Friday, March 11, 2016

Robo Racer is out!

Yay!  Another Game Jam, another actual game release!

I've added it to the game page for the blog.  If you are super excited to play it, or super lazy, or can't find the page link cause it's glorious blue on blue at the top right of every single blog page, you can click below to get there.

http://gawaingames.blogspot.com/p/games-ive-made.html

I think I'll let the game speak for itself really.  It's been a blast making it, and my mind is still in a flurry of thoughts and design concepts, so anything I write about it won't make much sense for now.  Plus I've been promoting and repackaging the promotion material so much over the last 2 days, I don't really feel like spouting it all twice just for this blog post.

Not Robo Racer related news after the break.  If you are just here to check out my games, you can stop reading here. ;)



What's next for me?

I'm trying to make the version 2 editor for Mothrina Chapters.

Currently that means re-learning how to use Visual Studio Express to make interfaces.  The last time I used this tool was back on the 2008 version.

I opened the 2015 version last night, and was quickly overwhelmed by all the new buttons and windows they've added.  It appears I have a bit of learning to do before I can splat buttons and text boxes all over the screen again.

The concept is to make a proper windows program that spits out bits of files, like enemy data, for my App Game Kit program to read from.  Most of the game data will be made using this new editor.

The actual game mechanics will still be run by an expanded/rewritten version 2 of the Mothrina Chapters engine, running off of App Game Kit's engine.

The primary reason for doing this?  To enable copy and paste editing of game text using the windows edit boxes instead of having to code my own in App Game Kit Basic.  Yep, that's it really.

Though there are lots of other benefits that come with having a faster way of developing editor side features.  Like it won't take me three days of digging around to implement a new editing field or type of data, for starters.  App Game Kit is cool, but it's hard to emulate all the work put into regular windows GUI elements.

Not sure what to do about the actual dungeon editor yet.  I really don't want to code from scratch an editor in Visual Studio, since the dungeon layouts are visual.  Perhaps I might do a three way editing system, with App Game Kit used to make the dungeon floor editor and the game, and a Visual Studio app for editing all the gritty data bits.

First though, I need to wind down and get myself back together after the game jam.

Signing off.