Well, I promised I would be back with a real game, and here it is!
Harvest: Massive Encounter is a neat strategy/tower defense mix-up by the awesome guys at Oxeye Game Studio. I helped porting it to Mac and Linux, and generally making a new version that contains a lot of the fixes/new stuff they added to it after the last patch 🙂
The port is good news for Cobalt too, as the shared engine is now capable of running on any PC OS… so expect news on that one soon 😉
Changes are mostly technical, such as using OpenAL everywhere, using luaJIT, storing user stuff into ~/AppData etc… but also include the Italian language (proudly translated by myself, yay), fixes to the gameplay such as a bigger map, and a Steam mac version! And more game changes may be coming…
Can’t have a post without some eye-candy
(actually it came out like a month ago but… I didn’t really remember about the blog)
…anyway, you can grab the demo version here! The Linux version only comes as a .tar.gz tough (I didn’t feel like requiring a .deb install only for a demo), but installing the dependencies should be easy.
Enjoy the game, and report back any horrendous bugs, I’m here to fix!
I renamed it to Ninja: Training, so that it can actually be searched! Apparently the AppStore search gladly ignores ‘:’ while ‘-‘ is part of the word it is attached to… why it can’t just be Ninja Training, you say? It’s a loooooong story!
And the next post will be about some other bigger and better game, I swear 😛
So, using SSH+SVN on a private repo is one of those console/system nightmares where everyone knows better than you, but still there’s not one piece of working reference.
After the second time of going through that hell, here’s a note to a future me… or anyone that has to go through it:
- First, you login to your server via telnet. That was one of the things noone said to me:
telnet youruser@yourhost -p port (You don’t specify the port in the address or it won’t work)
- Then you want to create a public+private key pair on the server; go to ~ (home dir) and run
ssh-keygen -b 1024 -t dsa -f mykey (will create mykey and mkey.pub files)
- Now create a “.ssh” folder in the home dir, then move and rename mykey.pub to be “.ssh/authorized_keys” (if the file doesn’t exist; otherwise add mykey.pub to its contents)
- Then download “mykey” to your very computer – it is easy, and obviously is a wall for anyone not already knowing:
rsync [--port nonstandardport] user@host/mykey localpath/mykey
particularly awesome is the –port option, that is deep down in the man page and apparently nowhere to be found on google. Also if you dare to use the standard :port format, it will say random things.
- now that you have your key safely on your disk, run
chmod 600 mykey (the next step won’t run otherwise)
ssh-add mykey (enter the passphrase)
And you think you are good to go? If you use a non standard port, WRONG.
- fact is, that ssh does not like at all nonstandard ports. So you have to go and edit your local ~/.ssh/config file to add:
Host yourdomain
User yourusername
Port yourdamnport
- and then, you can specify your command without the port like this
svn checkout svn+ssh://user@host/yourpath
And this should be all… until it forgets about the whole thing and you must run it again! 🙂
It has been a long year since I last posted about Ninja Training, and that was about a reason – I had really no control on what my publisher decided to do (or better, NOT to do) about it!
So, it was eventually pulled out from App Store.
Now, I am re-releasing it on AppStore for those of you that still don’t have a triple copy of it 😀
Really, it started to not waste it sitting on my hard disk, but I ended polishing graphics, adding Game Center, removing (lots) of bugs, and adding two more power ups!
So, here’s a glimpse of random awesomeness:
Download it from your nearest AppStore and enjoy 😀
There’s also the QR-code for the lazier:
PS: tell me if you find any bug!
Lots of cubes
I don’t know if this spawned the Minecraft generator, or the other way around; anyway, there are lots of blocks in both!
However this time it is not based on Minecraft, it’s a demo of Dojo’s shiny new 3D capabilities! It features destructible islands in the sky, fancy/artsy graphics (everyone is so hyped about Proun today?), procedural endless world and enemies, and a lot mor… wait, not really.
There could be a cool game buried somewhere in there, but it is only a tech/design demo. On the plus side, things explode.
It works on Windows, OS X, and could work on Linux and IOS (while I didn’t try). Controls:
- W A S D – move
- left click and drag – turn AND lock enemy ships
- space – fire!
Download it here (Win), set up some music, and take off 🙂
Also, it was an university project, so if you’re curious about how it’s made, here’s the source!
The summer has come, the sun shines outside… no better time to code!
Deep Blue is a map generator for the ever-famous Minecraft that puts you in a (well, not so much) endless ocean dotted by unexplored islands, volcanos, misterious underwater cities…
and a brand new flooded hell, the Nifheilm!
I made this in the past few days because I needed SO much a sea map in MC, and I think it has worked out quite well – try it by downloading the .jar, and let me know 😉
Bye!
EDIT: I forgot to mention, the source is yours to grab!
It’s easy to change the “spawn chances” of anything you don’t like, look into “World.java”!
MINECRAFT 1.8 EDIT: I haven’t still tried the leaked beta, but most probabily the generator won’t work natively in 1.8 maps. It could work if imported as an 1.7 map… but now that Minecraft has Oceans I see little point in fixing it! It was a fun generator to make anyway, so, gg.
It is no Unity, but it’s getting there 😉
Ok maybe not, but now Dojo got an OSX Cocoa Platform along with the already existing Windows and IOS ones;
here it is showing some random procedural demo I’ve testing it with (which I cannot avoid to find awesome)
Shooter running on Snow Leopard
I even updated a bit the README so you can at least make some sense from it. It can be downloaded from BitBucket as usual.
Also, it was a real pain to get a windowed Cocoa application running without ever using a .nib (and I hate those), mostly because Apple docs really want you to use NSApplicationMain and be fine with it.
It was easier than it looks after some demistifying, you only need to:
- create the first NSAutoReleasePool on the stack
- create the NSApplication sharedApplication
- create the NSWindow, the NSOpenglView, and the NSMenu for the menu bar
- create a NSTimer to receive timed callbacks
- call [sharedApplication run] to start the whole thing, and sit back
PS: still no mouse or keys 😛
“Dojo is a simple-to-the-bone C++ game framework, aimed at getting 2D games done on IOS, Windows, OSX and Linux”, or at least this says its description for its Mercurial repository.
In short, this is the piece of software that I wrote to develop Ninja Training, my new project, and something other… and I decided to open source it all in a rush 😛
As the description says, it is a C++ library that offers most of the low level things that you need to make 2D games with vector and pixel graphics (or even 2,5D games, giving it some love).
Keep in mind that open source, this time, means that the code is not documented – while you could work something out of it with doxygen – not thoroughly commented, or even licensed (for now).
But, a cross-platform framework to quickly develop 2D games could be useful to someone – at least as a starting point for anyone that stumbles on IOS dev, and like me hates Objective C with a passion 😛
First issue on the list? For sure it is documentation, along with getting the IOS part working again…
if you ever think that it could be useful to you, feel free to leave some questions or feedback 😛
of my new game dev framework, that can cross-compile games on iPhone, iPad, Windows and Unix 😛
It could as well be quite buggy, I converted it as-is for PC, meaning that there’s nothing more than in the iPhone game (well, there’s something less: OpenFeint).
enjoy 😛
EDIT: I actually put a wrong download link 😛 – two times.
That’s all 😀
Just get it and try it!
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