Ludum Dare #15: Cavern Defense

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 31, 2009 in Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

Last week-end I participated in Ludum Dare.
This time the theme was caverns.

I had the the very ambitious plan to create a turn-based strategy for two players where I slightly overestimated my abilities and the time given.

Here is a screenshot:

Download here:
Windows (5,4 MB)
Mac OS X (11,2 MB)
Linux (4 MB)

Personal notes:
I’m not entirely happy with the result, because of some pretty nasty bugs and a few features which were cut due to lack of time. So I will be releasing an update in a few days. Stay tuned.

Linux notes:
- You need libSDL, libSDL_image, libSDL_mixer, libSDL_ttf and libSDL_gfx installed on your system to run the game.

Mac OS X notes:
- For some strange reason (specific FreePascal/SDL_mixer/Mac OS X – bug) there is no sound on Mac OS X.
- Be sure to copy the application from the image file to a directory with write permissions because the game creates a log file.

I put together a PDF with random thoughts and foodphotos during development and added a short post mortem:
Click here (3 MB)

Click here to see Cavern Defense Timelapse
(I realized I hadn’t chronolapse running all time during the LD, so my timelapse is rather short.)

GamesCom 2009

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 20, 2009 in News | 0 comments

I just returned from my three-day-trip from GamesCom 2009 in Cologne. Besides just be a gamer and all and just watching and playing all the cool games that were being presented I’m also a reporter for GamersGlobal this year.

(All articles are written in german.)
Articles from Gamescom 2009:
XIII Century: Blood of Europe
Diablo 3
The Saboteur
Dragon Age: Origins

Articles from Games Convention 2008:
Introduction
Sacred 2
Space Siege
The Settlers: Awakening of Cultures

Articles from Games Convention 2007:
Introduction
SimCity Socities
The Settlers 6

Welcome to Freeze Dev

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 5, 2009 in News | 0 comments

This site is no longer maintained and will be shutdown by the end of 2010. Don’t worry, Freeze Development is not gone, you can reach the team now at http://www.freeze-dev.com


Welcome to the blog of Freeze Development. Freeze Development (or short: Freeze Dev) is a small group of ambitious, highly motivated and independant game developers with the goal of developing cross-platform applications. For more info click on About.

This is the place for our development log, code snippets as well as personal opinions.

Follow us on Youtube
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Our open source software on Sourceforge

GLFW for Object Pascal

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 1, 2009 in Development, Libraries, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

GLFW is a platform-independant framework for OpenGL applications written in C and quite similar to SDL. Back in 2007, the latest version (2.6) of GLFW has been released containing a (deprecated) header file for Delphi. Unfortunately, it hasn’t had FreePascal support and only worked with Windows.

A few days back the question has been raised in the Pascal Game Development forum if it is possible to use PhoenixLib or Andorra2D on Mac OS X, both engines can be used with GLFW as a backend. I took the time to add FreePascal support to glfw.pas and ensured crossplatform-compability. I also replaced the old OpenGL header with the latest header from dglOpenGL and modified slightly it to work with GLFW. While I was at it, I updated the glfw.pas header version from API 2.5 to 2.6. It took a bit longer than expected, but after all it was not that much work.

Download here (2,4 MB; contains examples Triangle + Mipmaps with binaries and source)

Patch files here (7 kB; if you already have glfw.pas and dglOpenGL.pas installed on your system and you just want to apply the changes)

I contacted the maintainer(s) of GLFW, I haven’t received an answer yet, but I think if they find it useful it could be part of the next release. I certainly hope so.

Update: As of now, I am the offical maintainer of the Pascal bindings.