We’ve got more art! Enjoy.
November 9, 2011
November 8, 2011
Holiday Time!
The holidays are quickly approaching, and this year Ginger Magic Games is determined to get the best gift we can for our awesome fans, our first title! We’ve had a lot of funding problems with past projects, but this year we’re going to try out Kickstarter to see if we can get enough money to finish the awesome game we’ve been working on.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the concept art for the game. We’ve got several more sketches to ink and will post those tomorrow along with the details of our Kickstarter campaign. Stick around, because we’ve got several great opportunities to offer our fans in tomorrow’s post.
May 25, 2011
The Secret Game
Today we learned how to fix lots of errors that the Java compiler can spit out. Here’s some code for a secret game. See if you can be the first to successfully debug the entire thing and play a round.
Be careful, it’s filled with syntax errors, runtime errors, and even a few logic errors!
Click for the Code
May 24, 2011
PolygonSprite Star
Here’s a method you can use in your programs to make a star. I have an example setup() method that uses my makeStar().
package star;
import fang2.core.Game;
import fang2.core.Sprite;
import fang2.sprites.PolygonSprite;
import java.awt.Color;
/**
* @author Cole Sherer
*/
public class Star extends Game {
public void setup()
{
Sprite star = makeStar();
star.setColor(Color.YELLOW);
star.setSize(0.5);
addSprite(star);
}
public Sprite makeStar()
{
return new PolygonSprite(.5, .02, .62, .36, .98, .36, .7, .58, .8, .92, .5, .72, .2, .92, .3, .58, .02, .36, .38, .36);
}
}
May 23, 2011
Rotating Sun
Here’s the rotating sun that we just made in class.
package circle;
import fang2.core.Game;
import fang2.sprites.CompositeSprite;
import fang2.sprites.OvalSprite;
import java.awt.Color;
/**
* @author Cole Sherer
*/
public class Circle extends Game {
CompositeSprite c = new CompositeSprite();
public void setup()
{
double r = 0.5;
for(int theta=0; theta<4*1080; theta+=10)
{
r -= 0.001;
//double r = Math.cos(4.0 * Math.toRadians(theta)) * 0.48;
OvalSprite o = new OvalSprite(0.035, 0.035);
o.setColor(new Color(255, 255, theta % 255));
o.setLocation(Math.cos(Math.toRadians(theta)) * r,
Math.sin(Math.toRadians(theta)) * r);
c.addSprite(o);
}
c.setLocation(0.5, 0.5);
addSprite(c);
}
public void advance()
{
c.rotateDegrees(1);
}
}
May 22, 2011
Fang Engine Challenge
For people who’ve finished their “Lots of Dots” game, try to make these dot patterns. You should only use OvalSprites, for loops and if statements to achieve this. All dots can be added in your setup() method. There is no interaction required for this project. Just make each pattern as a separate game.
Fang Engine API
For all my students that are having trouble programming while the Fang API site is down, I’m hosting a copy of the API.
April 11, 2011
Gamma Caeli Debut!
The untitled shmup I was working on last month now has a name and it will be making its debut tomorrow night at the Athens GGDA meething. This will be a great meeting to come to if you’ve never made it out to a Game Developer’s Association meeting and want to hang out with local developers and meet people that love games. This is a show and tell type meeting, so there will be many people showing off their current work and talking about design and development decisions they’ve made in the past several months. The meeting is at the Game Day Pub in downtown Athens, GA at 7:00 PM. Come have a drink with us and be the first to play some games before they make their commercial debuts!
March 13, 2011
Untitled Shmup: Gameplay Complete
It’s been a few days since my last post, but I’ve been following the rules every day and have good news. As of today, I’ve completely finished all of the gameplay programming! The enemy ships follow random, procedurally generated flight paths and fire bullets in many randomly selected patterns. They keep attacking in an ever-faster manner until the player caves under the pressure and goes down in fiery glory. I plan on writing a little more code tonight to save the high scores in CoreData. I’m also going to do some FB, Twitter and GameCenter integration tonight so you can share scores with all your social networks.
Tomorrow I get to start on the fun part, graphics. I’ll finally be replacing all of these dots with actual sprites and it’ll start to look more like a game. I’m also going to explore Cocos2D’s particle system tomorrow so that enemies can explode, powerups can sparkle, and thrusters can shoot fire. The biggest task for tomorrow is giving this game a name! Stick around for the next update to see some nice graphics and possibly hear a sample of the background music. Until then, here’s a few shots of the progress.
March 9, 2011
Untitled Shmup: Day 2
Day 2: Bullets
It’s the second day of my attempt to work on games for the rest of the month and so far I’m succeeding. I followed all the rules I set for myself yesterday and added bullets to my untitled shmup project. Following some great advice from Jens Andersson, I used the Factory design pattern to create a BulletManager that is used to create new bullets and intelligently deal with memory recycling.
I also moved the code for my circles out into its own Ship class and added boundaries so that I wouldn’t keep losing the ships off the edge of the screen. Now that I’ve moved a lot of the code out to separate classes and cleaned up the code design, I think I should institute a new rule: I must comment all of the code I write every day. This will keep me from pulling my hair out when I switch back and forth between projects and need to remember what I was doing.
Cocos2D Tip
If you’re having trouble creating a subclass of CCSprite, you’re not alone. When I moved the code for my circles into their own Ship class, I extended CCSprite. I then proceeded to override the init method like I always do when creating new classes. Inside init, I then called [super initWithFile:@"redCircle.png"]. This was a terrible idea. It creates an infinite loop where initWithFile calls init which uses your overridden version and on and on. To prevent this, simply rename your class’ init method to something new. I happened to choose initShip and my problems were solved.