So, you want to be a game developer?

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jun 12, 2010 in Miscellaneous | 0 comments

Congratulations! You know you want to develop games. (This is just a very basic guide/rant whatever you might call it; I’m not going to go into specific details)
Here are some subjective thoughts based on my personal experiences:

Game development is hard work
But it seems so easy… I mean for like 20 hours of gameplay, you just have to work like two hours for, right? Definitely not. It’s not that you just need to like playing games, you also need to love creating games. When creating games, you are often stuck on odd bugs which will take you hours to find. Balancing is a huge time-consumer and you will spend a lot of time on the most basic things. If you are creating platformer, you have implement gravity all by yourself and your protagonist will not move by himself only if you tell him to. And you need to know what to do if your player collides with another object etc.
You are not going to make awesome games just because you like to play video games. (Only if you are extremely talented which is a very rare case. ) But playing video games can be a motivational factor for your own development process.

You will have invest at least as much time as with any other hobby you want to pick up. If you want to develop video games commercially, even more.

HTML 5 Canvas for FreePascal/Delphi

Posted by Johannes Stein on May 3, 2010 in Libraries, Miscellaneous | 0 comments

I’ve been working on a proof-of-concept for the last couple of hours. With HTML 5 being more and more stable and HTML5 games slowly becoming an alternative to Flash games, I was looking for a way to port existing games for the Web platform.

HTML 5 Canvas seems like a good choice for the graphics output, so began a low-level implementation. At the moment it is just a proof-of-concept, it can just draw different types of shapes in different colors and I’m not sure if I’m gonna develop it any further or even if the way I took was the right one.

Currently it works like this: Compile an example with

fpc -Mdelphi filename.dpr

or

fpc -Mobjfpc filename.dpr

which results in a compiled executable. Execute it and you get a html- and a javascript-file. Just open the html-file and you should see the result.

It comes with three examples. Download here (5 kB)
Every example from https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial/Basic_usage and https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial%3aDrawing_shapes should work if translated to Pascal.

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?

Freeze Development is now six years old

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 1, 2010 in Development, Miscellaneous | 0 comments

Even though this post is being published on April 1st, this content is not fake.
In fact I just forget to blog on March 30th, the day Freeze Development was founded exactly six years ago.
*Happy birthday*
I want to thank everyone who enjoys our applications/games and especially those give us feedback or support us with code.

A few things you can expect in the next weeks:
- Cavern Defense will be updated in the next few days: There are going to be two more maps, some bugfixes, a simple AI and it’s going to be netbook-ready (1024×600 px resolution and more optimized)
- Colonial Age will also receive a small update: Just a few bugfixes and compiling against the latest version of ElysionKronos
- This blog/homepage will be updated to be more clear in regards to finding games more easily
- I’m very eager to release the Elysion Frameworks as it is, but I haven’t integrated all the radical changes I wanted to, so it might take a while until there is an official release, but you can still check out the SVN and/or contact me via e-mail/ICQ/Skype/whatever if you have any questions

Play The City @ Linux Info Day 2010

Posted by Johannes Stein on Feb 22, 2010 in Miscellaneous | 0 comments

This post would only interest you if you are living in Germany and/or are willing to travel to Augsburg, Bavaria on the 27th of March 2010. Play The City (Link to german page) is an application I’m developing with a few of my fellow students since last semester.
As for the technical side, you may have already guessed or read on my blog post from about half a year ago we are using FreePascal and SDL (and the Elysion Frameworks of course).
The big news is that we are going to show Play The City on the Linux Info Day (german link again) this year. We are probably distributing some Play The City Live-CDs, you can watch and talk with us live and you can try the application for yourself.

Thoughts on the Google App Engine

Posted by Johannes Stein on Feb 17, 2010 in Miscellaneous | 0 comments

I’ve been playing around with Google App Engine after reading about it on the Wolfire blog (here and here). I started with the Java environment, but switched over to Python because there is more documentation on Python and Python seems faster on my machine when starting the web service or deploying to the web.
Anyway, from what I’ve seen Google App Engine seems quite impressive and I sure hope to develop a few applications with Google App Engine.
Also, Google’s conditions for a free account are almost as good as for what I’m paying now at my current web hoster.