:: yaroze ::

:: 11.8.03 ::

What a hectic few weeks!
Went for a couple of weeks holiday around the Basque country (22-07 to 05-08) and really enjoyed the time off travelling around. Then moved house 2 days after returning, and then a mad weekend down in Devon with much driving to and from due to all the traffic!
Now I'm in the new house in Hillsborough and there's soooo much to do, so I won't be doing much Yaroze for a while :) Nice to pay off the mortgage though. Only the student loans to go now!

:: me 8:55 AM [+] ::
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Got an animated googlie running randomly across the screen to fire at now. All I need now is a collision detectino routine and I've got the beginnings of a game! Wow!

:: me 7:39 AM [+] ::
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Over the past couple of days, I've taken some sprites from Ari Feldmen's excellent site (www.arifeldman.com) who not only does it for a living, but also has some fro hobbyist game makers. Much better than I could do.
Anyway, I've got a ship moving across the bottom of the screen, with acceleration and deceleration etc. Nice and smooth. Then I got some missiles firing, with sfx and all! Haven't really done sound in the tutorials, but just did someone's "Sound For Dummies" enough to convert some old samples I had lying around.
Now to get a beastie wandering over the screen to shoot at and that's a first simple game!

:: me 11:51 AM [+] ::
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Created a couple of sprites of my own - a simple 8-bit 16x16 ship and 8-bit 8x16 missile. I found the easiest way was to outline simply in a grid of 16x16 in Paint Shop Pro, and then resize to 256x256 for some bigger brush 16m colour painting. Nothing too accurate. Then resizing again back down to 16x16 and making 256 colours makes some decent looking sprites without being too precious about it! It's a real skill making 16x16 sprites pixel by pixel - something I can't do anyway!
Got the ship moving left & right at the bottom of the screen with the missile planted firmly in the middle of the screen.
Job of today is to get the missile "firing" and then design an alien and its bomb to shoot at at the top of the screen.

:: me 8:52 AM [+] ::
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Started "reviewing" Yarozer's games with Ben James and Philip-Andre Lorin under the microscope yesterday. I'll maybe do a couple a day, just to see what's possible and how I can learn from the masters.

:: me 8:33 AM [+] ::
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Grabbed some graphics from Ben James' Alien Looter using the dsave command from siocons. Just for the purposes of using something for testing - you understand - I will of course create my own if I ever do any game!
I'd like to go through all members' games and do some kind of simple review with a screenshot of each, just for posterity, and possibly look into the source of those I like in order to learn for myself. I'm such an obsessive-compulsive disordered man!

:: me 8:07 AM [+] ::
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Nothing really to report yesterday - having some fun looking at other Yarozer's games. I'm particularly impressed with Ben James. I think he must have done a game from all the 2D genres. "Alien Looter" - a space invaders clone - is a lot of fun and his latest - "katapila" - is close to an idea I had of a boucing thing and is terrific fun. Very simple, perhaps a bit too hard, plenty of room for expansion though. I think I'll continue running through a load of samples, and looking at source code, for a while. Puts off having to commit to anything!

:: me 8:19 AM [+] ::
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