Category: Uncategorized

I was fooling around and I made this.

Not sure if id (I assume they still own the copyright on Dopefish?) would sue me or not, so I should probably not leave that in there…

Finally, enough of the game exists that I have been able to create a gameplay trailer that shows tons of never-before-seen levels, enemies, and features!

You will see:
-Trampolines!
-Bouncy Balls!
-Mirrors!
-Lush countryside!
-Ghost cows!
-A perilous climb up a mountainside!
-Lava!
-The mysterious J-Balloon!
-Sharks!
-Water-running!
-Sea turtle riding!
-The evil Captain Dakkar’s secret fortress!
-And more!

Check it out!

Happy belated Thanksgiving, folks! This trailer showcases a sort of… hidden level: Desert Walk. Your objective is simple: reach the other side. The only thing in your way? Miles of desert, with the occasional bit of ground jutting out into your path. This level might be a reference to something.

If you were hoping for some more juicy “when will the game be done” kind of news, then you are in luck! At the end of October, I was hoping to have the game done by the end of November. I was on track for this date, and things were going swimmingly, but then I got sick, and then Thanksgiving came (which, in retrospect, should have been better planned for in my schedule). Thus, the game’s release date is now “sometime in December.” Unless my house is hit by a meteor, the game will be out in December. Probably sometime before the middle of the month. I have a little Christmas update that I want to get out, so I plan to move on to that as soon as the game is out the door.

Later today, I plan on making a new gameplay video, as there are not nearly enough of those yet. It will showcase some of the new levels I’ve created since the last gameplay video (which is pretty much all of them!)

Happy Halloween, ladies and gentlemen! In honor of the spooky holiday at hand, Cheese and Bacon Games has created a terrifying trailer for your enjoyment.

Turn off the lights, shut the door, and feel yourself sweeeeept away into a brand new look at some of Hubert’s scariest foes. You will be shocked! You will be horrified! Or you might at least be interested to know that Hubert’s Island Adventure: Mouse o’ War will be coming to a computer near you next month!

Behold! A link to the video in question! Women and children may wish to avert their eyes. Men may weep. Your pets will just want a snack! And Hubert? Well, Hubert will see you all again very soon…

Years ago, I wrote an AI script for StarCraft. My friends and I enjoyed playing on money maps against large numbers of computer players, but were frustrated with how unchallenging the base game’s AI was on those maps. Thus, Dark AI was born. It was polished and tweaked and tested over years (very intermittently), and I’ve kept it up to date with each new version of StarCraft since then. It is extremely challenging, and it cheats like crazy. It is specifically designed for money maps, and I would not recommend playing against it in a regular game.

Today I have set it up with a page on Google Project Hosting, where my other open source stuff resides.

Check it out!

My apologies for the sparse updates on Hubert this year. I plan to begin posting updates more regularly leading up to the release, which shouldn’t be too far off, now!

As the title says, the game is now in alpha. It has actually been in alpha for about a week. Testing has been quite useful thus far, and I’ve been gathering bug reports and feedback on the gameplay. Additionally, work has finally begun on the creation of the actual levels (yay!) There are two levels now complete, and I am working on another today. Aneissa has been trying her hand at drawing up some levels as well, so look for her levels coming soon!

I have also been making some pretty major optimizations, and the game can now run much better and on lower-end systems. Along with the optimizations, I have added a software renderer. There was already a software mode in the past, but it was eventually removed because I couldn’t get it to look close enough to the hardware mode. That is no longer the case, and software mode has returned!

Here is a video showing the software rendering mode in action.

And here is a video demonstrating the two levels that are currently in.

I’ve been running a small Minecraft server for a while now, and some time ago I wrote a little program to keep backups of the currently running world. It looks at the server’s config file to determine the currently running world, and then copies that world to a date/time-stamped folder within a folder with the world name. That way, I can easily keep backups for several worlds at once.

You can specify how many backups to keep per world (the default is 7), and each time the program is run, it backs up the world and then deletes the oldest backup if there are more backups than the set limit.

I setup a Windows task thing to run the program once a night, and so I have nightly backups for the past week for the server. It is pretty handy!

I’ve been using it for a while now, and so far it hasn’t blown up my computer or killed my server/worlds dead, so I think it is now safe to share it with the world.

You can check it out here.

I just wrote up a postmortem for Cosmic Heist over on the Ludum Dare website, and I’m going to post it here, too. So, without further ado…

So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.

What went right

I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.

I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.

I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.

The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.

The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.

The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.

What went wrong

The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.

Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.

There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.

There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion

All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.

Links

Ludum Dare entry

Cosmic Heist on Cheese and Bacon (my website)

Cosmic Heist on Google Project Hosting (MIT License)

I recently participated in the 48 hour game making competition known as Ludum Dare (the 21st one). I succeeded, and the game I made is called Cosmic Heist. I’m now open-sourcing Cosmic Heist, and I’ve set up a page for it on the site.

Click here to see the Ludum Dare entry.

Click here to go to the game’s page on Cheese and Bacon.

Click here to go to the game’s file hosting page.

The game is licensed under the MIT License, like my other open source projects.

It has been a while since the last update, but work on the game continues. For a few months, most of my focus was on a couple of other projects, but now I am back on Hubert’s Island 110%. A couple of days ago, I finished the last of the NPCs. I have also finished implementing all of Hubert’s moveset. I’m currently working on lots of miscellaneous things, such as finalizing the level file formats, fixing bugs, and tweaking things here and there. Here is the current version of the roadmap for the game:

Phase 1 Complete!

Phase 2 Complete!

Phase 3
-Create a script for the whole story, and all of the levels and cutscenes.
-Create all the level artwork for all of the levels.
-Create the actual levels.

Phase 4
-Create the bosses/boss levels.

Phase 5
-Create the menu system and get it all hooked up.
-Implement stats/achievements.
-Implement cutscenes.

Phase 6
-Clear the To Do List.

Phase 7
-Add the animated main menu graphics/effects.
-Add in any remaining sound effects.
-Create the music for the game.

Note that most of the items on the roadmap are actually partially complete already, and a few of them are done save for dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s. The To Do List mentioned in the roadmap is basically a list of miscellaneous little tasks, bugs, balance issues, tweaks, graphical improvements, etc. that need to be handled. It grows and shrinks all over the place on most days.

I’ve made another short video of a test level, and that should be up later today.