FrostEd Alpha 1

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jul 19, 2010 in Applications, Development | 1 comment

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

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jul 13, 2010 in Development, Games, Libraries | 0 comments

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.

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

Incognita Studios

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jul 11, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

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.

FrostEd – Cross-platform text editor

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jun 16, 2010 in Applications, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 2 comments

When I switched to Mac OS X something I was really missing was an easy-to-use and free advanced text editor, something like Notepad++ on Windows. I found Smultron and Fraise which are really great editors but lack some features regarding some syntax highlighters and code folding and I came across some annoying bugs when I’m trying to edit larger source code or text files.

What I’m looking for in a text editor (and I’m trying to implement those “features” to the best I can):

Currently I’m trying to decide on a license (MIT, MPL or GPL), but after that’s decided I will officially release it which will possibly be in a few days.

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.

Ludum Dare #17 Results are in

Posted by Johannes Stein on May 10, 2010 in Games | 5 comments

The Ludum Dare #17 results are in. Even though my entry still lacks a bit of gameplay, the results are the best I’ve received so far:
#16 in Theme
#19 in Graphics
#14 in Audio
#12 in Community (although I’m still too shy to chat in the IRC channel)

Go check out the results for yourself.
Link to my game: Click here
Thanks to everyone who voted, participated and/or left a comment. (Except of course for that guy who gave me one point in each category, seriously, dude?! <-- Btw: This is a smiley which means you shouldn't take this sentence too serious.)

Pierrec wrote a review about my game (in french) on his blog L’Oujevipo.

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.