December 2010
20 posts
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That's it. I'm out of here and I'm not coming back...
I took a swing at the optimization work I mentioned last time. Got the special-case behaviors in there and working fine. In the process, I discovered some embarrassing oversights, like how when the world is shut down none of the objects still in it get deleted. Whoops. Anyway, that’s all fixed now, and no one will ever know… unless I carelessly blab about it on a worldwide information...
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Do you want to go... faster? Raise your arms if...
I wrote the code for enemies that broadcast and receive targeting data this morning, but won’t be testing it just now as I’ve been overcome by a sudden desire to optimize various systems in the game I’m not happy with. For some reason I felt like writing a long, educational article on the topic. I’ll hide the vast sea of words underneath a “Read more” thing, but...
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It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
No picture for this status update today, but my attempts at cleaning up the navigation system have been startlingly successful. There are two main angles to this:
First, the code which handled actually following an A* path to a target had utterly rusted out, assuming it ever worked in the first place, which is hard to believe considering what a mess it was. Enemies can now actually path through...
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Say something!
No flashy images or anything at the moment, but here’s the two Neon Galaxy things being worked on:
First, continuing to poke at the between-level intermission. I’ve been adding more tweaks to the animation and putting in the text updates to the player. It turns out my text animation system has worked out really well. It’s now capable of making text appear and disappear at...
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Ten Minutes in the Chamber of Understanding
I’m not gonna switch projects yet, I promise. But I figure it’s OK to put some thought into design for other games, since Neon Galaxy is pretty solid in that respect.
So I was reading some Devil’s Advocate Reviews the other day, specifically the review of Wild ARMS. And the man sez this, when talking about characteristics of old-fashioned Japanese RPGs:
Much more important was...
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XCode Shortcuts
I use XCode for my Mac development. Why? Well, it’s free. But it’s also not terrible: not quite as featureful as Visual Studio, especially when equipped with Visual Assist, but it gets the job done quite nicely as far as I’m concerned. There are a few shortcuts, though, which not everyone might know about. I shall share three:
Command-Option-Up switches between .cpp and .h files...
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Goodbye Handcrafted Levels →
An article on how the creators of a well-received indie game which relied on handcrafted levels decided to move to a completely procedural system for the sequel.
Though I’m relying heavily on procedural content in my own projects, I’ll grant it has its drawbacks. The main problem is that it’s easy to lose the sense of authorship. A major reason I like playing games is for the...
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Finishing a Game! →
Finishing a game is hard! Here’s an article on why it is hard.
This strikes close to home as I have decades of experience in not finishing things. My other creative outlet is drawing comics, and the number of comics I’ve actually finished over many long years of doing it can be counted on the fingers of a mitten. The only thing that I’ve found which works at all for me is to...
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FRIST POST!!!1
Welcome to Mayfly Studio’s Tumblr! I am your host, Mark Sachs. My day job is in the traditional game industry, but in my spare time I’ve been working on writing indie games on the Mac. Until now I’ve been writing about that on Livejournal, but I figured it would be nice to set up a distinct place for that sort of thing, and so here we are. It’s also a good excuse to try out...