In accordance with the title metaphors, I believe it is high time for a game update! Well, it is actually more than an update, given how little information we gave you in our previous post, Wading In.

Let us begin with perhaps the most important part of the game—its name.

The knight in shining armor must rescue the fair princess, taken by none other than a black magic wielding sorcerer. Typical. But how does a knight who has been stripped of his sword fight? That's the focus of the game here. True to its genre, expect to be thoroughly puzzled upon entering the levels. Most of the time, all you will get is the entry point, the portal to escape, and the name the sorcerer has aptly provided for the altered space you are in. It is up to you to connect the dots and make your way. It's not death you will be, or should be, scared of. Rather, it is being stuck in the void for all of eternity. Good luck.

That hopefully painted a fairly accurate picture of what has been in development for the past week or so. In case it hasn't, take a look

… Continue Reading

     This post is, once again, coming to you from Joraaver.

     Last time, I talked about how the stages of our game are designed in Tiled, and what layers we had to look for. I also addressed leveraging the SAX parser in Java to parse the tmx file for the objects.

     Today, I'm going to analyze how I stored my objects from Tiled and how I mapped them as tiles to jME's coordinate plane.

     Most of the information regarding the "gid" number of the tile and collecting tilesheets is in the Parsing and Rendering TMX Files tutorial by GameDev Tuts+. I'll only be covering the things that are jME specific, and will touch base on the "gid" information if necessary.

Collecting the Objects

     First, I'll quickly dive into collecting the tilesheets. Follwing the tutorial above, I created a nice and simple TileSet class, with the same attributes. Then, inside the DeafaultHandler I created, the code below handles grabbing each tileset and creating an instance for it:

public void startElement(String uri, String localName,String qName, Attributes

… Continue Reading

     Another head's up, this post is by Joraaver.

     This is going to be a more technical post, as I delve into how I took the stages from Tiled and made proper levels in jME. However, the general introduction and parsing of the maps created by Tiled are well covered by the tutorials Introduction to Tiled and Parsing and Rendering Tiled Maps on GameDev Tuts+. Rather, I'm going to cover what made the process more unique for our purposes during the creation of the game.

     Let's get started!

A Sample Stage

     First, let's take a look at one of our stages, built in Tiled:

     I've color coded the key elements in the map.

     Objects underlined in red indicate they are part of the Nodes layer. These are the "start" and "end" nodes.

     Items underlined in blue are part of the Collision layer. These are all the grey outlined rectangles.

     The objects underlined in green are part of the Floor layer. The

… Continue Reading

Head's up guys. This post is written by Joraaver.

We've given you the basics of who we are, but now, I'm going to dive into what the game is about, as well as what part each of us plays in the development of the game we're working on. The game has no name yet, so "the game" here means The Game.

The Game

This is a puzzle-platformer game. It's got a bit of a backstory, but the real focus is on the puzzle in each level. We hope players will learn to love the titles as they move on through the levels, because they'll get no other hints. Now, I can't tell you everything, can I? But perhaps a screenshot will satiate your hunger for now:

Our Roles

     I'm Joraaver, the lead programmer on the team. I'm using the JMonkeyEngine, or jME version 3 RC2, as the game engine for this project. I could have gone with a more classic 2D engine, like Construct 2, or even have used Unity, which has just released a 2D framework in it's latest version (v4.3). However, I am most familiar with Java, I like the open-source nature

… Continue Reading

     Merry Christmas everyone! Today is a day of festivity, so enjoy it! Luckily for all of you, the team has a present to give. As game developers, we realize the importance of marketing yourself, and one great way of doing this is creating a blog, similar to this one. For all those curious about how they can go about starting their own blogs with Ghost, here is a high level explanation of how we did it.

Some Background

     Ghost's goal is to make blogging simpler by bringing blogging back to its roots. It is not a full website development kit of any sort; with it you can create a theme, host a blog, and make and edit posts (so far). Later releases will include the ability to create static pages (such as an "About the Author" page), a dashboard to keep track of metrics, and much more. You can find out what features will be included when by looking at Ghost's Roadmap.

     Ghost also has fairly well maintained documentation, available here.

     With this information in mind, we can split the

… Continue Reading

     If you are reading this, then you must be wondering who we are and what we do.

Who are we?

     We are 3 brothers who have banded together to take the mighty first step in game development. We've been gamers since we were young—jumping on the Mario and Pokemon bandwagon, as well as playing our fair share Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, Crash Bandicoot, and the likes. We've covered much of the spectrum--from early PC games to more hardcore FPS titles, such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. Let's just say we are well versed in the consumer aspect of games.

The Mission

     This blog will chronicle our journey over the course of the games we develop. Why? Well, for one thing, it keeps us on track, but more importantly, other budding game developers will be able to learn from our process and our mistakes. With the debut of this blog also comes the announcement of the first game we are making, which we hope to release in about 2 to 3 weeks. Thus, you can expect to see posts every 2-3 days, keeping

… Continue Reading