Last monday was an important day for us. While Marco and Pedro were working on the final systems of Hajime, I had a nice day with Pre.
Pre is a great coder and a great example of a entrepreneur. We met him and two friends of his when they launched Orion’s Belt, a MMO browser game. The game got some visibility and won a some accolades and it resulted in getting the three of them contracted by a company to proceed with the game development of version 2. Marco did the graphics for the game’s 2nd version already as a Vortix Games gig.
I think everyone felt that sooner or later something would happen that involved people from Vortix and Orion’s Belt. It just did. Pre decided to make a big change in his life and pursue his own goals and business and started a project with us that has nothing to do with anything that anyone has seen from us. It is highly inspirational and motivational to find people that embrace risk, just like me, Marco and Diogo did and go for it. It is even more motivational because what we are trying to achieve is the original plan that brought Vortix Games together in the first place.
So give your warm welcome to Pre and wish him and us luck for the project ahead of us.
Good evening traveler! Vlad here to serve you… and by the way this is our 100th post!
I was just opening the blog admin panel to write this post as someone no need being *cough* Rasmus *cough* mentioned that we were not updating Bruce Ali’s journal… well that is true and the reason for it is that this week was still slow unfortunately but for wonderful reasons, most of them at least.
Hajime is now on Flash Game License for developer viewing only currently which is an important milestone. All objectives related to the Nape wrapper are met and now it’s time to solve the bliting part in order to have gameplay.
Looking back I feel I’m a week late, but with stuff I would need in some weeks already done, so maybe I feel we’re late, but it will payoff later. Right now I don’t know… still… while a lot of people were complaining about their jobs I was coding a box that explodes when it hits the floor… this has to be the best job ever!
Vlad here to make a balance of this first week of development. It was my plan to show the power of Nape wrapped in Bold Pixel but it was not possible. So I decided to write a balance, sort of a week post-mortem!
What went right
Nape went right! I couldn’t be happier about it! It seems that Luca didn’t forget anything.
The project is superbly organized. From a coder point of view, everything is accessible and integrated, I managed to have debug, release and testing projects all-in-one (should make a tutorial about that!) in Flash Develop and that really raises my current and future productivity to a whole new level. We’ll see how it works for Marco and David, but I think it will be alright.
What went wrong
Basically, it was a slow start. The physics wrapper is in the “almost there” for a couple of days, which means it is taking a couple of days too long. There is a good side though since objective for the wrapper at this point was to just start it and almost all functionality is present and totally abstracted, so we might squeeze some development time from it in the future.
Both me and Marco had some non-Bruce-Ali stuff to manage… that took some time too, but it was worth it since it would bug us sooner or later, so might as well be sooner!
Next week
I really want to move on to the gameplay. That will introduce several systems Marco wants to use and that I want to build ASAP.
On a personal note, I admit I feel somewhat rusty… too much time without developing any larger game project I guess, but I’m hoping (and this is mostly a personal desire) that during next week I can shape up again.
Nape wrapper is almost wrapped… pun intended, but first, apologies for the missed day 3. While Marco was working on the Hajime trailer I was surfing the waves of wrapping a physics engine. Before moving forward, a big thank you to deltaluca for helping out!
Although not necessarily final, the current wrapper consists of:
Core
This class basically controls the behavior of Nape’s space. Due to its nature, Nape wants simple things to be done quite often, for instance, if you want to change gravity, you need to wake all objects. Core does these small things for you.
Entities
Physics entities basically wrap Nape’s bodies. The abstract entity (if you don’t recall how we are using abstract classes in Bold Pixel, check this out) will offer most if not all of the functionality. Although this means that the class is not really abstract, it also means that classes that inherit from this can and should be used as presets. Currently we have a simple box, simple circle, core walls and a explosion.
As time goes by more and more presets will be built, that’s the whole beauty of it!
Debug View
This class allows for fine lines to appear on screen so we can degub objects positions and so on. Quite useful for blit, not that useful for display objects since it uses Nape’s assignGraphic method. The debug view observes if there is a display object assigned before drawing the debug sprites. This means that if a object is already skinned, it won’t have a debug sprite.
A simple test
The SWF below uses the wrapper exclusively. The walls are a non-skinned PhysicsCoreWalls object. The light wood boxes are also non-skinned so we can see the debug sprite, but the bitmap is handled manualy. The objective of this is to show how blit objects will look if debug sprite is present. The dark wood boxes and the rock circles are a normal body with a assigned graphic, so, no debug sprite is created.
Plans for tomorrow: have a bang with Nape… almost literally! Until then, click the SWF underneath to watch a simple simulation.
Today I’ve been busy along with Pedro, putting together the final sound effects on the game so I could capture footage to create what will be the promotional video for Hajime, our next release. It’s been a huge trip. Not the smoothest but I have to say its been nothing but satisfying. Even Vlad, who has been working on other projects till very recently, was moved by the VGS logo and splash screen. Something we haven’t seen in a long time, not with all the outsourcing development. It’s nice to be able to put our name one something again, but specially nice that its something we are so proud of.
So, with no further due, here it is, the Hajime video. I hope you enjoy it.
