Author: Kevin Wells

[Originally posted September 21st, 2010]

I finished fixing up the new hardware renderer code, and got the screenshot function working again. I also fixed a worldmap collision bug.

With the renderer finished, the game is now platform-independent, so I hope to eventually release the game on Windows, Linux and Mac.

I tested the game on several different OS’s, just to see how it performs. On an emulated Windows 98 SE (via VirtualBox), it ran pretty decently in software mode (hardware mode blows up). In Linux, I tested it in Wine, and found that it ran quite well, but only in hardware mode. Software mode performed horribly. Then, I moved on to the main event, and got the game to compile natively in Linux (Opensuse 11.3). It runs quite well natively, so I’m thinking a cross-platform release is a real possibility.

Tonight, I decided to work on some level tiles, and I decided to throw out the slanted look I had been planning on, as it was going to delay the game far too much. I’m currently the game’s sole artist, and art is not exactly my forte, so anything that reduces art requirements is a Good Thing.

Here’s a screenshot of the slanted look that I was working on.

For a good look at the current direction I’m going, check out this video.

[Originally posted September 21st, 2010]

So, originally I wanted to use a somewhat fancy (from a technical standpoint) lighting system in Hubert’s Island, in which each tile had its own lighting value. You can see a video demonstrating this here. Ultimately, this just doesn’t look good, however. It was actually Aneissa who convinced me to let it go, as it was fun to write the code for, and a shame to just cut. Ah well, it was an hour well spent anyway.

A simple sprite-based lighting system has replaced the tile-based lighting, and you can see that in action here.

What do you guys think?

[Originally posted September 18th, 2010]

So, this is the first development journal for Hubert’s Island (somewhat tentative title, but I’ll probably stick with it). In these journals, I will document the development progress of the game, talk about different coding stuff, and generally keep everyone informed on the status of the game. Without further ado, here’s the first little dev journal:

Today, I finished up doors, and made the AI aware of those.

I optimized AI detection of walls, and did a few other minor things.

I also wrote a new image loading function for the hardware renderer, so it no longer requires an additional external library. The benefit of this change should be complete platform independence of the game’s code and libraries, as the library I removed was compiled using VC++ and I couldn’t get it to compile myself (and I worked on it for HOURS!).

To test out this hypothesis, I tried running the game on an emulated Windows 98, where it previously crashed immediately upon running, with some Microsoft-y error. Today, the game loaded up and ran quite well, and that was really exciting to see! I’m using Virtual Box, and as far as I can tell, Win98 has full access to one core of my CPU, so that might explain the over-100 fps I was getting.

But regardless, the system requirements of the game should be lower than I originally thought they would be.

After all of the work on the game, I worked on the site a little more, and all of the associated Cheese and Bacon accounts (Twitter, YouTube, etc). Then, I completely broke the site while trying to add a mod linking WordPress and phpBB together. Whoops. Anyway, I just fixed that, so everything should be cool again.

Until today, dev journals were being posted on the forums. However, today I decided to migrate dev journals to a blog format, so updates can now be posted directly on the Hubert’s Island page. This should also make following and sharing posts easier than before.

This is the official site for Cheese and Bacon Games, an up-and-coming indie game developer. Our current (and first) project is an as-yet-untitled platformer for the PC.

So, the site is online, and right now I’m working on getting everything up (forums, game page, etc). Stay tuned for more news shortly.