{"id":1734,"date":"2011-10-26T02:49:29","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T01:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2011-10-26T02:49:29","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T01:49:29","slug":"prototyping-chess-quest-v0-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2011\/10\/26\/prototyping-chess-quest-v0-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Prototyping: Chess Quest v0.3"},"content":{"rendered":"

(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Three major changes:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You have a health bar, and can die\n
  2. The trackball is now supported for movement\n
  3. Performance is literally 1.5x – 2x faster\n<\/ol>\n

    Download link<\/h3>\n

    Chess Quest-0.3.3<\/a><\/p>\n

    So, a friend of mine tried it out today, and he couldn’t move around at all – something wrong with his HTC Desire (even though I’ve been testing on near-identical phone, for some reason his phone was losing the input gestures). This evening I did some improvements and fixes until it began to work “tolerably” on his phone – and I threw in some new small features too.<\/p>\n

    It’s still test stuff – not indicative of the final gameplay, but I’m trying out different basic ways of achieveing the stuff I want to achieve in the later versions.<\/p>\n

    Overview of what’s changed<\/h3>\n
      \n
    • You have a very basic HUD\n
    • There’s a couple of coloured powerups scattered around – red restores health, green increases maximum health permanently\n
    • Enemies actually kill you now, every moment you’re touched by one, your health drains continuously\n
    • You can choose different levels at the start – I included one of the early test levels that was easy for me to upgrade with recent changes. I’ve got another one I can probably add quickly later (one which generates 100% random mazes each time you play)\n
    • The ultra-simple EntitySystem I’m using was running too slow. There’s no simple fix I can see – the ES really needs to be written for performance, if I want it to be high performance – but I was able to do a 10-lines-of-code workaround that took the worst piece of bad performance in my game and made it literally 5 times faster. That’s good enough for now!\n
    • Input system has changed *again* – the Android OS has poor input management, a bit buggy, with an inconsistent programming API, which *also* runs differently on different phones – so I keep trying to do as little work on this as possible. The Android OS is desperately trying to prevent me from doing any prototyping at all – it’s begging for me to write hundreds of lines of code to make up for Google’s inattention there – but if I do that, I will lose all the time I would have spent doing game design and dev, and the whole project will be a failure. So, yet again, I’m putting on a band-aid and dodging the rest for now. But … at least now you can use trackball instead of \/ in addition to swiping on the touchscreen\n
    • There’s an FPS counter on the screen\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      (I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) Three major changes: You have a health bar, and can die The trackball is now supported for movement Performance is literally 1.5x – 2x faster Download link Chess Quest-0.3.3 So, a friend of mine tried it out today, and he couldn’t move around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,31,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}