I've just released some code I've had for a while. This library allows you to use bitmap font images to draw fancy and stylish text to the screen in an XNA project. It was used in Music Island to strings using bamboo-styled text.
More information and downloads are available on the code page.
I finished up polishing the menus and high scores for Super Pirate Box. The completed game is now available on the project page!
Features:
Hope you enjoy it!
Camera Obscura has been submitted to Steam Greenlight as of this Sunday! We've very excited to have a shot at publishing the game as we approach 2 years of development. Visit Greenlight here and vote for us:
Camera Obscura \ Steam Greenlight
We've also released a portion of the soundtrack on Youtube for your enjoyment:
Last weekend, I participated in a 48-hour game jam with UCI's Video Game Development Club. I had a lot of fun pulling a couple of 14-hour workdays with my fellow game developers. Together, we turned out four games in the weekend, spanning platforms including XNA, Unity, and SDL.
I decided to use my weekend to learn more about using SDL with C++ to develop a 2D game. I spent some time in the preceding weeks writing some libraries for spriting and controls to simplify the process, but of course, there were still a few issues during the weekend. For one thing, I hadn't realized that SDL doesn't load PNG images natively. I was able to implement the SDL_image library, but that set me back a bit.
Anyway, the game itself it an arcade-style top-down game. You play as a pirate who must repel legions of enemy pirates who try to board your ship. However, for some reason neither you nor any of the other pirates have weapons. So what do you do? You attempt to shove them overboard, of course. It's fast-paced action, easy to pick up, but difficult to master - and one slip-up means starting over from zero!
I hope to be able to wrap the game up within a week with some basic menus and online highscores.
Update: Get the game on the project page.
This week's random side project was inspired by my friend Bryan Ploof and my Music and Technology class. We've been discussing music generated by computers with little or no human influence, including attempts to map anything from fractals to sorting algorithms to musical notes. Michael Matthews gave a lecture on his research in creating music using cellular automata. Cellular automata are sets of simple rules that define how a grid of "cells" evolves over time. They provide very interesting possibilities in the generation of music because their rules often generate musically interesting patterns and progressions. Michael's approach was to use a one-dimensional automata to control the pitches and timbres of sound available to a player, who modulated the sound directly through motions picked up by a webcam.
My goal was to make a system that could act autonomously to create a unified tune with a strong melody. My approach was to create three seperate automata to control different aspects of the music. One controls the rhythm of the song by selecting the timing of each note (quarter, eighth, etc). The other two control the notes that are played: one selects a chord from a pre-defined set, and the other selects which notes from the chord are activated.
Here's a sample! This video uses a few chords selected from the Star Wars theme to generate a tune.
An executable and the full C++ source are available on my code page. Future plans for the project may include replacing the chord-selection mechanism with a Markov chain to make it more musically coherent, and implementing samples and ADSR so the notes can be things other than sine and square waves.
