Category Archives: indie life

USM2 progresses and Fizzball

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USM2 programming is running at full speed. Yesterday I spent 10h on it! also I just finished a temporary website, you can check it here. The initial release will be in english only, but I put all the texts in an external file so will be (hopefully!) easy to localize it.

Also I’m already planning some updates… I mean I already wrote down some notes on possible new additions. For now main goal is to finish a release candidate 1.0. In games so complex like a soccer management one, you never run out of ideas! but is important to try to release a first version to gather users feedback (most important thing for a developer).

Meanwhile I found very fun the game Fizzball released by the friends developers Grubbygames. Is a very clever and well designed variant of the classic game “arkanoid” or if you prefet “breakout”. Cool comic-style art too. Was a fun diversive for a few hours, then I had to go back working on USM2…! 😉

USM2 match events

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Working like mad on USM2 again. I’m trying to met the deadline of a playable alpha by end of this month, but things are getting bad… I don’t know if I’ll be able to met it 🙁

That is bad, of course I don’t have any boss to respond to, but I have some people that are waiting to play this game since long time (2 years!) so I really want to try to release it soon. But of course, I don’t want either to release it without a proper beta testing…!

Today made the match event menu, soon I’ll post a screenshot. I think looks cool, you can choose what your player should do when there’s an important event in the game. If your great talent is on the edge of the area, what he should do? shoot a powerful shot, a precise shot, lift the ball on the area, or… ? you’ll have maximum 5 choices each one with a related skill involved and a possible percentage of success (depending on the skill value of your player).

I think that even if is just small interaction, should be a nice diversion from the usual automatic matches you see usually in the soccer management games…!

…and the Goalkeeper scores from the corner!

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No wait I didn’t went nutz programming USM2…! is that today I finished an important part of the game. When a new event occurs, the game must pick a reasonable player based on the ball position. If the ball is heading towards the center of opponent penalty box, it needs to pick an attacker, obviously.

But today made a cool change, instead of looking the role of the player, it actually looks at the position on the field (as it should be!) using the grid on the picture below. What it means? that if you want to put Buffon, Barthez, Kahn (or name whatever goalkeeper you want) in the position of Henry, Ronaldo, Toni – you can 🙂 of course don’t expect that they’ll be able to score sensational goals after dribbling two defenders… 😉

tactic grid

Magic stones online stats!

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Today was tired of working on USM2 and also was challenged by my friend patrice to make a sort of “online druid viewer” (lol should copyright that phrase) for my game Magic Stones. For now I just made a temporary page but works already! In the game you can choose to upload your druid stats online, and then you’ll be able to login into a page using your game registration info to personalize it.

I’m still in the initial phase and need some more time, I think I’ll release this new feature in the new version of the game during this Christmas 2006. The biggest problem right now are the artifacts, since they’re randomly generated in the game itself… 😐

I’m having a mad idea… have the artifact “global” and then use the online system to make a sort of “online trading” for artifacts ! hmm well the idea is quite cool I think but I hope doesn’t take too much to be implemented :p

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! 🙁