My Android dev blog

New reworked background and a new spaceship: the H.A.R.E. Its...

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:04:00 +0200

New reworked background and a new spaceship: the H.A.R.E. Its fast and agile enough to avoid enemy fire, but fragile enough to break after a few shots.

Allright, I have finally finished moving out from at home. Since I am also currently working on my...

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:54:04 +0200

Allright, I have finally finished moving out from at home. Since I am also currently working on my bachelor thesis I had to put my programming aside for awhile.

To report on a bit of progress, I am currently working on inventory system/buying/trading stuff and the like. Simple work, but man, GUI work sure is a downer in terms of motivation.

This is what it currently looks like. I think I need to make some small symbols instead of writing “Weapons”, “Addons” etc. Takes up too much space and is ugly to read.

Currently working on GUI system and stuff. The background render still doesnt look the way I want...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:47:07 +0200

Currently working on GUI system and stuff. The background render still doesnt look the way I want it to, but I will get that right eventually - I Hope.

Also, I have been kinda trying to work on some kind of economy simulation for this. Not to fancy, but I want to give the player the feeling that the world lives and that whatever he does actually has an influence.

The intended system would work like so:

Each spacestation generates money depending on population and wealth for the AI to use. Also companies which work at these spacestations produce products such as weaponsystems, hulls, “cargo” (which is just a consumable representing stuff like food/clothing/whatever the population needs). This stuff is then bought either buy the population (and kinda disappears), by the AI to build new ships (like patrol ships and stuff) and trading companies which send convoys to other space stations to trade.

Also there is a simple supply and demand system to influence the prices.

So, if the player decides to rob a convoy he doesnt just gain some loot and hatred by the company he robbed, but he also disrupts the trade. Missing weapon systems lead to the AI producing less ships and having a weaker presence.

Missing cargo makes the population poor which in return has its various consequences.

Some of this is implemented, some of this needs to be implemented, some of this will need to be thrown away. But thats anyway the current system I am aiming for.

Today I spent hours on something I thought - or hoped - to be trivial: Outlining of friendly and...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:25:00 +0100

Today I spent hours on something I thought - or hoped - to be trivial: Outlining of friendly and enemy units.

I tried quite a few approaches, in the end I ended up rendering the model twice. Once normally and a second time with the vertices extruded along the normals AND - and thats the catch - Front face culling enabled. It kinda got me the desired effect without doing super-expensive post processing operations like edge detections and stuff.

Pew pew pew. I worked a bit at implementing shields. I wanted to have cool ripple effects and stuff...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:01:10 +0100

Pew pew pew. I worked a bit at implementing shields. I wanted to have cool ripple effects and stuff but that didnt really work out.

After lots of tweaking around this kinda what I came up with which looks halfway decent and doesnt eat my FPS for breakfast. I want make a space game, not a shield simulator.

Back to Work!

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:04:00 +0100

After 823 months of nothing, I finally remembered that I had this blog. And I also remembered my resolution to write at least a bit about what I am doing, so lets start doing just that.

Due to university, my time devoted to gamedeving was rather not-exceptional. I reworked my game library from the ground up to support 3D stuff. If you are interested you can grab it here under TyrLib2. Sadly the demo for this is currently broken due to the optimization and interface refactoring efforts of the last few weeks.

So anyways, I have been working on a library, who cares if nothing comes out of it? So, to introduce my current android project:

Well, there isnt much to see yet, but I guess the general theme should be clear. It will be a sandbox space game. I am honestly not yet clear about the entire game design yet, as I am rather concerned with the performance as of now.

As far as I’m concerned, I would be spamming particle systems left and right because I think they look cool. Well, at least the explosion effects and the trail effects do. But currently they are still a bit too expensive. I think I will need to transfer more work from the CPU to the GPU.

Block Defense published!

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:36:00 +0200

Block Defense published!:

Yay! Finally published the beta version of Block Defense.

The main menu is still ugly as hell and the game still has balancing issues and a few bugs. So I would like to ask anybody interested to help improve the game! Send me a mail, comment here, whatever, if you have any suggestions/bug reports/ideas, feel free to say it!

Oh finally an update! I intended to get to this point a lot...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 21:56:00 +0200

Oh finally an update! I intended to get to this point a lot sooner, but as destiny wills, it should not have been. First the university exams stood in my way and then one day I woke up with a spontaneous “testicle torsion”.

What sounds rather harmless had led to the operation of my balls and the removal of one of my testicles about 24 hours later. Ouch. I didnt really want to talk about this kind of stuff on this blog here, but that event was simply so random and yet distracting me from work so much, I just had to address it here.

Now lets skip to the important stuff. I have finally finished the beta version of Block Defense. Currently featuring 3 base towers which can be combined by overlapping them to create a total of 6 new towers (3 simple improvements and 3 completely new towers).

Check out the current gameplay in the linked youtubevid. I will also release the beta version tomorrowish. I still need to perform a few balancing measures before I can upload it to the google market.

Opensourced my library

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 22:11:00 +0200

Opensourced my library:

I finally managed to get my ass up and put the small library I assembled in the process of creating my games.

The problem? Its not exactly _made_ for other people, therefore the documentation is rather lacking, or rather: nonexistant. Though I hope I can fix this one day.

License is MIT, so you can basically do want you want with it. There are probably a lot better android libraries floating around, though, since the TyrLib was mainly created for educational purpose for me.

Finally time to start up a new game. Okay, the game I started...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 21:50:00 +0200

Finally time to start up a new game. Okay, the game I started this time around - with the temporary and rather unimaginative Block Defense - is kinda in line with my other project Block Quest.

Yes, you may admire my grandiosly bad sense for naming. Anyway, continuing…

Instead of going in the direction of dungeon crawling, Block Defense is aimed to be more of a tower defense. Of course, its not just a simple tower defense.

Like in Block Quest you have rooms/blocks which you an place on the board. This rooms now contain towers instead of monsters and crystals what-do-I-know. Also, the objective has been turned around. While Block Quest has focused on keeping the advernturer alive, this time around you are meant to kill hordes of brutal and ravaging… blobs.

So, abstract the blocks/etc/stuff out. Basically, you have to make the longest route possible with what you are given. Most tower defense games either just let you place your towers on the sideline which is imo pretty boring or let you maze around. However, both of them allow you to just get some kind of “wonder recipe” pattern.

Thats what I’m aiming to to avoid, and thats what Block Defense is basically about, to give the player a more dynamic and challenging enviromnment for creating mazes to kill… well.. blobs. Maybe I will switch to killing orcs, but killing pink wobbly masses somehow seems more charming to me.

So anyway, I started the project yesterday, so its still pretty rudimentary. The art assets are directly taken from my other projects Cross Defense and Block Quest.

I am not exactly sure what style I’ll be aiming for. I like Block Quests “paper style”, but considering the naming I probably should do a different style to allow for better differentiation.

Boss enemies

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 11:18:00 +0200

Alright, finally time for updating this blog, yay!

After giving some thought about what Block Quest is missing most, I could only arrive at one conclusion. Its a dungeon crawler - but there are no bosses! Well now, that has been fixed and as such Block Quest now features to boss levels.

Boss levels work like this:

Since its mostly a block dropping game, of course a boss encounter doesnt just mean that you have to kill some overpowered monster. That would be rather boring and anticlimatic.

Instead, in a boss level, the enemy boss does block dropping related things as well.

The orc boss for example first increases the spawned amount of monsters to seriously annoying levels. If you survive that for a while, he starts to increase the dopping speed and only then will he himself spawn and after killing him the adventurer only needs to reach the stairs leading downwards to complete the level.

So its basically the full course with multiple phases, etc. I have yet to get the balance right, though. The orc boss works pretty well and while I’m sure the undead boss is somehow beatable, i have yet to get any empircal evidence for this.

I mean, I know, having the boss drop additional rooms (which are also cursed/gray rooms, meaning they can only be cleared after recoloring them using some red or blue room), was most likely the most annoying thing I could do, but this is harder than expected.

Welp, at least there are now bosses. Next I wanted to focus on improving the prayer-part (the weird sidequests-mini-alternate-game-mode).

Also I have some thought about adding multiplayer, but that has yet to ripen..

Eurogamer review

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 20:27:00 +0200

Eurogamer review:

Oh my! The first time I ever got a professional review for a game I devved myself. I think I can now die happily.

Starting this blog...

Thu, 31 May 2012 21:01:00 +0200

Okay, I have finally made up my mind. I will actually try starting a blog. “Try”, mind you. This will probably end up forgotten by me because of a certain disease called lazyness I have yet to overcome.

But anyway, here we go. I decided to make this blog, to write a little bit in between about my game projects for the android. They are all small games, but if there is anybody out there enjoying one of them, then hell yes, I have done my job.

So, games you hear? My currently active project is called “Block Quest”.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tyrfing.games.BlockStory.app

So, whats the game about? Its basically a blend about dungeon crawling and tetris in which you assume the role of god. Sounds weird? Hopefully. Anyway, you have to take care of your cute little followers who dont have much to do besides praying to you and running into these kind of dangerous dungeons. And well, you’ll be the one actually making the dungeons by playing tetris (Sometimes I do think reality uses a similar concept…).

Well, thats about it, thanks for reading I guess. I hope I’ll be writing more in the futre.

Block Quest

Thu, 31 May 2012 20:52:00 +0200

Block Quest:

The piece of work I’m kind of proud of. Block Quest is a combination of Tetris and RPG dungeoncrawling mechanics. Doesnt make sense? Well, if we set aside the controls which I just dont seem to get exactly right, I think the blend of mechanics actually kind of works. As much as a tetris-dungencrawler can work, anyway.

Blob Break

Thu, 31 May 2012 20:45:00 +0200

Blob Break:

This was once called “PacBreak”, but having a yellow circle with an opening and closing mouth is apparantly a violation of copyright laws and thus got the game banned. Which is why the name changed and which is also why the game colors changed… not exactly for the better.

CrossDefense

Thu, 31 May 2012 20:43:00 +0200

CrossDefense:

Okay, this was the first game I developed for the android. And honestly, It’s quite the opposite of what can be called good, especially as the interface is kind of a clusterfuck. Sadly, the core mechanics of the game are not exactly interesting enough to keep the project alive.