Saturday, March 31, 2012

At The Philosophy of Computer Games 2011

After almost six months, since the last year's 2 days Hellenic Game Developers Conference that was held during the Athens Digital Week, Space Debris appeared to this year's The Philosophy of Computer Games event at Athens, Greece in April.

This time, Kostas Anagnostou, Game developer and Adjunct Lecturer in Videogame Technologies spoke about the "Data driven game development - Empowering the artist". This time the presentation was more technical and described the concepts behind the development of Space Debris.

The main idea is that the programmers instead of concentrating on the game mechanics themselves they develop a kind of player that is able to reproduce whatever is feeded more like a music or video player but this time data is the game itself.

The speach can be found here.

Development diaries - February-March 2011 archive

27/03/2011
Restored asteroid field functionality. It didn’t work because its spritesheet was not registered with the SpriteSheetManager. It took me all morning to track this down. We really need more Assert mechanisms in the code... Took an update from the repository, we now have definitions for almost everything in the game! The game crashes though because some sprites are missing from the spritesheets, flimsy content pipeline... I’ll have to use Nick’s tool to recreate the spritesheets.

22/03/2011
Fixed a game crash bug, it was due to wrong memory allocations. I also closed some old bugs which had long been fixed.

25/02/2011
Added a temporary menu to the game with background music. I also fixed some graphics glitches at the screen boundaries.

09/02/2011
I tried running space debris on the iPad. The whole process required nothing more than setting the iPad as target and building the game! Everything worked normally, even the UI! on the scaled output. Onay the graphics looked a bit blurry due to the filtering. I wonder if there is a way to do the scaling manually and turn off filtering.


08/02/2011
After setting up my new apple account and license and my new MacBook, I am ready to pickup space debris development from where we left it. I have set up Xcode and svn as well, did a test build of the game and all work fine. We are ready to roll again. :-)

Kostas Anagnostou