Here the new “Wood Games”-Traiĺer! Go share and tweet this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpMsm9Qrmvk

Just wrote down some advices on how to survive a game jam (having ludum dare 48h-competition in my head). Have a look here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/wp/?page_id=706

Just created a new page with instruction how to setup xmlvm to compile Java-Code to Native in Linux! Have a look here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/wp/?page_id=684

Currently I’m working hard to finish my first android game:”Wood Olympics”. I have a prototype in the market already and at the moment I add new disciplines and change quite a lot about the game. I somehow mixed jump&run elements in which was no good mixture. I want the game to be something like Track&Field with online-elements (score,achievements, challenges and competitions). Still lot’s to do and actually I live quite to long with very bad (coding) design-decissions that takes me very much time…I have more or less everything under control eventhough the whole structure is very fragile :D. For people interested:

Gameplay-Video

For more details go to the official ToMaGa-Page.

Ok, I make it quick! This weekend was Ludum Dare 48h gamedev competition. This was the first time I used Unity3d instead of java and my beloved jMonkeyEngine. Actually I forgot to swap the programmer as well cause I made the same mistake: beginning too quick followed by struggling and then a restart…

BTW: The theme of the competition was “Discovery”. And first thing I thought was the space shuttle. Somehow I had very soon an image in my head how the game should look like. It evolved of course during the competition and of course at the end there was some time pressure! I’m still awake although I’m sooo tired but somehow can’t go to bed. ;D OK two screenshots and the link to the competition version.

BTW II: Although I used Unity3D the game itselfs is a 2D game using an orthographic camera

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=479

Well, actually I don’t have a clue about Shiva3D. But the promise to deploy on Android,IPhone,Linux,Win,Mac,Web,Webos for really not much money (170€ indi-license) forced me to have a look :D.

After hours of downloading (I was not alone as it was just released) and one hangup after 4h(!) I finally got my Personal Copy which is free for testing purposes (without timelimit). Well, it’s late and I make it short. Here a short trip to deployment as I had problems with the intuitive way. Finally I got it spit out an apk and install it on my emulator. So here is the way how to do it

-Start Shiva3D Editor
-In DataExplorer (lower right corner) select Samples->Games->CarGame(double-click)
-(If you want press Play in the SceneViewer)
-In GameEditor (lower left corner) Game
->Export (I left all options as they were. I just saw the intersting .stk and .cpp option…that is postponed for now)
-> EXPORT

That’s it for the Editor! Now open Shiva Authoring Tool.
- First we have to setup some paths as we need ant / cygwin / sdk and ndk in order to compile for android.
(If you don’t have the stuff, ask google)
- Press Settings (lower right corner)
- Setup the folders (if it says it don’t find ant, add an ANT_HOME environment-variable heading to it)
- Select the Android-Cellphone on the left and press the arrow on the right
- locate the exported .stk (the one you exported from the editor)
-> NEXT
- set authoring-type to project. (I first tried the apk option but got problems! Don’t know if the reason is my cygwin or sdk / ndk. I tried much last time and I may killed something… )
- Specify a bundle identifier with minimum 2 dots: e.g. com.trocha.thomas (if no build appears /press enter to apply)
-> build
- the authoring tool opens the explorer at the place where it created a zip-file for you.
- unzip this
- open a cygwin-bash (maybe a normal win-cmd would be enough!? Don’T know)
- if you e.g. unzip to d:\CarGame you have to change to /cygdrive/d/
-> cd /cygdrive/d/
-> type ant
- it is doing some stuff and finally says build success but at my setup there is some strange link:
[exec] cc1plus: error: /cygdrive/g/David/ndk/build/platforms/android-3/arch
-arm/usr/include: not a directory

Who is David? I couldn’t locate the problem. Nevertheless lets go on.
- Just type: ndk-build
- that links your CarGame.cpp with the engine and produces a shared-library.
- enter ant install which will now install the game on your device (if it is accessable and can be located via ‘adb devices’)

- have fun. I’m glad when I can test it at home on my own device….

Maybe I could help someone, maybe all of this was not necessary!? As I mentioned I don’t have a clue about Shiva3D (yet). But that might change as soon I have enough time. If there are other ways don’t bother to tell me.

EDIT:

Just found an official introduction about building android…mabye that is quite a bit better! Check this out: http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/doc/authoringtool/android

Just arrived from mainz from attending devmania doing the overnight-contest with my globalgamejam-companion burak. This time we decided to use Unity3d instead of the beloved jMonkeyEngine. We started at about 6pm and more or less finished 9am without sleeping. There were some problems with the hitboxes using the unity-collision detection. Due to the lack of sleep it was a real challange and usually no problem if google is your friend but we were disconnected as the devmania-guys DID NOT provide a public online connection to us. Good to know that the whole unity-manual is packed as offline version as well. (But somehow I was too much on fire to have the calmness of reading So I choosed the nerve killing try and error option Hehe…well I took a power nap now and somehow regained first power again. So here is a link to the result:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/unity3d/first/WebPlayer.html

It took me really long to give Unity3D a chance. Even though I knew it would make a good job I always wanted to create my own framework based on jMonkeyEngine. Hey, I’m a coder… Actually I came quite far but still there were millions of issues. But now that I agreed to help students in creating games upcoming semester (e.g. with Unity3D) I have a better cause to neglect my programmer’s dislike about one of that all-in-one-babies. And first to say, still nothing can be done without scripting

Until now I worked thorugh the 3d and 2D Platform games and watched one “How to make a car game”-Tutorial:

http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/3d-platform-game.html

http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/2d-gameplay-tutorial

http://www.der-softwareentwickler-blog.de/2010/02/16/unity3d-tutorial-serie/

After  working through all this three tutorials I felt ready to start with something on my own. I created a small world with some free to download models, my dummy animated guy and a nice terrain I modeled in Unity3d and painted on it with splatting-painting. I created the lightmap with blender which was only possible cause I found some cool scripts that let you export the scene and terrain as OBJ. The movement-script is made from scratch by me (therefore it is of this poor quality yet). Actually I found out that realtime-shadow is only possible with the Unity3D Pro versions so I had to be happy with the projected “Blob-Shadow” for now. I added a small Unity-based animation for the wind mill. Actually I’m not so sure about how the movment and MouseOrbit-Look around the Character should work. For now you steer the guy like that:

awsd or keys for movement

left-ctrl for running

space for jumping

mouse for looking around (mouse-wheel to zoom in and out)

Have a look here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/unity3d/first/firstunity.html

Well, 2 Weeks ago I participated in a game-coding-project at Trier. Some students of ‘University of Applied Sciences’ organized the week with the goal to finish a multiplayer 2D Shooter. They (Robert and Tobi) provided a good framework based on Slick2D to start with including a working basic network-framework.

To make a long story short I took the part of creating the GUI as I thought I had some experiences with nifty gui that also is integrated with Slick2d. Even it seems to be a fast thing it took me the whole week(5days) as we had to split up the whole framework into different gamestates and to write some additional protocol-commands to exchange data from client to server and back. Nevertheless I learned lot about nifty and even I had the feeling to kick it from time to time I know it was the right decision to choose it.

It provides lots off posibilities for transitions like ” when the screen starts take the block and move it in after 1second and move it back when leaving, or fade, or shake or or or” I had some problems with the widgets but in this case ME was more the problem than the framework itselfs :D.

To have at least a bit contributed to the game itself I added a new weapon that is quite slow but follows the target until it reaches the enemy. For that I had to include a pathfinder in the TileMap. Not too hard work but still enough for getting stuck in some traps for lots of time

Tomorrow is a revival-meeting and I’m really look forward to see some guys again.

Also have a look here:

http://fsi.fh-trier.de/node/921

I just joined a group of students that want to create a 2D-Platformer in about a week using slick2d. The big theme is RGB, actually I’m a bit too tired to write more about this. I just made some tests with nifty-gui and created for testing test Logos. This is the more or less the best one! THe others were somehow flcikering on the monitor….:

Not that bad! Good night!