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

About memory leaks…

Posted by Johannes Stein on Oct 6, 2009 in Games, Libraries | 0 comments

There were a few memory leaks in the Elysion Frameworks. Well, “few” is clearly an understatement. Fortunately I found some code from the (old) ElysionSDL library on some backup DVDs and after a couple of days I was finally able to fix all memory leaks in the classes TelSprite and TelTrueTypeFont (and all derived classes like TelButton).

There a few things which are not working as I hoped, for example the VirtualClone procedure just loads the original image file now, because copying from an existing SDL_Surface gives for some reason unknown to me a null pointer.

I marked the Generate procedure as deprecated, it still works now, but in the near future Generate won’t exist any more and that code will most likely be moved to the Draw procedure. The reason is, ElysionKronos doesn’t need Generate and I’m trying to keep the Elysion Frameworks as much compatible to each other as I can.
If you want to try the Elysion Frameworks (it’s still not stable) check out the SVN repository on http://sourceforge.net/projects/elysionsdl/

On another note:
I’ve updated Cavern Defense to the newest ElysionLegacy version and also included a 64-bit Linux build. The Mac OS application is significantly smaller this time. (I inadvertently included debug SDL libraries in the last release.)
The download links have been updated.

Cavern Defense Update

Posted by Johannes Stein on Sep 4, 2009 in Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

Here is finally an update for Cavern Defense. This is mainly a bugfix release. All critical bugs have been fixed and it is quite playable now. I updated the instructions screen, so that it should be more clearer how to play the game. For more information on what has changed take a look at the changelog.txt file.

Downlod links:
Windows (6,2 MB)
Linux (4,8 MB)
Mac OS X (12 MB; Universal Binary)
Source (132 kB)

If you want to compile the source, you also have to download one the binary releases and combine those two because the resources folder is not included in the source zip file.

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.)