iDevGames

Revolution 3.5 is a major upgrade featuring data presentations using the all new Data Grid, object-oriented behaviors, which allow you to streamline your coding, and RevOnline II, an easier way to share code or get help. RunRev has an all new interface and also boasts 100 bug fixes and minor enhancements.

You can now add notes to documentation entries. These notes contain helpful explanations of how to do things easily or efficiently or show you how to avoid potential problems. User ratings save you time picking out the most helpful comments. We’ve also made changes to the group object to support behaviors. You can now prevent objects within a group from being selected with the mouse and a new set of messages get sent to allow you to redraw the contents of custom control before they are shown on the screen or resized.

Also of note to multimedia game authors is Revolution Media, a low-cost version that ships with and adventure game construction kit, enabling you to write the next “Myst” or “Cosmic Osmo.”
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Overview

I have always loved strategy games of all types. Unfortunately, I find most computer strategy games to be very long and involved and difficult to sit down and play in one sitting. Board games are great, but finding enough players is always a challenge. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of good, short, turn-based strategy games for the computer — most of them seem to be cheaply made knock-offs of table top board games.

There are a few exceptions to this. One of them is a very old, very obscure game that I had as a kid and missed playing. Constellation is a game that I wrote for myself because I wanted to play that game again. That other people have enjoyed it, and that it has won second place in the uDevGames 2008 Contest is icing on the cake.
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Ingemar Ragnemalm, best known for writing the Sprite Animation Toolkit (SAT) and the book ‘Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus’ has released a new Mac OS X IDE called Lightweight IDE.

Lightweight IDE was written after the observation that IDEs have gotten more and more complex, to the result that it is a problem. The IDE is not always a help, it is a burden.
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Samuel Williams over at Orion Transfer just posted a brief introduction to managing game state. In particular, he talks about de-coupling the simulation from the renderer, and also includes a brief overview of maintaining distributed state in networked games.

• Related Link: State Management

Getting Started

I entered uDevGames ’08 because I needed motivation to get something done. The three month deadline gave me something to work to. Boston was developed by a team of three — Nathan was in charge of story and music, Micah did the comic art and character design and I took care of the 3D art, level design, and all programming.

December

The first task was to get a story. I rounded up Micah and had a meeting with Nathan. After about ten minutes, we had a basic story line. I went back to trying to familiarize myself with the game engine while Micah, the artist, worked on character design for ‘Boston’. The next day, after another consultation with Nathan, the writer, we had our main character drawn out.
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SoldierAnts is a turn-based strategy/action game where you pitch your wits against 1 to 4 players that can be either Human or AI. It supports two game modes, quick battle ideal for a 5 minutes burst of fun and campaign mode where you can wage a longer war to control all the territory on the map. The aim of each battle is to defeat the other team and to do this you presented with a large selection of weapons; Sniper Rifle, AK47, FlameThrower, Prod, Snowball, Grenade, RPG, Missile, Mine, Petrol Bomb, Cluster Bomb, Time Bomb and Airstrike. You may want to avoid incoming attacks or gain a better vantage point and to do this you can walk the SoldierAnts left and right, flick them to jump, use a jetpack, teleport or simply dig yourself a hole with a mole and cower. If you ever played Team 17’s classic Worms then you will have a pretty good idea what SoldierAnts is all about. It has a slick interface, intuitive control scheme, great gameplay and lasting appeal. Packing more firepower than the A-Team your band of SoldierAnts are all set to wreak havoc.

Related Links:

• iTunes
• www.iSoldierAnts.com
• Watch it on YouTube

Nebula Device is an Open Source realtime 3D game/visualization engine, written in C++. This 3D Engine runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Irix, and Xbox. It includes scripting via TCL, Python and LUA. Current progress on the Mac OS X port is not know, however the engine does seem very promising.

Related Links:

• Nebula Device
• Nebula Community

The Creative Itch Begins

It was the spring of 2008, and I hadn’t finished anything in a year. I was still easing into college, so I was very busy, but I missed game development. Even though iDevGames hadn’t run a contest in some time, I decided to create a game design to put on file just to satisfy my creative itch. I thought about games during my twenty minute walk to class one day and came up with the modular ship concept — I became very excited and drew a quick mockup:
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NUI is a C++ application framework that runs on the iPhone, Mac OS X (Universal), Win32 and Linux. Its main distinctive features is its use of 3D hardware to render the UI via OpenGL, OpenGL Es and Direct3D. Features include:

• Low level abstraction: string, files, paths, streams, network, timers, threads, mutexes, etc.
• Widget layout engine
• Really many widgets: text, grids, boxes, collumn views, tree views, etc.
• Integrated widget tree visual introspection/debugging
• Web-like CSS engine
• Modern rendering and compositing engine
• Animations for widgets and their attributes
• Attributes to remote control widgets
• Audio IO and Audio file loading/saving (including compressed audio files decoding)
• Stable and proven lib: many applications have been released since 2001 with NUI at their core.

The lib is dual licensed under the GPL and commercial licensing for non-free software developers.

• Related Link: http://www.libnui.net

Brandon, the author of iCodeBlog has a three part tutorial on making a simple iPhone game up on his blog. It covers everything from graphics, to a simple AI and user interaction. For those just starting out making games for the iPhone, here’s a good way to get started. The author also mentioned that he might move on to more complicated games as well if there’s demand. See the link for the tutorials. Also, 71squared, another code blog, has an ongoing video tutorial on making an OpenGL ES based iPhone game, it’s up to three parts right now (though only two show up if you choose iPhone Game Programming as a category). So you can watch them work on the programs right in front of you.

Related Links:

• iCodeBlog
• 71Squared