tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17420004540543452102012-01-26T18:23:56.208-08:00Game development at Blazing Games which Billy D. Spelchan is a majority share holder of.Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.comBlogger4121100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-7102607394145865852012-01-26T18:23:00.000-08:002012-01-26T18:23:56.229-08:00

There is a saying that you do not know how important something is until you no longer have it. With thoughts of SOPA and ACTA still in my mind, I wondered what would be the results if Santa Claus came down from the North Pole and gave old media the silver bullet for stopping piracy (hint, it is not SOPA or ACTA as those won't work anyway and is as like to exist as Santa)? If piracy were to

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-85737069127087046372012-01-13T20:58:00.000-08:002012-01-13T20:58:31.888-08:00

What better day then Friday the Thirteenth to resurrect my Game Development blog. After all, Jason managed to rise from the dead quite frequently. True, a month between posts isn't exactly dying but I had to have a Friday the 13th reference. For 2012 I am planning on updating this blog every other week. To be a bit more precise, weeks that do not have new content on BlazingGames.com will be the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-70026030783605582952011-12-04T17:47:00.001-08:002011-12-04T17:51:07.156-08:00

After creating the game, it became clear to me that there are more efficient ways of implementing the game other than using a grid like I did but as I have a short time-limit on the creation of the game, these faster implementations are out of the question. Still, there is some time left for doing an optimization pass. One problem that a lot of programmers have is the desire to prematurely

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-75184414628586212612011-11-27T20:00:00.001-08:002011-11-27T20:03:37.967-08:00

This is the third (the first two parts were released last week) of a four part article covering the creation of my implementation of Conway's Game of Life. This week I am adding Cancer to the game. I am not really sure why I decided to add cancer to the game of life. Perhaps it is my strange way of mourning over the loss of my mother or perhaps all the research into cancer that inspired me to

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-35921324144127073752011-11-20T21:33:00.001-08:002011-11-20T21:37:07.304-08:00

When my mother went to the hospital and discovered that she had cancer, I spent some time researching the subject. Perhaps not as much time as I would have normally spent when researching a topic that strikes my interest, but enough to discover what a truly evil disease it is. Essentially, cancer is when a cell not only decides it does not want to die (I can’t blame it for that), but then starts

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-27666770011134266892011-11-13T18:32:00.001-08:002011-11-13T18:33:58.632-08:00

This was a really interesting episode to create, as the huge number of articles covering it’s creation clearly shows. Game-play wise, however, I am not as sure. While the individual games are enjoyable for a short-term play, I am not entirely sure there is a long-term play value to the games. To solve this problem, I plan on having a future puzzle gallery project which will let players select

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-36025164341778691012011-11-06T20:08:00.000-08:002011-11-06T20:08:22.107-08:00

Sorry for missing last week, but I was condo-sitting for my aunt. This is a continuation of my series of articles about the creation of the multi-game Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3 where I tried to create as many games as I could in 24 hours. This part concludes the development of the final (and my personal favorite) game in the episode. In earlier games created this episode, the game data (

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-72635294530940487122011-10-23T21:32:00.000-07:002011-10-23T21:32:36.332-07:00

The distortion puzzle is a game I had created before but have never released on Blazing Games. The idea is that the game is made up of a broken up images where the boxes that make up the image are varying sizes. The part of the image that is shown in each tile is scaled to the size of the tile making for a distorted version of the image. While the game is essentially the original picture puzzle

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-40955226708808955102011-10-16T20:19:00.000-07:002011-10-16T20:19:46.452-07:00

I have decided to switch back to posting my entries here on Sunday evenings. I was actually thinking of dropping this blog and just posting to Google+, but figured that this has a bit more permanence then G+ posts do. This article continues my series on Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3, where I created 8 games in 24 hours. This entry covers the creation of my hex sliding puzzle. Originally, I was

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-62545805266757901602011-10-07T19:03:00.000-07:002011-10-07T19:03:13.321-07:00

This is a continuation of my series on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3 games on the Blazing Games site. While the other episodes in the Dozen Days series were about the creation of a game in under 24 hours, this episode is a challenge to see how many simple games can be created in under 24 hours. While this article covers the creation of the hex spin game, it is heavily dependent on

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-10504501274333477032011-09-29T21:01:00.000-07:002011-09-29T21:01:43.356-07:00

My series of posts on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3 (Puzzle Gallery) continues with the creation of the hex puzzle game. This builds on the theory and code from the last couple of posts so please read those first. With the HexTile class complete, the next step is to actually display the puzzle. The display of a hex grid is a bit more complicated then displaying a regular tile

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-34411851050119731272011-09-23T00:06:00.000-07:002011-09-23T00:06:51.426-07:00

This is a continuation of my series of articles on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3. In this part, we continue developing the hex code by creating a hex-shaped image clipping tile. As I don’t already have any existing classes for drawing masked shapes, a new class is going to need to be created for drawing the hex tile. This new class works very similarly to the existing ImageLayer

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-85647410562618168152011-09-15T20:46:00.000-07:002011-09-15T20:46:39.077-07:00

In order to manipulate hex-shaped images, masks are going to have to be used. In canvas parlance, clipping regions are the proper term. Clipping is one of the ugliest parts of the canvas API, as it uses a shrinking region logic. You have to save the canvas state before setting up the region, set up the region, do the clipping based drawing, then restore the state of the canvas.  Thankfully

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-69598433308619461392011-09-08T22:00:00.000-07:002011-09-08T22:00:56.197-07:00

This article continues my series of articles on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3. In this episode instead of creating a game in under 24 hours of development time, I am instead seeing how many games I can create in 24 hours. The previous articles covered the creation of the first four games in this episode. This article takes a look at hex grids and the theory used behind the next

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-79073546373979051962011-09-01T21:27:00.000-07:002011-09-01T21:27:49.525-07:00

The spin puzzle is similar to the twist puzzle except that the tiles surrounding the tile clicked on are the ones that move counterclockwise. As with the previous puzzle, this one was very quick to implement. In fact, this game was finished in under half an hour! The spinning mechanism is very similar to the twist mechanism but more so. To make it easer to get my coordinates straight, I took a

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-8367916629131241532011-08-25T14:44:00.000-07:002011-08-25T14:44:39.030-07:00

While it has been a while since the last post in this series due to a family tragedy, I am now back to posting weekly and am continuing my series of articles on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3. This is a game in a day challenge in which instead of developing a game in under 24 hours (development time) I am instead seeing how many games can be created in 24 hours of development time.

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-61921511537913906502011-08-18T18:59:00.000-07:002011-08-18T18:59:58.439-07:00

Sorry for the long delay between posts. I will continue my series on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3 next week as this week I am going to discuss the changes I am making to Blazing Games. With the added responsibilities that have come after my mother's death, I have been forced to rethink my plans for Blazing Games. This may be a good thing if I can stick to my new plans, but as I

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-33594946337887626592011-07-29T09:54:00.000-07:002011-07-29T09:54:53.134-07:00

My mother went from improving to a very rapid decline and passed away July 29th at 1:05AM. She meant the world to me and will be greatly missed. While I posted a game on BlazingGames.com  this week as the game ready to post, I will be taking a few week break from posting new material. I am many weeks ahead on this blog for material so may still post the weekly articles here but I can not

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-8062948260145679212011-07-21T22:57:00.000-07:002011-07-21T22:57:03.316-07:00

As mentioned last post, to make it easier to remember to post, I am going to post the blog at the same time I update Blazing Games. This week I am continuing my series of articles on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3 which is an as many games as I can develop in under 24 hours of development time challenge. So far the picture puzzle game has been created so development on a sliding

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-14246175937007410632011-07-17T15:09:00.000-07:002011-07-17T15:09:56.928-07:00

My mother is still in the hospital, which is at least part of the reason I missed posting this last week. I am thinking about updating this blog the same time that I update the Blazing Games site, but kind of want to keep them separate to emphasis the fact that they are separate things. The few people who actually read this probably already realize this and combining the posting dates may make

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-13276525497599845882011-07-04T08:14:00.000-07:002011-07-04T08:14:10.814-07:00

As my Mother is still in the hospital, I am quite thankful that I have been writing my development articles as the games were written so I am months ahead of schedule when it comes to material that is ready to post. If only I could remember to post things on time :). This series was interrupted by a couple of weeks to celebrate the release of Duke Nukem Forever and to take a brief look at my

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-10876898790053691092011-06-28T12:57:00.000-07:002011-06-28T12:57:05.130-07:00

This was suppose to be posted on Sunday, but with my mother going into the hospital, I kind of forgot about posting it. Sorry for the delay. As part of my larger project, I have decided to develop my own animation system. As this larger project is currently being done in Flash, which is essentially an animation system with a powerful programming language tacked on to it, this may seem redundant.

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-43168686045098652992011-06-19T14:47:00.000-07:002011-06-19T14:47:03.523-07:00

I am going to delay my series of articles on the creation of episode 3 of Dozen Days of Tiles for a couple of weeks so I can touch on a couple of other topics. The big news in computer gaming (and to a lesser extent video gaming) circles is the release of Duke Nukem Forever (DNF). The reviews have been more negative than positive. Some of the negative reviews are negative because of the games

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-12654476983146355682011-06-12T15:36:00.000-07:002011-06-12T15:36:01.887-07:00

For the third episode of Dozen Days of Tiles, my series where I develop games with a particular theme in under 24 hours of development time, I decided to twist the concept of developing a game in a day and instead trying to develop as many games as I can within the 24 hours. I know that while the work is done in 24 hours, because the work is spread out over multiple days, it is not the same as if

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-74907931748340367622011-06-05T11:52:00.000-07:002011-06-05T11:52:31.329-07:00

This is the final installment of my making of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 2. At this point in time, the game has been created but a showstopper bug has been discovered. Finding bugs is never nice, but the very nature of programming makes bugs pretty much an inevitable thing. Bugs are often the result of a very minor mistake, such as was the case with this bug. Thankfully, with tools such as

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-121257312535077192011-05-29T18:26:00.000-07:002011-05-29T18:26:07.494-07:00

This is the second to last article for my series on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 2: Sudoku Generator. Earlier posts covered the creation and hiding of the puzzle. The final game is on Blazing Games and is located at http://blazinggames.com/table/dozenDays/tiles/sudokuGen.php. To support multiple puzzles with the Sudoku Player, the URL has a data parameter that contains 81

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-30518307854301587652011-05-23T10:52:00.000-07:002011-05-23T10:52:39.278-07:00

This article continues my series on the development of my Sudoku Puzzle Generator which can be found at http://blazinggames.com/table/dozenDays/tiles/sudokuGen.php . Previous entries have covered the model class, covering up finished puzzles, the first phase of creating a random puzzle, and how to generate potential combinations of numbers. The remaining portion of the sudoku puzzle potentially

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-39991549050335411612011-05-15T15:54:00.000-07:002011-05-15T15:54:56.049-07:00

This post is a continuation of my series on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles Episode 2: Sudoku Generator. In previous posts, we covered the sudoku model, covering puzzles, and the first phase of the generation of random puzzles. With a chunk of the sudoku puzzle already filled out, the job remaining is to fill out the remaining portions of the puzzle. This is the simple task of taking the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-20598682577312315162011-05-08T16:29:00.000-07:002011-05-08T16:29:56.450-07:00

This is a continuation of my series on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles Episode 2. Previous articles have covered the sudoku model used for storing the puzzle and the hiding of the puzzle. We are now starting the lengthy process of creating a valid random puzzle. For those of you interested in playing the game, the target release date for the final version of this game is May 20th, 2011.

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-56683391079687969412011-05-01T20:17:00.000-07:002011-05-01T20:18:48.392-07:00

This is a continuation of my series of articles on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles Episode 2: Sudoku Generator. There is a sneak preview of the game on BlazingGames.com for those who are interested. The final version of the game is scheduled for release on May 20th. Taking an existing sudoku solution and turning it into a puzzle may at first glance sound like it would be something tricky

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-19047736804014058952011-04-24T20:24:00.000-07:002011-04-24T20:24:31.476-07:00

First, happy Easter everyone who celebrates it. While I was originally going to post a sneak preview of my Sudoku Generator (yes, it is in a functional state though as usual I am behind in writing the articles related to the development), the Easter bug bit me and I simply had to quickly make an Easter game. This was actually a fairly quick development as I took my Santa's Search game and my Evil

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-77696678043524382732011-04-17T19:58:00.000-07:002011-04-17T19:58:57.668-07:00

With the first episode focusing on the player, and barely making the self-imposed time limit, I was really worried when I started working on this episode. The player was fairly straight-forward with the implementation, I started this project out with no idea whatsoever how I was going to actually implement this. To figure out how to write a generator, I figured the best way to start would

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-82637505241207080112011-04-10T20:02:00.000-07:002011-04-10T20:02:40.167-07:00

One of the more interesting books that I read when I was in school was "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks. This is the book that resulted in Brook's law, which is "Adding more programmers to an already late project will result in the project becoming even later." The point was that more people results in more overhead which results in diminishing returns so at some point adding more people

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-20916747901047304102011-04-03T21:12:00.000-07:002011-04-03T21:12:31.976-07:00

For the first few days of April I am having a poll on my Blazing Games site to determine the future of the site. Right now the ad revenue on the site covers the costs of running the site but does not earn enough to actually pay me for my time or effort. For that reason I am trying to focus on some larger projects which can either be put on other portal sites or possibly sold commercially as indie

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-55201668708607724842011-03-27T16:21:00.000-07:002011-03-27T16:21:23.309-07:00

This week we finish the series of posts on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles Episode 1: Sudoku Player. At this point, the Sudoku Player is in a pretty nice state with only three buttons left to implement and some additional cosmetic touches to add. The Clear Notes button is the easiest to tackle. It simply sets all the notes in the notes section to the unchecked state. I probably don’t need

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-25991819432162610312011-03-20T20:12:00.000-07:002011-03-20T20:12:10.647-07:00

Again, we continue my series of posts on the creation of my Sudoku Player. Speaking of which, new puzzles have been added. While the Sudoku Player is technically in a functional state at this point in its development, none of the sidebar buttons work. As most of the functionality that I want is tied to these buttons, it is important to start implementing the features. To me, the most

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-19925142769196032692011-03-13T16:40:00.000-07:002011-03-13T16:40:34.895-07:00

This week we will continue the series of articles about the creation of the Sudoku Player project (episode 1 of my Dozen Days of Tiles series on Blazing Games). The next step in the creation of the Sudoku Player is to build the user interface. When you look at the original planned layout, it is easy to break the interface down to two separate parts. The view of the puzzle and the note taking area

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-80706514121434986372011-03-06T10:43:00.000-08:002011-03-06T10:43:41.026-08:00

With the image button created, the next step is to create a check box component. As with the ImageButton class, I opted to go with an ImageCheckBox. Before starting work on this, the artwork for the buttons and check boxes used in the game were created. I used FireWorks to do this, but any graphics program would have worked. Ideally, you want a graphics program that supports layers as they make

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-34622147967388702472011-02-28T21:07:00.000-08:002011-02-28T21:07:31.068-08:00

This game took me a lot longer to finish up than I thought it would. Total development time was 22 hours. Still, the source code has been posted to the blazing games site for those of you who want to look at it. The series of articles on the creation of this game will continue next week as they still have to be written. I am going to try to finish off all the articles before next week so that

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-59578058621092616272011-02-20T15:04:00.000-08:002011-02-20T15:04:41.181-08:00

The final decision that needs to be made before starting to implement the code for a button is the type of button to implement. For the needs of the DDT project, there are two types of buttons that would be useful. The first is the ImageButton, which uses a set of images to display the four states of the button.  This allows total control over the look of the buttons but at the cost of having to

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-79447421741353256802011-02-14T11:35:00.000-08:002011-02-14T11:35:04.623-08:00

I would like to claim that I am late with the post this week because I wanted to wish everyone a happy Valentines day. This would be a lie. Before writing the post on implementing the buttons, I decided to play a couple hours of Disciples III. As with a lot of strategy games, the next thing I knew it was two in the morning. The fact that this happened is a clear indication that the low reviews

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-66573677608929821172011-02-06T21:42:00.000-08:002011-02-06T21:42:10.353-08:00

Having buttons and other GUI elements is nice, but before they are useful, your program need to be able to react to them. There are actually a large number of ways of dealing with this problem with the different solutions having their advantages. The most basic way of dealing with events is to use polling. This is essentially what is happening beneath the hood at the OS or BIOS level. Essentially

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-30415753028893903662011-01-30T21:06:00.000-08:002011-01-30T21:06:14.993-08:00

I am writing this on my laptop while lying in bed. I have been suffering the last few days with a bad cold or possibly the flu. While I have the code that I am writing about finished, I haven't pre-written the posts. I intended to get ahead with my articles so that when I became busy, or other things came up, I would be able to make the post anyway. Despite always being busy, I guess I still have

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-45522412726602140152011-01-23T19:05:00.000-08:002011-01-23T19:05:47.605-08:00

While the title of today's post could describe my feelings toward Neverwinter Nights 2, it has been too long since I went over my work on Dozen Days of Tiles. Still, one of the best ways to improve your design skills is to look at problems other games have so I will probably take a break in the future and look at how NWN2 could have been a much better game. While the work involved in coding my

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-69646034597499805862011-01-14T11:26:00.000-08:002011-01-14T11:26:45.714-08:00

I posting my January 16th entry early and yet again am taking a break from DDT (though will probably be working on it this weekend). There is a bit of a controversy about a game Capcom released and its similarity to an indie game released by Twisted Pixel. The article http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/capcom-saddened-by-its-own-apparent-theft-of-splosion-man.ars covers this in some

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-15127365558606614232011-01-09T13:29:00.000-08:002011-01-09T13:29:58.385-08:00

I am taking a break from my DDT discussion to instead discuss a design flaw in a game that I am currently playing. This is an older game that just recently became available on Steam in a platinum edition. As this game was one of the games on sale in the Steam end of the year sales, I grabbed it and a number of other games that I plan to eventually get around to. The game in question is

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-36610945809487791442011-01-01T14:01:00.000-08:002011-01-01T14:01:49.179-08:00

Happy New Year everyone. My resolution for the new year is to try and post at least once a week, most likely on Sundays but I am posting this a day early due to the date. I am one of those programmers who suffers from Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome. This is a common affliction where programmers tend to prefer writing their own code rather than using existing libraries. In my case this

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-11759822328199104882010-12-25T10:49:00.000-08:002010-12-25T10:49:50.670-08:00

This is the time of year when  things are the most hectic so I apologize for the lack of progress in Dozen Days of Tiles. I will continue the series next week and plan on releasing the first episode on Blazing Games in March. I am only going to create half the episodes as 2012 will be devoted to a 12 part game. Yes, the end of the world is overused but I want to do a series around that theme

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-69555585389658911062010-12-12T15:30:00.000-08:002010-12-12T15:30:11.606-08:00

Creating the tiles necessary for sudoku seems like a simple enough process. After all, only 10 tiles are needed. However, the check mark note system needs to be incorporated into this as well as the hint system. This makes the task a bit harder to accomplish. My decision was to got with 40 tiles. 10 for normal (blue), ten for incorrect (red) ten for correct (green) and 10 for locked (black). I am

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-70665356063375676932010-12-05T15:49:00.000-08:002010-12-05T15:49:43.613-08:00

As tempting as it was to take the day off and play Recettear, work has finally begun on Dozen Days of Tiles. I happen to be a big fan of the Sudoku puzzles that appear in the free paper that is delivered here so while solving the puzzle in todays paper thoughts of how to create my own sudoku player game started coming to mind. I grabbed a piece of graph paper and spent about an hour planning out

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-46716307689074910402010-11-28T10:44:00.000-08:002010-11-28T10:44:36.835-08:00

My original plans for this weekend were to start working on the first episode of Dozen Days of Tiles. I still am up in the air as whether I should start with my Mah Jongg effort or if Sudoku would be the better starting project. Sadly, neither have been started as Steam has their Thanksgiving sale going on and one of the games on sale (92% off) was an indie story pack that contained a game I

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-26307622488590120202010-11-14T15:00:00.000-08:002010-11-14T15:00:11.860-08:00

A few years ago I started the Dozen Days Pentalogy. This was planned to be a set of 5 series of a dozen small games. Each game in the series would be developed in a day. I originally started this project after hearing about a game in a day competition. As a lot of the games on Blazing Games were developed with  a very short time-frame, this seemed right up my ally. The first series of games were

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-852772934730381462010-11-07T15:13:00.000-08:002010-11-07T15:13:35.129-08:00

Creating a library is a bit different type of programming than normal application creation. When you are creating a class for an application, the only thing you have to be concerned about is that it meets the needs of your application. When creating a library, you have the extra burden that not only must your class do what it is suppose to do but it has to be flexible enough and bullet proof

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-74878056282773825632010-11-01T13:04:00.000-07:002010-11-01T13:04:39.041-07:00

When I was first starting to learn to program, I was told three steps to follow in order to create good programs. The first step is to get your program running. The second step is to get it running correctly. The final step, which is often not needed, is to get it running fast. In the old days (the 1990's) programmers were more concerned with speed (100MHz was fast!) so a lot of programmers would

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-30352010496296115232010-10-24T12:51:00.000-07:002010-10-24T12:51:52.959-07:00

With my birthday a few days ago and other things coming up to steal whatever spare time I had, there was simply no time to get to the optimisation and cleaning up of BGLayers. As middle aged programmers are treated the same way as the elderly I wonder if I have the right to blame my age for not finishing part 9? To be honest, I don't understand the trend to hire younger programmers. While they

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-37728496382620464752010-10-17T13:30:00.000-07:002010-10-17T13:30:29.811-07:00

Right now the library is good at drawing solid blocks. To be useful, however, better image support is needed. The one class that would make this library sufficient for the creation of games, which is the goal of this after all, would be an image layer that had support for image strips and image grids. Better yet, an image atlas since image strips and image grids are a subset of an image atlas.

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-33910178992105583402010-10-10T13:19:00.000-07:002010-10-10T13:19:47.605-07:00

I forgot to mention last week that the source code for parts 6 though 8 is located at http://www.blazinggames.com/other/openLibrary/html5Libs. It is time to start dealing with overlap. This will all be handled by the addDirty function which adds a dirty rectangle to the list of dirty rectangles. As before, this function adds dirty rectangles to the root layer. This time, however, an additional

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-24015975410636336572010-10-03T14:31:00.000-07:002010-10-03T14:31:06.037-07:00

While the code we have created so far is usable, the big problem with it is that there is a lot of redrawing as dirty rectangles may overlap each other. If you are dealing with only a small number of objects then this may not be a big deal. Still, my original plan was to subdivide dirty rectangles to eliminate overlap. As I started preparing to write the code to deal with this it became clear

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-7538955262858700382010-09-26T18:18:00.000-07:002010-09-26T18:18:44.809-07:00

I am going to delay the planned installment of Animating the Canvas this week. While I have made a lot of progress on the code and thought that I had the rest of this series finished, when using the code within my Tarot project, some bugs were uncovered. While I could continue the series anyway, as the planned topic for today would not have been related to the issue at hand, I have decided

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-21383026842784017312010-09-19T11:50:00.000-07:002010-09-19T11:50:06.466-07:00

Last week we covered the positioning of layers and how to get the real position of the layer. This week we are actually going to draw. To make this class very easy to extend, the drawing of the layer is broken into two separate functions. The drawSelf function simply draws the contents of the layer. No care is given to any children the layer may have. By doing this, we can isolate the drawing of

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-19824865683096072182010-09-12T14:54:00.000-07:002010-09-12T14:54:52.388-07:00

As I am partially writing these classes for use with November's Tarot release, I am a lot further in the code than I would be if I was just working on this code Sunday afternoons (which is the plan for this blog from now on). I have been packaging up the source as it has reached logical development points but it will be a while before this series of articles catches up with the work. The source

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-28673767775678007652010-09-05T12:04:00.000-07:002010-09-05T12:04:44.233-07:00

Before I get to the actual article, I will briefly point out that Dozen Days of Words episode 12: Morse Code has been posted on the site and while I never had the time to get dirty rectangles implemented in it, it does use a primitive layers system. In fact, if you are running it on Internet Explorer using excanvas you can visibly see how dirty rectangles could dramatically improve things. This

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-8680491230894464902010-08-29T13:23:00.000-07:002010-08-29T13:23:00.459-07:00

Today I am going to look at layers and dirty rectangles. These techniques work really well together, though it is certainly possible to use layers without using dirty rectangles. Next week I will start implementing the animation system by getting some of the primitives out of the way and we will continue the implementation in the weeks following that. Layers, when used in an animation system,

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-54728667563533764062010-08-22T12:57:00.000-07:002010-08-22T12:57:01.368-07:00

This blog has strayed quite a bit from what I wanted when I started writing it. I want to look at game development from both the design and programming view as products are created. This article, which will be divided into an unknown number of parts due to the huge size of the topic, will get me back on track. Here I will look at the development of an HTML 5 Canvas animation system as I develop

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-79727549937980666802010-08-15T12:50:00.000-07:002010-08-15T12:50:42.989-07:00

Thirteen Spikes Unlimited is now finished and has been on the Blazing Games site since Friday the 13th. As I have mentioned before, there was some plans to port the game over to HTML 5. ActionScript and JavaScript are very close as they are both variations of ECMAScript. This makes the game logic very quick to port, even if JavaScript does not have as nice of class or variable support as

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-81106860849514713362010-08-08T16:52:00.000-07:002010-08-08T16:52:43.290-07:00

One of the most frustrating things about doing third party work is that often you are in a hurry up and stop situation. Clients seem to always be in a rush to get things done. This is to be expected. What confuses me is the same client who is rushing you to get on things seems to continually do things that slow down progress. I am not sure why this is the case, but it probably largely is the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-46021441671635572212010-07-25T10:04:00.000-07:002010-07-25T10:04:31.525-07:00

I am about to embark on a rather interesting third-party project while continuing my own project so the amount of time that will be dedicated to the Blazing Games site will be reduced in the short term. The third-party project will probably appear on Blazing Games once it is done as will my own project but as both of those are large-scale projects. Thankfully, 3 of the 5 months are mostly done,

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-43608719379746578282010-07-18T09:41:00.000-07:002010-07-18T09:41:16.781-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts the last couple of weeks but travel, funeral, and other events have kept me busy. This isn't even counting negotiations that I am involved in but I definitely  don't want to talk about that. Instead, I will briefly explain why somebody who is often considered a skeptic is spending so much time creating a Tarot fortune telling game. I don't think that Tarot cards can

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-74100436278418074452010-06-26T06:28:00.000-07:002010-06-26T06:28:11.697-07:00

As I am heading off on a short trip today, I wont have time for a proper post. I am not taking my laptop but instead will only have my iPod Touch. This got me wondering if it was possible to develop a game using such a device. There are no IDEs or compilers that run on the iPod, but it does have a text editor and source code is just text. This would mean that if I am unable to find a computer to

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-62225594833929624892010-06-20T14:23:00.000-07:002010-06-20T14:23:28.447-07:00

Before I get to my point, let me first go over what lead to my current post. I have lost a lot of weight but still have at least another 20 to 30kg to lose. While letting my weight get so out of hand is my fault, had I started dieting the way I am now 20 years ago instead of listening to dieticians and other "experts" I would already be in shape. The experts that I seen were all under the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-35561608679991268132010-06-06T15:45:00.000-07:002010-06-06T15:45:45.896-07:00

Porting code by hand from Java to JavaScript/HTML5 was a rather interesting experience as working with JavaScript is not what I would call a pleasant experience. The language itself is similar enough to Java that writing or porting the code was trivial (more on that later) but the problem I had was with the debugging of the program. JavaScript is not a typed language and doesn't even require that

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-75592455019766788592010-05-30T10:54:00.000-07:002010-05-30T10:54:40.036-07:00

I am doing something different with the last two episodes of Dozen Days of Words. Instead of using FlexSDK to create the last two episodes, I am switching to HTML 5 and JavaScript. To make this transition a bit easier on me, episode 11 is going to be a ported version of my Java CircleWord game. I am sure that some of you are going to consider this cheating, but really CircleWord is a must-have

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-38951218788024557742010-05-23T11:52:00.000-07:002010-05-23T11:52:59.092-07:00

Slow is a relative term. Compared to the Commodore 64 that I use to program, today's computers are incredibly fast. Still, a lot of complaints about JavaScript and ActionScript (the scripting language Flash uses) is how slow they are. While both ActionScript and JavaScript use JIT compilers to greatly improve the speed of the code, there is overhead in compiling. Some proponents of "real"

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-26448689771343111882010-05-16T20:07:00.000-07:002010-05-16T20:07:06.736-07:00

There has been a lot of negative press about Flash lately, so I thought now would be the ideal time to take a look at why I am using Flash. Before I begin, though, I should first point out that much of the hatred of Flash seems to be oriented around Flash based ads. If you hate Flash for this reason then you are in desperate need for either medical help for your brain or are needing to learn

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-10277801122876867062010-05-09T15:35:00.000-07:002010-05-09T15:35:50.733-07:00

It's Mothers Day today so I am doing my daily update of Blazing Games and writing this right now because I am going to have to start cooking supper for my mother in about an hour. My copy of Adobe CS5 Web Premium came in so I have switched machines and am now updating the site using Dreamweaver CS5 on my main machine instead of having to do the posting on a different machine. While I suppose I

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-64970784408561579842010-04-25T14:53:00.000-07:002010-04-25T14:53:58.389-07:00

Next month is going to be interesting as Blazing Games will be updated daily for 27 days. Sometimes a project turns out to be far larger than it seems. Other times, as is the case with the project that will be revealed next month, feature-creep causes a simple project to balloon in scope. There is an easy way of accomplishing this project, and then there is the more thorough way which is the road

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-54573536045000775472010-04-18T10:16:00.000-07:002010-04-18T10:16:34.381-07:00

Right now I am using Adobe Creative Suite 3 to aid my development, not bothering to update to CS4 due to the fact that while it had a lot of nice features, I didn't think those features were worth the hefty upgrade price. While I can not say whether it is worth upgrading from CS4 to CS5, It seems like it will be well worth the price to move from CS3 to CS5. While I am slowly going to be migrating

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-86993537432835956932010-04-11T14:53:00.000-07:002010-04-11T14:53:23.710-07:00

I was thinking that perhaps I should wait until tomorrow to make a post. April 12th is when Adobe is going to officially announce the Creative Suite 5 lineup. I am hoping that something big is going to be announced tomorrow but think that perhaps the iPhone OS 4 rumors may have dampened Adobe's plans. One feature that they were planning on having for Flash CS5 is an iPhone exporter that would

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-16199263426989683902010-04-01T20:15:00.000-07:002010-04-01T20:15:29.345-07:00

Here is the text of the April Fools message that was posted on Blazing Games. Note the first letter of each sentence and the date at the bottom. I (Billy D. Spelchan) am still president of the company, and as this month's release shows, we are still slowly transitioning to HTML 5. Flash will probably be our main development tool for the next few years, though. At Blazing Games, we are proud to

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-45856403224974832592010-03-28T20:24:00.000-07:002010-03-28T20:24:11.105-07:00

When I first started web game development last millennium, the landscape was quite a bit different. Java had just come out and was being pushed as the next-best thing in web development. While there are a lot of programmers who hate Java with a passion, a large chunk of my savings account is the result of third party work I have done using that language. At the time, Netscape adopted Java as the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-2946415769577657752010-03-22T19:11:00.000-07:002010-03-22T19:11:16.750-07:00

JavaScript and the HTML 5 canvas are the things that were going to be discussed yesterday but too many other things prevented me from writing the post. I wrote an interesting email today. The contents of that email was "I did not authorise or send any press release as the project was still being negotiated and is currently in an impasse. I assume that this press release was sent by my potential

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-39858335934117408372010-03-14T14:04:00.000-07:002010-03-14T14:04:41.483-07:00

As I am sure most people who read this already know, HTML is the file format that Internet browsers use. While it is certainly possible to create a web site in php, perl, python, jsp, or a myriad of other server-side languages; these languages ultimately send an HTML file to the browser. HTML 5 is currently a draft standard, which means it is still being developed. In fact, it probably won't be

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-16031913342537400282010-03-07T19:14:00.000-08:002010-03-07T19:14:12.922-08:00

(Continued from Programming, the Early Years) The thought was that if the languages would be more human like so it would be easy for people to create software then there would be no need for programmers. The earliest programming languages were created to allow scientists and researchers the ability to write programs themselves which is why FORTRAN is considered to be the first high-level

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-19013700964350469262010-02-28T21:28:00.000-08:002010-02-28T21:28:51.644-08:00

The Space Station Defence game that has just been posted on Blazing Games is not the game that I planned to release in March. I was actually planning on releasing another episode of Dozen Days of Words, possibly both of the final episodes. After just starting work on episode 11, I came up with a concept for an arcade game. I figured I would take a few hours and build a quick prototype of this

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-37756810179775769852010-02-21T09:29:00.000-08:002010-02-21T09:29:33.562-08:00

Efficient code is not as important as it use to be. What is worse is that the situation is getting worse not better. While the vital parts of a program are likely to be written efficiently, a growing percentage of the code is going to be quickly written and probably inefficient. Making this situation even worse is that the code being written is often going to be interpreted or ran on a virtual

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-2039799368125374522010-02-14T10:14:00.000-08:002010-02-14T10:14:21.337-08:00

The enhanced version of history bomb has been posted on Blazing Games. My rant on efficient programming will continue next week, this week I am going to talk a bit about trivia as the game just releases is a type of trivia game. On the surface, trivia games seem to be something that is easy to create. As someone who has written a fair number of them, some for third parties, my knowledge of the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-38680245514002634002010-02-05T18:25:00.000-08:002010-02-05T18:25:31.804-08:00

I was looking over some of my older code noting how inefficient some of my code was. There were a number of reasons for this. The biggest is my very short development time. In my case, the short schedules are the result of my desire to release a lot of material. I have tried to slow down my release schedule to allow for better content, but other things always seem to creep in to steal my spare

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-42214495538158770112010-01-29T18:17:00.000-08:002010-01-29T18:17:41.230-08:00

It has been a while. My plans were to continue posting every week or so, but things are busy here so I kind of kept forgetting. Things may continue to stay busy based on how well a proposal I am working on goes but I will try my best to post at least a short article every other week if not every week. To make up for my delay, here is a sneak preview of February's game. http://blazinggames.com/

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-79573683722911547432009-12-23T22:03:00.000-08:002009-12-23T22:03:39.853-08:00

At last my Christmas game is finished. Sure, I would have liked to do a few more passes but as always time is the enemy. I think the game is pretty good but I am biased. I have been thinking a lot about what I am going to do in 2010 and the best words to describe my plans are icing. I will be posting my plans for all 9 projects that make up the Blazing Games site on New Years Day. There are some

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-79407420001656736562009-12-17T21:34:00.000-08:002009-12-17T21:34:07.428-08:00

I was originally planning on releasing the final version of Santa vs the Evil Gnomes this week and releasing the Christmas Edition of Dungeon Romp 3D for Christmas but with the passing-away of my Grandmother and lack of time due to family being down my plans are being altered. While I am very tempted to delay Santa vs the Evil Gnomes until next year and add a lot more features, I have delayed the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-3353437233714851302009-12-10T21:16:00.000-08:002009-12-10T21:16:56.277-08:00

I was going to have the first two maps of the Santa vs the Evil Gnomes game, but as there is no save feature so players would have to replay the whole thing so I just left the first level in there. The full game, which I hope to finish this weekend, will have 3 maps. The story is not as good as I hoped due to time limitations and what could be done with the rpg/3D engine that I am using. That is

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-67840251762561491232009-12-03T20:49:00.000-08:002009-12-03T20:49:03.153-08:00

My plans for this weeks site release were derailed when I came down with a cold. I usually don't get sick, at least not this bad, but I have been dieting which is probably not helping my immune system. I still have a lot of weight to lose, but I have made great progress this year. Still, my planned release for this week is not as far along as I would like so I am having a poll instead. After all,

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-8606184945677295792009-11-26T19:58:00.000-08:002009-11-26T19:58:05.657-08:00

Vampire Attack release 1.01 was posted with a strategy guide. The big feature that was added was a scoring system. I was also going to add more sound effects, but figured that there are some sounds that are going to have to be changed when I release the game as open source next year so I will just wait for the open source version to add more sound.

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-47594249587078768052009-11-19T21:57:00.000-08:002009-11-19T21:57:05.680-08:00

While I really don't like releasing Alpha versions of my software, I think the game is far enough along to give the players a sneak preview of my Christmas game. The new RPG core that the game is going to use is not yet finished so the game is currently using my CQ4 core. The rendering engine is my Dungeon Romp 3D raycaster with some modifications. The Beta version will be released next month,

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-29499877842068417152009-11-12T20:53:00.000-08:002009-11-12T20:53:06.924-08:00

My Thirteen Spikes Unlimited (TSU) game has reached the age of 0.8 which means that it is getting close to be complete. This release adds a construction set. Any levels you create in the construction set are saved using "Flash Cookies" but I haven't figured out a way of transferring the levels. I am honestly thinking that the only way sharable levels will be doable will be to create an air

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-43644684462475729932009-11-05T20:40:00.000-08:002009-11-05T20:40:25.453-08:00

Chapter 36 of Making One of those Weeks has been posted. For people who are interested in developing games, it has been fairly interesting as of late. First, the Unity engine (http://unity3d.com/company/news/unity2.6-press.html)has been released for free for independent development. Now the Unreal engine (http://www.udk.com/) has been released for free software. Sadly the UDK is Windows only and

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-79521594935028483232009-10-29T19:26:00.000-07:002009-10-29T19:26:16.631-07:00

While I would have liked to do a bit more fine tuning, Vampire Attack 2 is now finished. At least until next year when I open up the source. I might do a fine tuning pass for the open source release. I will release a strategy guide probably next month. While I would like to provide more details, my copy of Windows 7 has finally arrived and Ubuntu 9.10 was released today so I have a lot of

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-90143313656813062102009-10-22T21:35:00.000-07:002009-10-22T21:35:55.427-07:00

The open source release of OotW 36 has been released.  This means that October will not be having an episode of Dozen Days of Words. I haven't even started it, though have a good idea about what will be done. I am focusing on my Christmas game which will be 3 episodes and will probably start being released in November with a new episode every other week just like Vampire Attack 2.

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-6970870844718812142009-10-15T19:46:00.000-07:002009-10-15T19:46:17.774-07:00

The second beta version of Vampire Attack 2 has been posted to the Blazing Games site. I still have a level to complete and a lot of fine tuning to do to the game but there are two weeks before it is going to be released so hopefully the final version will meet my original goals for this game. To be honest, the second episode was created twice since the original map didn't work well with the

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1742000454054345210.post-91181398612134497672009-10-08T19:30:00.000-07:002009-10-08T21:26:07.551-07:00

The arcade based dream sequence that makes up One of those Weeks episode 35 is covered in this weeks posting of Chapter 35 of One of those Weeks. This is the episode where you dream of being in a space ship surrounded by blue screens of death. When you blast them with your laser, they divide into four smaller blue screens. If you blast them until they are small enough, you can destroy them. While

Billy Spelchanhttps://profiles.google.com/105313937225929040737noreply@blogger.com0