updating this thing is worth it?
:)
- posted by Shane @ 1:28 PM 2 comments

 
Update
not that anyone reads this blog im sure, but here is an update anyway:

So I finished the demo I was working on and posted it for the team to check out. The response was luke warm at best. Well we are going to take this sucker to e3 so lukewarm doesn't cut it (Plus we are vicious bytes, so lukewarm doesn't cut it there either). So after having an A.D.D moment at work, I kept having this game idea run through my head. I kept discounting it as "to hard to make in the short time by e3". So finally near the end of the day of telling myself that, I got productive at work. This was on a monday, come to that wednesday I started getting ideas of how I would code the basics of this new idea, and well took some time out to code it up and see how it flew. I did it, got it working, and it was pretty cool. I slapped together the quickest design doc in history for the team to see, the response was very good. So work began on "demo 2" affectionalty code named "ActionMan". So after about a week and a half of working on the intial ideas, I had the first "milestone" for the team to see, and again the reaction was very good. So I think that we finally hit on something that might have a chance at e3. I will keep my fingers crossed.
- posted by Shane @ 7:31 PM 0 comments

 
Milestone 2
Well the final milestone for pre-polish is done. There is a lonnnnggg way to go, and one glaring technical issue left to fix. May is rapidly approaching. Perhaps if the demo does get done in time for e3 and is polished enough, we *may* release the demo free for download from our site.

Of course the current demo would be very zodiac specific.
- posted by Shane @ 1:11 PM 0 comments

 
First milestone
Well the first of three miles stones was hit recently for our E3 demo. I have to say its going good. I am still not going to give the specifics of what the game is bout, type of game etc. But I can say do you remmeber when games were just fun? Nothing more, nothing less? just fun? Well this is what we are aiming for :)
- posted by Shane @ 9:44 AM 0 comments

 
Updates galore
So without giving away *Too* much what our next game is and what its all about, I can say that I have been making some good progress getting the more explorative areas of the game done. Complete with shields that recharge very halo esque. Its cool. Got some other data juggling to finish and ill consider the key parts to the explorative areas done and its on to work the more mission based stuff. Im adding in some other gameplay elements just to see if they are fun or not.

I thought I had figured out all the gotcha's of the engine but ran into another one that has to be fixed asap. Apparently im creating objects wrong or using the object lists wrong or something but I can chew up memory really fast when I thought I was deleting off old objects, this could be a pain ot fix. Another problem I encountered is a slight (hopefully easily remedied) design flaw, in that creating 20 instances of the same object has each of the objects load the same 3 graphics for itself, so thats 20x the storage space that should be required for graphics, as each of the same instances of an object should point to the pre-loaded graphics. Hmmmmm d'oh.
- posted by Shane @ 9:46 AM 0 comments

 
Cause im a control freak...
Well we are tweaking the controls of our latest offering. I think bad controls is the number one reason why good games suck, and I dont want to be one of those guys... So in our prototype we are tweaking the controls first and foremost, and the game itself hardly looks like a game, the art is mine, and the basics are int here and we are tweaking one part at a time till its perfect, cause apparently its what our fans expect.

I will say that collaboration on the net while is better than nothing, is god awefully slow for some things (Such as tweaking controls). Being the programmer, I do the tweak, compile the code and post the latest executable. Then I wait, and wait, and wait some more till otehrs finally log on and download and try. Then I wait, till they decide to comment on it. So its not as effecient as say running down the hall screaming "lets have a meeting everyone" bringing them into the room and having them try the latest and comment on it, but it gets the job done...sloowllly.
- posted by Shane @ 12:47 PM 0 comments