Whirley Games - whirley@whirleygames.com: ~/$ Tinkering with Games

This book is a well written piece of literature although I would have expected the book to be a little more focused. Coming from a database background a lot of this information was things that apply to all SQL DB’s. The sections that cover android programming are put together with a specific use in mind. This book will give you a good overview of the options available to you for android, but only an introduction to the details. The case studies do give you a good idea of when to use which storage option.

299 days (9 months, 25 days) and the final submission has been made.  Indigo Jam Games have submitted Deathtrap Dungeon a Fighting Fantasy inspired   action adventure game.

We taught our selves Unreal Development Kit, and we developed great social skills and formed a very strong core team.

I recently started looking into android animations.

I got hold of Android 3.0 Animations: Beginner’s Guide, this has helped me a lot. It covers everything from very basic animation using individual images, surfaces and Live wall papers.

It has good example code and it explains everything in detail.

You need a background in Java/Android development before taking on this book as it is not covered in this book.

Finally after some time we have the‚ intellectual‚ properties (IP) announced that we have been working on over the last 2 months. Indigo Jam‚ have been working on Death Trap Dungeon ‚  as announced by‚ EPIC on their blog.

I’m looking forward to the Gadget Show Live‚ to reveal and refine our game in spectacular real-time.

I have been having fun with the UDK for around 5 months now and all I can say is, Learn a‚  Scripting Language like Unreal Script.

If you are a developer there should be no reason not to do this, if you are not going to use the UDK learn LUA, python or even JavaScript.

Although Unreal has kismet which is visual script writing tool, the ease of making global game changes just out-ways the benefits of looking at boxes on the screen.

If you are serious about learning Unreal Script I would recommend Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner’s Guide from Pakt Publishing. It is a very good read and has very good examples. Covering subjects that are language specific, everything from key words to writing a Kismet module.

I thought i like the new theme. It is based on the Unix Shell

I’ll be adding some interesting‚ developments‚ in the next few weeks.

I have been trying to get my project off the ground but I refuse‚ to build a library without some sort of unit testing.

After alot of research I have decided to implement googleTest for my projects. I did find that most of the documentation is very complete but it still is not in simple terms. so here is the steps I follow to setup a gTest project.

1. Download, and extract to the folder where you want to use it from, gtest, in my case d:gtest
2. Browse the folder and go to the msvc folder and open the gTest project in MS Visual Studio
3. Build the project on both debug and release
4. Create a new project. And go into project settings by right clicking on the project in the Solution browser.
5. In Configuration Properties>C/C++>Additional Include Directories add : d:gtestinclude (or what ever the folder was you were using)
6. go to Configuration Properties>Linker>General>Additional Include Directories and add:‚ D:gtestmsvcgtestDebug for DEBUG and‚ D:gtestmsvcgtestRelease for Release
7. In Configuration Properties>Linker>General>Additional Dependancies add: ‚ gtest_maind.lib;gtestd.lib; for debug and‚ gtest_main.lib;gtest.lib for release.

Then run the program. You should see it execute.

Read the documentation for possible test.

Mike Gamble, European Territory Manager, Epic Games, on the game jam with some pictures. Unreal Blog

On Friday we received our team assignments and I was assigned to Team B(a great bunch of guys and girl),‚  we received the theme “Guy Fawkes”.

After about 2 -3 hours of brainstorming and bouncing ideas of each other we finally decided on a 3rd person/Isometric view game with Guy Fawkes out for revenge on the other seasons (Christmas would be our focus for this game jam).

Saturday morning (after a 4 hour sleep on a nice sleeping bag and a hard floor) we were pushing on. We had a camera, a rag-doll hanging by a thread (our character) and a lot of work ahead.

One developer focused on getting the world built, the 2 artists on getting the assets sorted, the QA tester built a menu level, the designers got on with various other tasks and I did the Unreal Script.

Dinner time on Saturday we were making great progress, with having an unpainted but rigged model in out game and unpainted models for our AI in the game. After a few interesting problems, like getting the gun to attch to the hand of our character, and getting the paint on the character in the game we we making good progress.

We then started putting everything together, we had painted skins for all the models and pick-ups.

On Sunday morning at 5am I just could not do anything anymore so i huddled off to a dark room to have a bit of shut eye.

7:30 am we had breakfast then back to the task at hand. We finalized the last pieces for the game.

45 Hours after we received the brief and about 6 hours of sleep we were ready to package the game

45 Minutes of mind numbing problems and help from the unreal guru (Markus) the packaging completed.

2 Hours later we had a very entertaining demo with the judges and we went to await the results.

Final results were that 3 teams made it through Team A, Team B and Team C. What …… Team B?

All the work and the limited sleep was all worth it as we actually were one of the teams that have made it through to the Make Something Unreal Live at the Gadget Show Live in April 2012.

Thanks to Train2Game and Epic for organizing this event, a the University of Bedfordshire for hosting this event.

Thanks to all the Guru’s that helped out with the various problems that came up, it helped a lot.

Thanks to all my team mates, it was a hell of a run, but we made it, now to get this thing in the bag.

After 10 weeks there is nothing i will fit in my head. Lets see what comes from it.

This weekend I’m taking part in the Train 2 Game, Game Jam, We all get together divide us up into teams of 10, we then have 48 hours to finish a fully functional game.

This is going to be fun….