Another day in the red tile factory...

This week’s advancements in the field of gruedorfery mainly lie in the iPhone side of things for me. Rusty and I creep ever closer to the end goal of shipping an iPhone game. We’re working, if it’s not clear, upon a sokoban clone to start with, and will progress to add features to our engine with progressively more complex games.

Of course, this may all be in vain if a verge 3 port to the iPhone comes out. Not that I’m one to start rumors…

Gruedorf turns one, starts teething.

This marks the first anniversary of my first gruedorf post, when a humble Grue and a pompous Dorf first shut up, threw down, then started swaking again.

It amuses me to see that since it’s inception, twenty competitors have joined our unwinnable contest. As of this writing, 6 are in a state of “not losing”, 10 are in a state of “losing”, and 4 have defunct sites. All in all, the contest is serving some of it’s purpose, keeping some chatter and activity constantly going, but I’d like to see it grow in the next year.

I’d also like to see Overkill and Toen stop failing so much, since both have made pretty awesome things in times past.

What is Gruedorf again?

Gruedorf is a simple contest between myself (McGrue) and Kildorf designed to promote activity in the amateur game creation community over at www.verge-rpg.com.

There are but two rules:

1. If you do an hour of work on a game and post to an RSS-enabled blog about it, you are not-losing.
2. If you fail to do work and post about it, you are losing.

It is important to note that nobody can win Gruedorf. It sure is nice when you ship a game, but doing so doesn’t free you from the eternal geas of a minimum of one hour per week. After all, we are people who profess to enjoying development.

So what got done this year?

I’ve lost a few times, but kept up a whole bunch of progress.

• Made progress on my game project that’s older than Duke Nuke’m Forever…
• Made significant progress towards finishing The Sully Chronicles, including finishing the implementation of the Battle System to a testable form.
• Made improvements to verge 3 on an engine level.
• Started work on a new verge community site, fully test-driving the process.
• Worked on and am shipping an iPhone game, using work done solely on weekends.
• Created a spike of a web2.0 sprite editor over a weekend

And that’s about it. Moving forward I’ll be focusing on Sully, http://beta.verge-rpg.com, and v3 for a bit. Whee.

Oh, and new site.

As a gift to y’alls, I ditched my old cakePHP spike of a blog and ported everything over to wordpress. I couldn’t justify working on the egometry source to do things that other packages did better. Leveraging other people’s work sometimes takes priority over having fun hand-rolling it, especially when you have limited free time.

So, yeah. You all can now comment on my blog finally. Whee.

Change is in the Map…

This week’s changes are mainly to the Crux Map-editor I posted last week. This week brings a bunch of refactorings, culminating in a much cleaner, quicker editing experience. Pending is some meta-data editing and a vsp view, but if you want to add more tiles for the meantime just add 32×32 pngs to the tiles directory in the established naming pattern and you’re all set.

Also along with tonight’s speed-up refactoring comes the possibility of a full v3 multilayer application built on top of this in the future. The slowdown that prevented this from happening was caused by a juvenile mistake that Kael caught after a half hour of me debugging and him playing videogames while aen looked on.

(It’s easier to “pair” program when it’s being projected on a wall and everyone involved is several feet from each other. It’s amazing how much being in comfy chairs and not having your personal space infringed upon helps.)

Anyway, for all of you out there in TV land who care, here’s the updated editor. CTRL-S also saves a .plist of the current map out into the v3.log, although the load doesn’t work yet. So sad.

This week I worked some with Rusty on the iPhone tile engine: we now have full maploading and zooming. yay!

I also worked some on a mapeditor. The mapeditor is a verge game right now, because the maps are simple and I wanted an editor mac and pc users both could use. I’ll post that when it’s a little further along.

SpriteWright.com

The biggest thing I’ve worked on this week is spritewright.com. I’ve been wanting to work on a javascript-only tile/sprite editing tool for a long time now (I really don’t know why: blame derangement if you must), and I finally just started tapping it out. It’s served pretty well to cement my love and understanding of the YUI and of event-driven programming. Thusfar this has been a non-TDD spike, but it’s almost too big now to go without tests. I certainly need to get my house in order before implementing a full undo/redo stack, for instance.

Future Plans

I’d like to eventually have a full database of public tiles and sprites up on SpriteWright, indexed and sortable by tag (omg, the icons of snozzberries are tagged ‘snozzberries’!) and/or by what palette was used. In fact, my obsession with palettes and palette-based art manipulation was half of the reason behind this whole thing.

I’d also like to add an open API so other art programs could load and save to the service. That’d be neat.

In the more distant but hopefully not-too-distant future I wouldn’t mind implementing a flash-driven web-based mapeditor that tied into the API, to solve once and for all the godforsaken verge cross-platform devtools problem (and to sharpen up my flex skills).

A Crippling Addiction

So, I think spritewright.com is the official name, but I also registered spriteright.com, spriterite.com, and spritewrite.com.

Clearly, I have a problem.

I like the implications of a craftsman that -wright implies, but I also like typing ‘spriterite’ because you get to spell ‘rite’ twice in a row. I got the others because if I’m ever pitching this site in the future verbally, I don’t want to have to spell it. I’ll just be all “Eh, it’s spelled how you think it is.” and let them get there anyway they think.

I also started work on a map editor coded in vc. If everything goes well, Overkill will be joining in on this on his next update.

Finally, I updated the Sully codebase to the mark 5 render engine: now with fully functional clickable renderstack items! Yay!