Trying to do a hat trick…

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 27, 2010 in Games, Miscellaneous | 0 comments

I already released two games this month:
Ghost Chaos
A Practical Survival Guide for Robots

So… only four days left in this month, may be I can pull something off for Experimental Gameplay?

Ghost Chaos – now available on Apple’s App Store

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 21, 2010 in Development, Games, Mac OS X | 2 comments

Apple just approved my game “Ghost Chaos” made with Objective-C and Cocos2D.

Get it here.

What is it all about?
About three years ago, I played a little mini-game that ships with Mario 64 for Nintendo DS on a DS a friend of mine loaned me. It was some kind of “Luigi’s Mansion” light. I always thought the game controls were really awesome taking adavantage of the touchpen. Basically, you have your flashlight and make the ghosts disappear, while the ghosts only appear visible to you when they are in the light cone of your flashlight. You have a time limit which makes the game pretty hard, because you only have a few seconds to get one ghost. Well, someone might have something like that developed for the iPhone App Store, but I haven’t found an app like that. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong place. So I decided, yeah, I’m gonna make a game that resembles that mini-game.
Unfortunately I haven’t unlocked the mini-game on my Nintendo DS yet, so I constructed the game from the memories of playing it then. I also took some creative liberty and modified the controls: You can either make the ghosts disappear by tapping on them or follow the ghosts with your light cone. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages: While tapping only targets one ghost, it serves the purpose in the first levels, while the light cone can target multiple ghosts at once and will be only way to solve the levels in time when you are playing Level 8 or higher.

Here is a gameplay video:

Click on “Read more” for the post-mortem.

Thorium Scripting Language

Posted by Johannes Stein on Mar 16, 2010 in Development, Games | 0 comments

So, I’ve been playing around with the Thorium scripting language lately. It’s a great project and I’m in the process of integrating Thorium into the Elysion frameworks.
The best feature is that I can use my Pascal classes directly in my script (if my class is derived from TThoriumPersistent and RegisterRTTIType is called with the correct parameters). I can declare the properties in my class and call these properties from my Thorium script without worrying about anything else.

This is a quick’n'dirty script I put together:

loadlibrary "core.std.io"
loadlibrary "elysion.kronos"

private elSprite sprite;
private elSprite sprite2;
private float angle;
private int al;

public void initialize()
{
	angle = 0;
	al = 0;

	sprite = elSprite.create();
	sprite.loadfromfile("test.png");
	sprite.x = 128;
	sprite.y = 128;

	sprite2 = elSprite.create();
	sprite2.loadfromfile("test.png");
	sprite2.x = 256;
	sprite2.y = 256;
	printf("Initialize\n");
}

public void render()
{
	sprite.draw();
	sprite2.draw();
	printf("Render\n");
}

public void update()
{
	printf("Update\n");
	angle++;
	if (angle == 360) angle = 0;
	sprite2.rotation = angle;

	al++;
	sprite.alpha = (al mod 255);

	if (sprite2.onmouseover) sprite2.visible = false;
		else sprite2.visible = true;
}

And here is the obligatory screenshot:

Graphics are loaned from Ari Feldman’s Spritelib GPL.

Simple iPhone example using FreePascal and SDL

Posted by Johannes Stein on Feb 17, 2010 in Development, Games, Libraries, Mac OS X | 3 comments

I’ve made a quick how-to on how to set up a simple iPhone example using FreePascal and SDL and run it with the iPhone simulator.

Please watch in HD. There are englisch and german subtitles available on Youtube.
Video Link on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm4UIPl1GqA
Video Link on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/9522466

The example source code can be downloaded here: http://www.freeze-dev.de/files/SDLiPhoneFPC_Colors.zip

The SDL 1.3 iPhone header I provide in this example is still incomplete and at best Alpha.

Also I’m using ElysionLogger from the Elysion Frameworks Subversion repository to create a HTML log file in the directory of the application bundle. If you don’t any log files to be created, delete ElysionLogger from the uses clause and any calls that begin with TelLogger.getInstance.

Update
If you rather develop with Lazarus, you might want to try this project file, which allows you to install the application on the iPhone Simulator right out of the Lazarus IDE. You need Lazarus 0.9.29 and the iPhone Laz Extension (http://wiki.freepascal.org/iPhone_Laz_Extension).
http://www.freeze-dev.de/files/SDLiPhoneLaz_Colors.zip

Merry christmas

Posted by Johannes Stein on Dec 23, 2009 in Development, Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

I wish everyone visiting this site a merry christmas and a happy new year.

Umm, I forget to make a blog post about my game I made for Ludum Dare #16, so here it is:
Colonial Age

Description:
You control a ship and need to explore all islands on the map before the AI does.
You see that circle around your ship? Yeah, ok, good, that’s your line of sight, you see everything that’s in this radius,
everything else is darker and hiden from you.

Download:
Windows (3,7 MB)
Linux (2,8 MB)
Mac OS X (4,6 MB)
Source (2,3 MB + Images/Sounds included)

Platform specific notes:
Mac OS X: Universal binary, needs at least Mac OS Leopard
Linux: You need libSDL, libSDL_image, libSDL_mixer, libSDL_ttf and liblua installed as well the latest graphics driver for OpenGL support.
Windows: You need Visual C++ 2005 Redist because of the Lua DLL. (The necessary DLLs are included, just in case)

Irrlicht for (Free)Pascal: Progress

Posted by Johannes Stein on Oct 24, 2009 in Development, Games, Libraries | 0 comments

I wasn’t actually thinking I would continue my Irrlicht port since it was kinda just an experiment. But hey, I’ve updated IrrlichtWrapper to Irrlicht 1.6 and got it working on a Mac.

I’ve just registered this as a project on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/irrlichtpas/
Feel free to check out the source code on SVN.

Btw: I’m in the progress of adding Irrlicht as a backend for the Elysion Frameworks.