I added The Last Sleeper to my list of Kickstart projects today.  I really think the music by Erik Aadahl is well done.  The latest update has a nice track, you should take a listen  I’m also intrigued by the story of the game, and it sounds like the game designer has face some serious adversity getting the project this far.  Add your support, only a few hours left!

The Last Sleeper

Here’s another batch of interesting game project I’ve supporting on Kickstarter.  They a look they need more support:

UFHO2 – A Turn-based Strategy Game

Organ Trail: Director’s Cut

LangGuini a Card Game!

Puzzle Me! – A Family-Friendly Board Game

I was working with some code in a book today and could not figure out why a variable was giving me problems.

Unknown idenifier: ‘mesh’. (BCE0005)

I don’t usually program using JavaScript much less with MonoDevlop, so it took me a while.  Turns out, it’s a little thing:

#pragma strict

I was using it, and the book wasn’t.  They didn’t declare the variable in the example unlike ALL the other ones! That’s why it is unknown, it IS unknown.  The sample code that came with the book compiled because it doesn’t have the #pragma strict.

GO VOTE NOW!

I’ve added Venus Patrol to my stable of Kickstarter projects.   It’s basically rebooting Offworld for Boing Boing which went silent back in 2009.

Here’s another small project I’m funding over at 8-Bit Funding: Americana Dawn: The Long Goodbye   It’s an interesting freeware project with an early America setting.

I came across and interesting Kickstarter project today called Free RPG tileset for indie game developers  I’m sending a paltry $10 from my wallet (which I might increase.)  I like the idea of crowd sourcing the funds to create art assests that can be used in indie games.  I hope Bret Truchan is successful and not only does more, but his success encourages other artists to do the same.  Heck, I might even organize a similar project.

While working on Iron Roads today, I tried to use the custom font Radius (a free font from Urban Fonts.)   I like how the letters look like curving tracks you might see on a draftsman’s drawing or surveying map.  It has potential for the Iron Roads logo.  Anyway, I ran into a tricky problem that stumped me for a long while.

I followed the normal procedure as Microsoft describes in Drawing Text with a Sprite:

1. Right-click your Content project in Solution Explorer, click Add, and then click New Item.
2. In the Add New Item dialog box, click Sprite Font. You may find it convenient at this point to change the name of the new file from “SpriteFont1″ to the friendly name of the font you intend to load (keeping the .spritefont file extension).  The friendly name identifies the font once it is installed on your computer, for example, “Courier New” or “Times New Roman.” When you reference the font in your code, you must use the friendly name you have assigned it. XNA Game Studio creates a new .spritefont file for your font and opens it.

At this point I had what I needed, but alas, it wouldn’t compile, complaining:

The font family “Radius” could not be found. Please ensure the requested font is installed, and is a TrueType or OpenType font.

Took me a long while to figure it out, but it’s actually quite simple. Install new fonts before starting up Visual Studio! So, all I had to do was shut VS2010 down and start her up again, an Voila! New beautiful font displaying in my game!!!

Please note, this is a concept piece, not art assets are my original and I don’t claim copyright to them.

If you want to help the victims of Irene start here: Network For Good: Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Irene is causing a lot of stir.  Game jam challenge:  ”You have 48 hours to make a game during the Hurricane and about Hurricanes.”

Potential games about Hurricane

• You are a Hurricane, rip down as many buildings as possible
• You are an insurance claims adjuster, denie as many claims as possible
• You are a city in a low laying area, how much money can you save not preparing
• You are a C-130 and must collect reading ffom the eye of the storm
• You are a boat or ship and must steer clear of all the hurricanes trying to sink you
• You are an oil rig and … I dunno… what do they do?!?  Hmmm… according to Wikipedia, it sounds like they abandon them.
• You are mother nature and must use hurricanes to control population and development on the main land

I didn’t finish. I just didn’t have my weekend clear.  You really need a clear weekend to finish Ludum Dare. The tech change in the middle didn’t help.

My main take away: Unity slowed me down. I’m too much of a programmer. When a game engine gets in the way, I can see all the different ways I would code myself out of the problem, but I can’t see any solutions in the engine’s context. Code is a powerful too, and I’m good at using it. Game engine’s are alien worlds with bizarre rules and un-explainable behavior.

So, I’m going to stop using game engines (or frameworks etc.) I’ll use non-game libraries and leave all the game programming to myself. Specifically, something like SDL, SFML or even XNA are good for me, but not stuff like Torque 2D or Unity. I think XNA is “library” enough not to be considered a game engine. It’s more like a toolbox. Oh, I think the caveat here is I want to make 2D games, not 3D.

I think there is a bigger principal at work here: KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid Game Engine’s are complicated systems built by lots of programmers.  They have multitudes of  audiences with different needs.  This all makes them hard to understand with lots of bells and whistles.  In order to accommodate all these different requirements, some feature are overly complex with lots of assumptions.  Those assumptions require rigidness to keep you out of the weeds that aren’t handle so well because of those assumptions.  So at the end of a Ludum Dare weekend, you look back and see all the time lost figuring the game engine’s nuances and gotrchas.  Then you pine for a chance to go back in time and just pounded out the code you needed.