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From - Career Blog

Webhallen


HoverCat gone gold!




During the last month, I have been developing a game for the iPhone, so this post is going to be a recap of this last hectic month, and not so much on the actual game and gameplay, more on that later.

Since I quit school in early June, my goal for the summer was to create a complete title for the iPhone. Whole June was scheduled for personal time, so it went all to July until I started to develop.

Before this project was actually started I went through a lot of other areas. I was first trying to develop a game without an idea, just dealing with technical aspects and hoping for an idea to pop up. Well, that never happened, but I got some nice code that I later could reuse with some minor modifications. For you game programmers, this is a common problem that you probably have read of: "Don't make an engine, make a game!".



After realizing that an idea for a game wasn't just going to drop from the sky right in front of my feet, I decided to look up some game design resources. We did some game design at the institute, but much to little. So I found this guide on how to go about designing a game, and it was PURE GOLD! After I had started to go through that material, I was thinking about just doing a remake of a game that I loved when I was a kid. I watched some videos of it on YouTube an thought: "That's not THAT cool as I remembered". But I still wanted to go with that game concept, so I stuck with it. Then I went through the crash course in game design, and the ideas just came flying once I started to type my design document and it turned out not be a remake at all, it's a completely different game. Very fun experience!



Two days later, I started coding. It was going very fast in the beginning, after just a couple of days I was flying over randomly generated terrain and shooting at an enemy, and the game was basically done, I thought! Then all the details that was going to be implemented started to appear, together with glitches and bugs. And that eats up a lot of time! I also had art to create, which was a LONG time ago I even touched, maybe some time before my days in Blekinge. Surprisingly, I got satisfactional results pretty quickly, considering. And then my baby brother, who is starting to become a music freak, created some music for the game together with my input.



Then the last two (!) weeks have mostly been polishing and making it a complete game, with menus, high score, advancing through the levels and some rough balancing. We'll see if it passes Apple's review or if it missed something and will bounce back once or twice.





Wednesday, August 19, 2009 - 6:05 PM1 Comments




The Dreamer - Week 3




This is our game concept for the course game production. I have the role of lead programmer together with another one, and we are a total of eleven programmers and one artist (that is doing this for free, so thank you very much for that!). We have been coding now for 3 weeks and about 90 hours each and we have to put in about 150 hours of work in total.
Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 10:36 AM1 Comments




Game Concept Challenge 2008


Från onsdag morgon klockan 10, och 24 timmar framåt, tävlade jag och Lucas med ett gäng andra i "Power Challenge Code Crunch"-tävling som hölls under Game Concept Challenge i Karlshamn.

Vi visste inte vad vi skulle göra mer än att det såklart var ett spel, vilka verktyg som var tillåtna och att tävlingen tyvärr var individuell.

När tävlingen väl startade fick vi reda på att det var ett racingspel, i 3D, vi skulle göra, vilket jag inte alls hade väntat mig. Jag hade trott att det var mer av ett tema vi skulle få och inte en genre.



Hur som helst, jag hade börjat skissa på en remake av Super Skidmarks i början av 3D-kursen för några månader sen, så jag visste ungefär hur jag kunde gå tillväga. Jag använde Irrlicht som 3D-motor för att underlätta utvecklingen (dock tveksam till om det gjorde det :huh: ).



Både jag och Lucas var snabbt igång, tog nog inte mer än 2-3 timmar innan vi knackigt och buggigt kunde köra våra bilar på trasiga banor. :)

Sen tog det stopp för min del, satt och bråkade med några rader kod fram till säkert 18 på kvällen, då började det bli trist. Jag fortsatte med andra delar av spelet, som checkpoints, ljud och lite information som man får i spelet. :wacko: Men jag hade börjat ge upp runt 2 på natten, ungefär då och därför jag började koda på ljud, det var enkelt och behövde inte tänka så mycket. Jag orkar verkligen inte tänka matte och sådant när jag är utmattad och bara vill sova, den funktionen i hjärnan är avstängd då. Och de var det jag föll på, tycker jag, tyvärr. :'(



Men det var ändå kul som fan, att göra ett i princip komplett spel på 24-timmar. Sen kan ni ju gissa vem som kom på första plats och vann en PS3 värde 6000:-, precis, Lucas. Klart värdig vinnare och glad för hans skull, nice att en nära polare tog hem första pris!
Saturday, April 19, 2008 - 12:45 PM0 Comments
Installing Windows on a Mac with Boot Camp
Last two days I've been struggling with installing Windows through Boot Camp, since I wanted to be able to code some DirectX on my laptop and using VMware Fusion didn't really cut it.



Ok, so I was running a bit low on space to be able to make a Boot Camp partition I had to make some space first. Apparently you should need at least 15GB of space before attempting to install. But even if this is true, it might fail to move files when you try and make the partition, as I experienced. So I had to read up on the internet to get a solution to this, so I will publish this small guide on how to get it to work if you have problems with your disc.





  1. Make sure you have 10GB or preferably more free. Start Boot Camp Assistant, and if it fails to make a partition we have a couple of options to try and the error messages may vary. Mine was saying "Some Files Could Not Be Moved".



  2. The first solution to try, and is free, is to start your Mac from the installation DVD (insert the Leopard DVD, reboot and hold C or Option). After you've selected your language go to Utilities -> Disk Utility. Select the drive you're going to install Windows on, in my case on my MacBook I only have one option here "55 GB FUJITSU ...", then Partition. Select the space, that by default takes up the whole drive and if you haven't changed the name says "Macintosh HD". Click the +-sign and select this new space that is created, you can drag it to change the size or type the size you want. I would recommend to change the Format to free space. Then hit Apply. If it completes (mine didn't) without error you can restart your computer and the Boot Camp Assistant should work.



  3. If you have other errors, you should select First Aid instead and hit Verify Disk/Repair Disk.



  4. The second solution is to get another tool, that can defrag or in any other way fix our precious disk. The only one out there that works with Leopard, at this time of writing, is Micromat Techtool. Once you have acquired it, start it from the DVD/CD (reboot and hold C or Option). Navigate to Performance, and do both Maintenance and Optimization. The Optimization took about 10 hours (!) for me, but it was necessary to be able to install Windows. Note that Techtool can solve other disc errors as well, not just this one.



  5. Once done, fire up Leopard and Boot Camp Assistant and the partitioning should now complete, if you haven't got to any prior errors, and step you through the installation of Windows. If you have created a small partition I would recommend that you format the partition in the Windows installation program as FAT32 since it has less overhead, but it can't handle files larger than 4GB, another benefit is that you can access the drive from within Leopard, which is not the case with NTFS.



  6. When the installation of Windows is complete and once inside you should install Boot Camp from the Leopard DVD, the installation program start automatically after you've inserted the disc. If you want to be able to access your OS X-files from Windows you will need Mediafour MacDrive program, it also makes it possible to write files on the OS X-partition (beware! I recommend that you stick to your Users-folder if you don't know the inside outs of the file system).



  7. Inside Boot Camp (accessible from the systray or Control Panel) you can change various settings, most importantly which operating system should boot by default. When the computer boots up, hold Option (Alt) and you will be able to choose which one to start, otherwise the default one will start.



  8. It is possible to run Windows from within OS X, so you don't have to reboot and change every time when you just need to do something small. You can do this with VMware Fusion or Parallels. This way, you have the best of both worlds!







Hope this helps someone that might stumble across this article searching for a solution to this problem. ;)

Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 4:11 PM0 Comments
What? DS progress
I've been playing on my Nintendo DS a lot lately, a bit too much to be honest, even if the platform only has a handful of real good titles, at least for single player. That's a bit sad, since I really like the console otherwise. So I figured I once again should try to conquer the land of DS programming. Taking off from when I gave up the last time, not that many weeks really. :)



And I finally got my code to run on the emulators iDeaS and NO$GBA. It had worked properly on DeSmuMe earlier but nothing else, and not the hardware. As I got it to work I transfered it to the hardware to test with no hopes.





The problem was earlier, that apparently you need to set up the lighting even if the scene won't have any! Trial and error, rinse and repeat.

Well, now I will have something to play around with during the holidays, nice.
Monday, December 17, 2007 - 11:42 PM0 Comments
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