Tuesday 31 August 2010

A couple of Screenshots - or not!

Well, I was just about to upload some screenies for you but Blogger is giving me Service Unavailable when it tries the upload - balls!!

Have to wait until tomorro now :(

Sunday 29 August 2010

The One That Got Away

The One That Got Away
A new small flash game that I've been working on. Featuring a fish and an evil Octopus - coming soon!

Saturday 21 August 2010

Productivity

You know what it's like - you turn on your PC to do some "work" and first of all you check your emails. Then you go to your regular forums and see what's going on there. Then you browse your favourite blogs, check your email again and then chat to a friend on Skype.

Before you know it 2 hours have passed by. You decide to go downstairs and make a cup of tea before you start coding. Back upstairs an email comes in that you decide to respond to straight away. You then go back and check Ebay and have a message on a forum that you need to reply to . . . and on it goes.

Eventually you've had enough of your PC and decide to go downstairs and do something more productive like watch the tv or cut the grass!

I've had (have) this problem too. The only way I've managed to combat it is to do some work first, no matter what.
I now turn on my PC, bring up my code and do at least one little thing that needs doing. Even if it's something that takes 2 minutes, I've been more productive than usual. I usually find that once I start coding I carry on for quite some time before I decide to check my Email.

So if you want to be more productive ignore the emails, forums, blogs etc and get a small bit of work done first, then sit back and play on the Interweb. You'll feel much better for it.

Saturday 14 August 2010

Fighting Talk

Well, Fighting code anyway.

Currently I've got a player controlled fighter who will move around the play area nicely doing jumps, kicks, punches and some specials taken from Street Fighter. All works very well.

I've also just finished coding the Player 2 stuff plus all the moves and if you've got enough fingers you can battle it out between them.

I think that's the easy bit done!

The hard bit will be doing the computer opponent AI.
I read somewhere (don't know where!) that the best way to do AI for this kind of fighting game is to make the hardest opponent first. Then you just strip back bits until you end up with the weakest, most stupid opponent. Sounds good to me!

Thursday 5 August 2010

A day away . . .

. . . from your code is always a big help.

I had a problem with the special moves for the fighters in our latest game. I spent hours looking for the problem and couldn't see it. I even went back to earlier builds of the game to try and track down the cause, but to no avail.

I didn't look at the code the next day but last night I looked at it with fresh eyes and there it was - an obvious mistake staring right at me! 10 minutes later and the special moves for player 1 are working fine again - hurray!

Onwards and upwards!