First, to everybody in Canada and the USA: Happy Canada Day and Happy America Day; we're somewhere between them (July 2) right now. I had a great day yesterday riding with some friends, one who is visiting from the USA.

I had a special four part blog series prepared but, really, it was boring and not my style. I'd rather just blog about what I'm doing at the moment or whatever strikes my fancy.

This is the Floating Eye, an enemy that wanders the Farmer's fields near Happy Town.

Where'dja Come From, Floating Eyed Joe?

I've posted about graphviz in an earlier post. Basically, I find it immensely useful to sketch out gameplay ideas in terms of dependencies.

Flower Power Example

Suppose you have an idea for your game, a "flower boss". To defeat this boss, you imagine the player attacking it with a fertilizer bomb. In Graphviz:

flower_boss [shape=octagon]; // we want bosses as octagons
flower_boss -> fertilizer_bomb; // beating the flower boss depends on the f-bomb

fertilizer_bomb [shape=box]; // items will be squares

So last Thursday I got sick, maybe this H1N1 thing. I'm feeling better now.

Reccomended reading: The Plague, by Albert Camus. I read this novel last summer and found it simply amazing. I think it's one of my favorite books, along with the just-recently-read Treasure Island.

The Library Event

So last week I showed the game off at a small business fair at the local library to the general public.

The Calgary Public Library (Castell branch, downtown) is having a small business fair and I've rented out a table. Tomorrow I'll be showing off Texas in playable form to the general public; this is sure to be a disaster! Hahaha =)

It will be awesome to watch people play. This is my first trade show, and I kind of like the venue. Here's a commercial from the Library:

Hooray, I've got Alpha 101. It adds an automap and fixes some other gameplay flow issues. I haven't addressed very many "bugs" in this one, so if the game crashed for your before it'll probably still crash for you now, unfortunately.

If you wanna test, please just reply here or send me an email, psysal@gmail.com.

Thank you!

What a great day! I got it almost all worked out. There are some subtleties. Since my blog topic is "really boring game development minutae" I'm going to lay it out for you.

A funny compiler error

I got this just now:

CODE: texcoord_ratio = (rep_size - 1) / mkrloc (tex_size, tex_size);

ERROR: ISO C++ says that these are ambiguous, even though the worst conversion for the first is better than the worst conversion for the second

Interesting! I have no idea what it means, but the trick was that (rep_size - 1) was supposed to convert the 1 into a mkrloc (1, 1).

I've got two fairly-big programmerly issues ahead of me. One is automapping and the other is to clean up the walking code.

I think I would be smarter to tackle just one of the two for the next update. Since walking isn't as critical (although annoying) I will tackle the automapping.

How it Works

I've got it fairly clearly figured out now. The automapping system will be of course area-based.