…I postponed Carl Cube, because before global game jam started I wanted gamekit to be able to link blend-files or at least group-instances. That should make it possible for teams to work on different blender-file and link objects of the other one. That worked quite well on linux and actually also on windows, BUT during GGJ windows crashed all the time…

Great, just as I imagined… In the end it was just some stupid asserts that fired on windows but not on linux (where they seem to be ignored). Compiling windows in release-mode fixed it,…too bad that it took several hours to come to this simple conclusion (todo:still have to look at this asserts)

GGJ wasn’t perfect, and in the end it was like the last year. We were more or less ready to start creating some levels just before the deadline. Of course at this time we were already a bit stressed And therefore the actual game is a bit crappy.

The result is here(the title screen on the website is the best of the whole project :D):

Btw, the other two guys involved in this were Markus Oppermann and Burak Kahraman.

In the end I have to admit that I still wasn’t as confident with gamekit as I thought, so we actually ignored the physics-engine just because something wasn’t working right from the start. Keeping a cool head and first thinking before coding would have been a bit better for this…Not sure if that would have changed anything though

But in the end all about ggj was positive. Getting stuck with gamekit let me know better where and how to improve it… Btw the location in Mülheim(Ruhr) was great and well organized.

When I came back home I started thinking what went wrong and why, and since then I’m working hard to get gamekit more stable and to look more indepth to know what is really going on there. There is still much to discover

Works well, especially since I decided to not commit any new feature I built in the official gamekit-trunk (e.g. video-texture, gui-support in lua, linking of blend-files..), I can work much faster. No need to think about how to implement a feature so that it is bullet-proofed for gamekit-trunk or do it perfect before going on.(no that anything in gamekit would be bullet-proofed, except bullet-physics of course :P) Just do as you need,…great! Btw, I can’t point out the GIT is the best tool to work on such a project, keeping the own development branch with the official branch in synch,…GIT GIT GIT.

To finally get something done, I started (again ) a simple project and decided to go for a well known old game “SOKOBAN”. (Carl Cube have to wait…)

Game-View

The mechanic is simple but works excellent. I already created most of the framework. Things done so far:

• simple creation of bricks (for now static and moveable)
• player controlled by keyboard (but decoupled over message-system, so any other input-device sould be integrated quite easy
• goal-points (for now just sending an internal message, that all points are mounted ==>level won)
• editor that let you create and modify the levels at runtime
• save, load, delete via ui

Editor-View

I want to keep it simple and want to go on with deployment for the different mobile devices. Now I have to create a new gamekit-android-runtime from scratch. That will be a hard fight not to think about iOS.

We’ll see how far I will come.

Actually, I wanted to show a small video, but was too stupid to create a screencast…

Keep on rocking,ToM

Global Game Jam will be started in exactly one week and I decided to remake our first ggj-project Carl Cube and Bobby Ball to check if gamekit can do what I want to do.

Actually I spent some time in fixing gamekit and developing it to a point I would consider usable in a way I want to create games. I just decided to be more centric on developing games now and not that much maintaining the engine (not that I did this fulltime or such…). That means that I will still have an eye on contributing and fixing gamekit but only after I finished a game or if serious bugs occur. (Not sure if I will really do it like this, but I have to concentrate on finishing stuff… keep focused,man! :D)

So, this will be day onepointfive since I already started a bit yesterday:

Stuff I use:

• Ubuntu
• Blender
• Eclipse
• gamekit
• git

Yes, it is true. I really neglected the blog for a while. So what am I doing at the moment?

First of all, I working on gamekit to have it in shape for creating the kind of games I want to create.  For that I’m doing lots of bugfixes and working mainly on the runtime and it’s lua-layer. Actually I love this project. Finally I’m home in case of game-engine. Now it has to be stable enough for all platforms, which will still be a tough way,…

For people that don’t know gamekit (and I think that are 99,99%). It is a blender-based game-engine. This means you use blender as scene-graph, use (if you want) its bge-bricks for visual logic (most of them are implemented in gamekit) or use lua-scripting inside blender or use c++. Of course you can use all 3 methods altogether. The game can produce code for Linux(my main platform), win and osx plus android and iOS (but the mobile versions still need lots of optimizations).

Caution: Since this is a 100% community driven engine, there isn’t that much documentation People who are not willing to make their hands dirty and need everything on a silver plate to produce something should switch to the big good documented and more stable engines like unity3d or udk (btw: I like unity but I do like more to play in the dirt :p)

So let’s have a look at http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/

…and if I’m not working on gamekit I’m working on a game-project with a bunch of people that are located somewhere in Germany. So it is some kind of distributed working. At the moment we see if we can get a publisher of that master-piece of game software

…and if I’m not working on this one, I’m involved in a game-project at the University of Applied Sciences Trier…

…and if I’m not doing this I’m working on a super ambitious Software-Project that should/would/could change software-development, but actually that might only work in my head *lol*

…and if I’m not doing this I’m running or biking so that my head and soul get at least a bit to see from the world. Sports is one of the most important things of the day.

Biggest problem is the 24h-day constraint…there is just too less time for too much things to do