Freeze Developer's Blog

Devmania 2010

Johannes Stein — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:11:52 +0000

So, me and some teammates of mine from Incognita Studios were at the Devmania in Mainz, Germany this week-end.
What is Devmania you might ask? It is a get-together for german independent game developers which lasted about 24 hours beginning Saturday 2 pm local time. Besides having project presentations and talks they organisators were also hosting an overnight contest in which an entry had to incorporate the theme moonlight. We had about 18 hours to complete a game.

We started with Processing.js, a Java-like language based on Javascript HTML5 Canvas where you use classes and inheritance with your keywords like class and extends. The syntax and style of Processing.js is great, the debugging not so great to say the least. So the more stuff we kept adding to our game the slower it began to perform with bounding box collision finally being the death sentence to the performance. Even the latest WebKit JavaScript engine showed some serious lags.
With now 12 hours spent on debugging… pardon developing with Processing.js (don’t get me wrong: I still like Processing and Processing.js), the results were not quite what we expected to see and only about six hours left on the clock we were faced with a difficult choice: Give up? Never. So we redid the whole game with FreePascal and Lazarus using my game framework I’ve been working on nearly half a decade and which I’ve been using for school projects and especially my Ludum Dare entries. The game is functional and has most of the features we wanted in the game, but it still suffers from a few bugs and is in need of polishing and balancing, but basically what we did in just six hours is pretty cool.

You have two zombies and two sperate screens of the game. You need the lead the way for the zombies who only react to moonlight which is evidently on your cursor. You can switch between two modes: Either use one light cone to move only one zombie around and leave the other one completely unprotected or use two light cones to control both zombies at the same time.
But be careful along your way to reach the castles: There are traps, fireballs and even the castles are hostile to you and are shooting arrows in your direction.

Here is a screenshot of the game:

Graphics by Artur Schütz (the zombies are even animated ), Coding by Jesse Klugmann and me

This blog post is also available on Pascal Game Development.

Apple restored my faith in them

Johannes Stein — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:09:12 +0000

We all remember the fuzz Apple created back in April when they decided to dictate which programming language (and/or libraries, although that part can be interpreted either way) every iPhone developer had to use. I wrote a short blog post about that, read it here.

But here are the good news: Yeah, FreePascal iPhone applications are now allowed in the App Store (as they were before the April-change). All other programming language are allowed as well.

See for yourself:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09statement.html
http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2010/09/09/Apple-relaxing-SDK-license-agreement-MonoTouch-and-Flash-officially-allowed.aspx

This step Apple did calls for a bit of celebration (I’m kidding, well… kinda…) and then I will be announcing my first FreePascal iPhone game soon. (Currently I’m working on an Objective-C iPhone game, but the one after that will be a Pascal iPhone game.)

After the April-change I wasn’t really sure if was going to support Apple further (by that I mean renewing my developer account next year and buying new Apple products), but things might have just changed now.

And of course I will be making the second part of my video tutorial series about SDL and FreePascal for the iPhone.

Working with Blender 2.53

Johannes Stein — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:33:43 +0000

So, I’m finally trying to switch to Blender from Cinema 4D. Or at least I’m giving this another try, there are still some things I haven’t figured out, but so far it’s going really well.

Here is the latest scene I’ve been working on:

BIGJAM: Conclusion

Johannes Stein — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:44:48 +0000

So, BIGJAM 2010 is over or at least for me it is. My train leaves quite early – which means noon in the lingo of any nerd. While others will keep jamming I will be on my six-hour long train ride home. It was my first event where I actually got to meet guys in real life who are at least as interested in developing games as I am. Still, I’m not really a social guy and talking fluently in english was much harder for me than I anticipated. Writing blog posts in english like this one seems by far much easier to me.

That being said even in my native tongue it happens that I suddenly begin to have problems expressing myself. Well, something I have to live with I guess.

As for BIGJAM itself it was awesome. It was perfectly organized by Robert aka jstckr and it was great meeting all this new people. When I was at the Games Convention 2004, Developia/Softgames had a booth there and when I chatted with some of the indie developers there a few people already knew some of my work. Unlike now at BIGJAM nobody really knew about any of the stuff I’ve done which in a way I actually preferred.

In this three days I’ve made four games which beats my record of April this year when I made two games in that month.

And there is more to come: I began on something involving the themes of Sunday’s second jam (“A fateful night” and “Unthinkable”), but I didn’t finish it due to lack of time and motivation and I also have a half-finished fishing game from Friday’s first game jam.

So what is next? I will try to attend as many real life getting togethers as possible. The next one will be Devmania (an event in Mainz primarily aimed at german indie devs) in the first weekend of Octobre.

BIGJAM Day Three

Johannes Stein — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:48:17 +0000

Today I made a game in collaboration with dertom:

Slimy Slug – Win32

Here is a Windows 64-bit compatible version compiled by dertom: Slimy Slug – Win64

Slimy Slug – Source (C++ using the Elysion Framewoks)

BIGJAM Day Two

Johannes Stein — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:54:47 +0000

Two fresh games for your enjoyment:

Road to Happiness

An artsy game about Epicureanism.

Circus Lion

Taming a lion tamagotchi-style.

BIGJAM Day One

Johannes Stein — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:50:09 +0000

I’m currently at BIGJAM in Berlin where already two 3-hour jam happened. I didn’t finish my entry on the first one which themes were “fish” and/or “attraction”. I’m going to work on this one later one though, I only needed a couple of hours more to finish the game.

But I finished a game for the second jam where the themes were “serenade”, “luxury” and/or “she doesn’t love you”. You play it in your browser here. (Only if your browser supports HTML5.)

FrostEd Alpha 1

Johannes Stein — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:00:49 +0000

So I finally decided to release FrostEd Alpha 1. If you don’t know what FrostEd is, click here for more information. Remember it is an alpha version, so there is a lot not working here, but I’m already using it productively for my job and some programming stuff where I don’t have to use and IDE.

So, here is a list what is working (because the list with the stuff what is not working would be much longer):

- Opening, editing and saving files
- Find, search replace (although that’s buggy)
- Mostly everything SynEdit supports that means code folding support Object Pascal, HTML and XML
- Full syntax highlighting support CSS, Diff, HTML, Java, Lua, LFM, Object Pascal, Perl, PHP, Processing (including the whole Processing API), Python, Shell, SQL, TeX, Visual Basic and XML
- Partial syntax highlighting support for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3, C# and HaXe

Download here:

Download FrostEd Alpha 1 for Mac OS X (7,2 MB)
Download FrostEd Alpha 1 for Win32 (0,8 MB)
Download FrostEd Alpha 1 source (1,0 MB)

License: GPL3

Sourcecode Notes:
You need Lazarus to view or edit the source code. Install all components from /Third-Party. TMyRollout is licensed under GPL2 and has some small modifications made by me to use TBitBtn instead of TButton.

Intro to Processing.js for web games

Johannes Stein — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:34:20 +0000

With HTML5 and its new features – most notably Canvas – gaining popularity each day, the question arises if you Canvas is capable of web games. Well of course it is or wouldn’t be writing this tutorial. So the question is more like “Where do I start?”.

Welcome to this intro to Processing.js in which I am going to show what this Processing is, how it is capable of web games and the first steps when to get started.

What is Processing?

The Processing language was created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab and was originally intended to be used in a Java run-time environment. In the Summer of 2008, John Resig (Inventor of jQuery), ported the 2D context of Processing to Javascript for use in web pages. Much like the native language, Processing.js is a community driven project, and continues to grow as browser technology advances.

Source: http://www.processingjs.org

If you want to read the rest of the article click here to read more over at Incognita-Studios.

Incognita Studios

Johannes Stein — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:21:34 +0000

Well, it’s official: I’m working with a team on a project over at Incognita Studios
While we are still secretive about the project itself, you should definitely check out the Incognita Studios page. Here is another link, in case you haven’t been to the Incognita Studios site.

So what can you expect from the Incognita Studios?
Well, apart from secret games we are going to release different tools and libraries which will ease the development of games. You can also expect at least weekly blog posts with topics such as tutorials, our personal opinions and our thoughts on specific games or game-relevant stuff.