Dev Log: Loot Numbers

Whoops I forgot to post for like two weeks again. Why do I keep doing that! Oh well.

I'm quickly running out of things to do in Super Sky Sisters now as I try to polish every last bit that I can. I just keep letting my anxiety get the best of me and I refuse to release it because my brain is broken in weird ways. Anyway!

I added some fancy numbers for when the player collects loot in the game. I figure since damage and healing has numbers then also collecting loot should also give some fancy numbers as well. I tried to make them look very different from the damage numbers so I went with a white fill and a gold outline.

The numbers also get bigger the more you collect which can be pretty fun at times...

Posted December 15th 2016 12:32 PM (General)

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Character Sheet Updates

Not really sure if any portion of my followers play Pathfinder, but I'm still working on my character sheet manager anyhow! It's actually been a lot of fun to work on since web development is way easier than game development, and I get instant feedback on it from my pathfinder group every time we play.

Here's how it looks now.

Added fancy icons from the Bootstrap glyphicons and did some formatting work on some of the headers to make them readable.

Also added a dropdown menu with a "hamburger" button to open it. The icons make it look even cooler than it actually is.

Behind the scenes I made the sheet auto ping the server every 15 seconds so that the player session will remain active and not get garbage collected by the server.

webdev programming

Posted November 30th 2016 5:12 PM (General)

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FNA and SDL Events

I've been poking away at the new version of Otter which will be using FNA instead of SFML. At first I thought it would be super easy and cool to use the XNA "state" systems for input. Stuff like KeyboardState, MouseState, etc. The problem with this though is that at lower framerates this way of detecting input can totally miss inputs.

I couldn't find any examples on how to plug into FNA's SDL event loop, but I eventually stumbled into something that worked. All I knew was that I had to use SDL_AddEventWatch. So here's a quick example on how to use SDL events with FNA:

SDL_AddEventWatch((data, ev) => {

    var sdlEvent = (SDL_Event)System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.PtrToStructure(ev, typeof(SDL_Event));

    switch(sdlEvent.type) {

        case SDL_EventType.SDL_KEYDOWN:

            Console.WriteLine("keydown: {0}", sdlEvent.key.keysym.sym);

            break;

        case SDL_EventType.SDL_KEYUP:

            Console.WriteLine("keyup: {0}", sdlEvent.key.keysym.sym);

            break;

    }

    return 0;

}, IntPtr.Zero);

I added this code in the Initialize method of Game, and I'm now getting my own key up and down events. Eventually this will be hooked into my input classes and I should have the same input functionality that SFML Otter has.

fna programming csharp

Posted November 26th 2016 8:20 PM (General)

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State of my Brain

Progress on things has been pretty weird lately. I've been all over the place with what I've been working on and how I've been spending my time. I'm struggling to find things to talk about on the ole blog so I figured I'd write up just a bunch of thoughts and feelings that are bouncing around my noggin.

Super Sky Sisters
I've been feeling like this game is "almost done" for the past year. It's always felt that I'm one bullet point away from finishing it, but each bullet point reveals two or three more that I then have to work on. It just doesn't seem like the game has enough stuff for it to be called "finished." That and I'm also struggling with a lot of anxiety about the game.

Honestly what I really want to do is just release it on itch.io and call it a day, but I feel like I'm missing possible opportunities to do way more with it. Steam, Humble, maybe actually trying to get any sort of press for it... but all of these things make me feel incredibly anxious. I would be perfectly happy just quietly releasing it on itch, but am I just screwing myself over by doing that? I mean I do have to make money on my work otherwise it becomes pretty difficult to eat, but right now the thought of putting Sky Sisters in front of a potentially huge audience makes me feel pretty uneasy and I'm not sure exactly why.

These feelings of weird social anxiety that somehow carries over to my work is probably the biggest reason I haven't hurried up and finished it. My anxiety and "introvertedness" just gets stronger and stronger all the time and I'm not sure how to fight it! Whoops this part isn't exactly about Sky Sisters anymore.

streaming sky sisters fna thoughts

Posted November 23rd 2016 8:14 PM (General)

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Travel Pillow Mock Up

One of the main reasons I need to finish Sky Sisters is so I can get started on this dang game.

The full version is on my twitter. This is the main reason I'm still looking for an editor that easily supports tiles with bleed over on the edges. If this mock up were using strict tiles I would end up with a billion different tiles and a billion tile layers to make it all work.

Anyway just dreaming of what I want to do next. Probably with FNA!

art games

Posted November 22nd 2016 4:17 PM (General)

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Pathfinder Character Sheet

Over the past two weeks I built a web based Pathfinder character sheet manager. It's all the way up to version 0.9.something which means that it's totally usable but may have a couple of new features added before it's called 1.0. Actually thinking about it now I have a really bad habit of calling things version 0.9.something forever instead of ever calling it version 1.0.

The entire source, readme, and license can be found on Github.

And now here are some cool screenshots.