Monthly Archives: October 2006

USM2 match screenshot

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usm_match_screen
Click to enlarge the thumbnail to see the USM2 match screen in all his splendor! seriously, I’m very pleased how it turned out. The players now have a particular color depending on their role (goalkeeper=green, defenders=blue, midfielders=yellow, attackers=red). I’m thinking also to let the player do the substitutions directly from this screen (instead of having to click “manage team” button on the left during the match).

I’m now making another screen with the general team tactics, like “Offside trap”, “counter-attack”, and so on…

sensational goal!

I remember that scream when I was playing the good old pro evolution soccer series some years ago with my friends (what memorable tournaments I made!). Now a friend developer just released a nice game – ok is not 3d, but what matters is playability…! Here is the description, directly from his website:
Sensational Soccer is a classically styled football game giving you control the whole team. Compete in league or cup competitions. Play against a friend in the 2 player mode. Create your own match winning tactics. Playable with either Keyboard or Joystick or Mouse. Full player database featuring all the squads from over a 40 leagues worldwide with realistic player stats.

Try it, you might be surprised.

Why I choose PTK

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When I started to work seriously on indie games, my first choice went to Blitz3d (at those times Blitzmax wasn’t yet available). I made my first game USM with it. Luckily, after that I found PTK and never went back. Why? Read on…
USM was a good product, considering was done in 5 months of spare-time work. Unfortunately, Blitz isn’t exactly the best language to work on big complex games. The lack of a good integrated debugger shows off on large scale project. My game USM for example used LOT of variables, like a database of over 25k players. How I could know if there was a particular bug happening without a debugger like those present in Visual C, with watchers, break/edit and continue feature, and so on ? impossible!

That’s why I stopped to update USM and made other games with PTK and C/C++ (I’m currently developing USM2 with PTK and C, and is really another world compared to Blitzbasic!). At first my transition from basic programmer to C programmer was a nightmare. I knew NOTHING about C. I thought for example I could compare a string using:

if (jack=”john”)

quite ridiculous, but remember that I was used to BASIC language. Even nowadays I’m far from being a good C programmer after 3 years of working in C.

Still in those 3 years I was able to complete 8 games using the combination PTK+C! when I think about it, is amazing, not talking about the quality of the games (you can judge it yourself if you want) but for the speed at which I made them! the main reason I was able to make them so fast, was because I used PTK. With PTK you have the easyness of use as a basic language (blitzbasic for example) BUT you still have the powerful debugging capabilities of all the modern C/C++ compilers.

Porting to mac is a joke. When I tried it the first time, took me about 3 hours: of which, I spend 2h and 45minutes to try to configure Xcode and all the libraries (Xcode isn’t exactly user friendly…) and the remaning 15minutes to copy the files and compile the game! yes, in 15 minutes I could see the same identical game I made on pc, on my mac!!! that was quite astonishing for me!
Now things have changed a lot (2 years have passed) and several other cross-platform libraries have come out, like Torque game builder and so on. I still consider PTK a better choice for lot of reasons:

  • tested: as you may know if you read indiegamer forums, or if you just take a look at PTK showcase, LOT of games have been produced with it, topsellers on many big portals. Millions of people tried it and consequently, I think I can say is the most tested 2d cross-platform library available on the market now. Don’t underestimate this!
  • easy: well, I need to talk again about how is easy to use? if I passed from programming in blitzbasic to C in just 3 months…!!
  • cheap:compared to other libraries is quite cheap. You pay $199 and you can use it – stop, you can make even 50 games and you don’t need to pay anything more. Only exception if is your yearly income is over usd 250k, which I think will take quite a while… complete licensing info here
  • excellent support:the author was awesome to support me. Every single question I had replied quickly, and many new feature added ! of course not only because I requested it, but because several people asked for it. Check out the official forums here.
  • full source code: Ah, was forgetting, once you buy, you get the full source code! so you can even modify it yourself for your particular needs.

Well just to be clear, I don’t get any percentage on PTK sales. I’m just grateful to it, because if I didn’t use it when I started to be indie, now I would still be a part-time developer! 🙁

galactic civilization 2

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Today my copy of Galactic Civilization 2 (Galciv 2 for the friends) arrived. I tried the demo some weeks ago and was impressed about it so decided to buy it. I bought it as always from www.play.com because the price was quite lower than the one listed in their official website… 🙂

After playing it for several hours, I can say I’m pleased. The game has lot of replayability and depth, even if I would have preferred a “real” battle – not just the CPU doing everything for me. The first time I saw it, I was quite disappointed, I must admit! the game is still cool, no doubts about it, but if you thought to be able to play cool intergalactic strategic wars like in the Master of Orion series, you’ll be disappointed!!

Overall a very good game, that could have been perfect (for my tastes, of course) with a turn-based battle on which you move each single ship involved in the battle.

usm2 visual basic editor?

usm2 editor

Yeah seems crazy but… today I wrote a small editor in VB for usm2! I save the data, as always, in CSV format so isn’t a big deal to read it from mac/pc transparently. Why I made that editor? because I’m making the interactive match of the game, and I wanted a flexible way to organize/edit the various event. Before I had to type manually a line like:

5,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,champions!,,Temporary Event,0,Temporary Event,0,Temporary Event,0

quite easy to make errors! now instead I have all checkboxes, radio buttons and textfields – much more intuitive. Took me 4h to make (most time spent checking the VB manual, wasn’t using it since 3 years!) but probably will save lot of time and potential bugs later.

So now I can start to fill the data… I don’t know yet if I’ll make the editor available to public since is quite “raw” but once I refine it a bit… why not? people would be able to create their custom in-match events. So if you want to have an event like:

“the french player goes nearby the italian… and he gives him a powerful headbutt!”

you can add it! 😀