New Programming Regime

I’m currently in the frame of mind where I want to program games. Often, I flit in and out of this mindset, but this time there’s a genuine plan.

Inspired by Petri Purho, other Indie developers like Cactus and Increpare, and – strangely – Intel, I have decided:

• Games will be produced on a tick-tock basis.
• On a tick, a new game will be made.
• On a tock, an old game will be improved.
• The cycle will take some regulated length of time.

Currently, I’m working on Slimetanks, which has recently suffered a few huge setbacks which are making me sad. I had to move the number of Slimes you have from a simple counter into an inventory entity, which means re-writing a lot of subs.

The next game will be me bringing up to grade something I started a long time ago. Teaser to the right.

In blog news, I had over 40 views per day just after my post on BASS. This is strange, and I’m trying to scope out why that happened. My most popular post is the Pokémon cards one.

See you soon, tubes.

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craftscii

OK, so I’m working quite hard with the newly named ‘slimetanks’, getting it polished and making it fun in some way. In the interim, like I promised, here is the full version of WorldGen, now called:

 

A game where colourful ascii blocks lie between you and some zombies.

• Tutorial
• Never-ending game mode
• Sandbox mode

For pictures, see the linked trackback.

For download: craftscii version 0.11

Slimes soon!

1 hour game

At 9pm I decided to make a game in an hour. I already had a design, but spent 5 minutes smoothing it out on paper first.

It’s a console-based game called Slime Ranch, and is inspired by Victorian fish farming methods. I didn’t finish it, but I did get one piece of core gameplay done. The game flows as follows:

• You are a “slime rancher”.
• Slimes must be caught in jars as they fall from the roof of a nearby cave.
• Slimes are then put in tanks, with algae food to make them multiply faster.
• Slimes can be sold for money.
• Money is used to buy dyes, which add value to a slime tank and their offspring, etc.

The piece I got done was the slime cave. You are shown a number on the screen, and must press “C” to catch the slime after that number of seconds. If you’re right to within rounding thresholds, you catch the slime. You get 5 tries before leaving the cave with your “winnings”.

There isn’t much to see, but I’ll probably finish the game by tomorrow. Exciting!

New C++ Guide

A long-ish time ago, I wrote a guide to programming C++ for absolute beginners.

It was very easy to follow, but probably not very good; it was littered with errors and things that I explained away, because I didn’t properly understand them. Today, on Minecraft forums, somebody was talking about their trouble with learning C++, so I went and thoroughly updated the guide, and reuploaded it.

Tada.

The process led me, strangely, to completely removing my reliance on IDEs for developing C++ code, because I wrote my own equivalent of Linux’s MakeFile program… it’s called “Ste’s Compile Shell”, and is very personalised, but also quite good:…

Now, I have an entirely new folder structure for my C++ stuff, and a new way of writing and compiling code. Basically, I run a program which makes  a template “Hello World” file on my desktop. When I want to compile something, I drag it to a binaries folder – also on the desktop – and run a little icon next to it, simply called “Compile”. Type in the file name, and it sends all the relevant gubbins to MinGW and returns a lovely .exe or debug info.

This means I can now use Notepad++ for everything it should be used for. Hooray.