Glitch Form and Movement Intro to Facts

Tell me what you think. I’ll have more up in the future and hopefully more finalized versions of these and some other tracks I haven’t exported to MP3 yet. I’m pretty fed up with the ADPCM encoding in XACT it doesn’t compress as well as MP3 does.

I have two other other tracks for under ground heroes and a bunch of sound effects that I whipped together using various samples and effects to get an approximation of what I wanted. They were using too much space so I went with a lower sample frequency and got rid of the stereo channel. I only kept the stereo channel in the music tracks but I compressed them using the max ADPCM compression allowed. The tracks sound okay on headphones and the sound effects are so short you hardly notice the bad quality. The sound and music is down to around 5mb now.

I got most of my blogger stuff moved over to wordpress. It was fairly painful since I’m on the blogger beta I had to export atom, convert using xslt to rss and import into wordpress. I think I’m going to use rails for the main page. I’ve done a lot of stuff in ruby so far except rails, which is the opposite of most ruby programmers I’m finding.

Since music and sound is at the core of the game I’m considering building a specialized sound library/sequencer for the game. It would use an existing format and tracker for the editor probably screamtracker3 since I’m most comfortable writing tracks in that. Right now I’m using fmod which actually allows you to get event callbacks from the sequence. I’ll probably just play with that for now.

I wrote a really nice scene graph when I was on vacation in mexico so that eventually needs to make it into the gfxlib but it’s a pretty big change at this point so I may put that off too..

Oh well, lots of stuff to put off per-the-usual. I really am trying to keep the tasks smaller and more achievable but at some point I know I need to make bigger bets to make sure the stuff can be finished, polished and pushed out the door.

Well there is more or less something there now. It is actually playable, although not being able to see scores and combos is a bit of a drag. Also the thing is completely full of bugs. It has gotten a lot funner to work on now though. Much less doing the boring plumbing that runs the show and more doing the AI and gameplay that I enjoy.

Okay well this isn’t the sky falling but screenshots are so much fun, especially really dumb ones during development. What was at one point actually a fairly fun playable little game is currently a shadow of itself living on top of all new (actually rehashed I get to that in a minute) stuff.

Now I’ll provide a little story about beatbox, mostly for my own benefit. About a year ago I was having a lot of trouble getting any coding done after our second kid came along. I still had time but I just couldn’t really get myself motivated to do anything good. Discouragement mostly came from the fact that I didn’t figure that I had time to really write anything of any good quality.

So I got this idea to just hack, not worry much about proper design or object orientation or really doing anything right at all. I wanted to get back to the root of what I loved, the thing that made me write reams of code in Jr and Sr High School. Just get something up and going no matter how sloppy or lame it was and have fun doing it. So I put some 3d graphics to music using glut, and it was a blast.

After awhile just doing different 3d scenes at different sample points in the song became a bit mundane for my own personal enjoyment so I decided to make the blocks fall down and controllable. And that’s more or less how beatbox was born. I wanted to have poyupoyu style gameplay with my own individual twists because that was really what I wanted to play and I didn’t have a poyupoyu game on hand to enjoy.

This whole time I was still hacking. The entire game logic was in poyu.cpp and the rendering was in render.cpp. It was a pretty mess. I copy-pasted chunks of code that I dragged in from all kinds of personal projects from as far back as 2002, yeah a glorius mess. At some point I just dropped the binaries in a folder and called it good. I realized this was a dead end and I was re-inventing and ruining all kinds of work I had already done for the past few years as well as writing some code that would never again be useful. So I made a big choice. I was going to take 5 years of code and make it into a set of consistent usable libraries and make all my games compile off of that. I knew this was a huge project but I decided that it would be fun and good for me.

So I’ve come to a summit of that work. I actually have the original beatbox code retrofit into the new set of libraries with a new resource system thrown in for good measure. It feels good but all I have to show for it is a white triangle on a grey background. At least I’m happy.

Bomberman DS Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney

The general lesson seems to be: if you hear a DS game is good and you see it, swoop it yo.

Oh back to the topic, so we’re talking about beatbox which is my music based puzzle game I sent out to a few people and the tracks so far which are named:

I Was a Teenage Mecha (MkII) Luxury Carpet Comparison (bitwise) Siding is Exciting

I’m going for a bit of an abstract techno feel with these tracks but the names are inspired by local Seattle band Minus the Bear who have great song names such as:

Hey! Is that a Ninja up There? Monkey!!!Knife!!!Fight!!! Thanks for the Killer Game of Crisco® Twister I Lost All My Money at the Cock Fights -

I mistakenly said one of their songs was ‘Monkey Monkey!!!Knife!!!Knife!!!Knife!!!’ and for that I’m sorry because I really think that is a much funnier title anyways

And while I’m at it I might as well thank Ryan Blinsky for introducing Minus the Bear to me.. As well as tons of other awesome music.