Red Brick Games

Lately I’ve been hitting freesound.org like mad. That is such an awesome website.

This is a really good time to be an indie game developer. So many quality tools and resources are available for free, or for nearly-free.

Tools and resources such as:

• Audacity - free (a VERY nice tool!)
• Blender - free (amazing…though hard to learn)
• Blender Torque DTS exporter - free (the docs for this are FANTASTIC!!!)
• Freesound.org sound files - free (mostly)
• Ogg Vorbis tools and codecs - free
• OpenAL drivers - free (x-platform audio spec)
• OpenOffice - free (ok, so it’s not about game dev, but ya gotta do project management!)
• Paint.net - free
• Perforce source control - free (up to 2 users)
• RTS environment pack - $40 (for the indie license; bigger projects=more $)
• Torque 1.5.2 Game Engine - $150
• Torque Showtool pro - comes free w/ Torque 1.5.2
• Visual C++ 2008 Express - free
• WinMerge - free

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The costs to break into the indie game industry are mainly just one’s own labor. (Although, that there is a considerable expense!)

A big thank-you to anyone who has contributed to the open source tools in that list! They’re much appreciated. And great quality! Thanks!

Game development news will resume next post.

A few pictures from my new Motorola ZN5 “Zine”.

For some time, I’ve been wanting to retire my 7-year-old digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A40. So I bought the new Motorola ZN5, a top-ranked camera cell phone, hoping to combine phone-and-camera into one.

The verdict: as you can see the ZN5’s pictures are pretty good.

But they don’t seem quite as good as my old camera, despite competing against 7-year-older technology. I was a little surprised by that–I guess there’s no substitute for a genuine camera lens and optics, which aren’t found in cell phones.

Still, for a cell phone, those are pretty good pictures.

Pics are from my modest condo–small but pleasant!

This Christmas, I got a hand-drawn card from my favorite 5-year-old:

which came in a custom “hearts-and-Chuck-E-Cheese” envelope :)

Aw… I think that was my favorite Christmas gift!

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Not much game development news to report, unfortunately.

I’ve been optimizing Orcs vs. Martian’s minimap and replay, and improving their appearance. How boring is that, eh? Lately other things in life have been requiring time, so game development has been sparse.

I could also write about my R0xx0ring Aw3some Tool Tip Improvements!!! — but if boredom could kill, I suspect that’d be a fatal blow.

After the minimap/replay work is done (which shouldn’t take long if I ever dedicate the time), next up will be some more A.I. work. Enemy unit A.I still reasons on a per-unit basis, not in groups, so whenever an enemy attack force encounters moderate-to-good defenses, they get all scared and refuse to attack. Freakin’ individualists - learn to think as a team, will ya.

I’m also brainstorming about how to visually represent more of the different upgrades. That should be fun and pretty easy work.

I recently heard a philosophy-of-life kind of quote, that I really like.

We don’t necessarily learn from our life experience. We learn from reflecting on our life experience.

…but I still like this piece. :) More artwork from my favorite 5-year-old:

Edit:
didn’t understand the reference to “The Louvre” in the blog title? The Louvre is Paris’s most famous art museum. Sigh. Game developers — no culture at all. (shakes head)

P.S. Ok, I admit it, I had to look it up too.

Jolly poor show, Best Buy and Frys.

So, I removed my recently-deceased laptop’s hard drive, right? Now I want to copy it over to my desktop system. But laptop and desktop hard drives use different IDE connectors. So I need an adaptor, right? You can get such an adaptor for as little as $3.

So I head on over to Best Buy. Tell a salesman what I’m looking for. This “helpful” salesman tells me what I really need, what I really have to have, is a complete hard drive enclosure. Which, of course, I don’t. And which, coincidentally, starts at $50. Not $3.

Now, if I was unknowledgeable about computer hardware, this guy could have easily hoodwinked me into buying one of those $50 jobs. However once he realized I knew hardware, he stopped trying to push those things.

Would it really be such a crime if customer service people helped customers, rather than trying to get out of them as much money as possible?

So I head over to Fry’s. Still looking for a cheap adapter. Another salesman. This guy shows me an IDE-to-USB converter, allowing me to plug my laptop’s hard drive into a USB port. And at a better price this time: $15.

But it’s bulky, is more than I need, and I know I can get cheaper, so I ask: you got just a direct 44-pin to 40-pin adapter, that’s cheaper? I get a cool reaction to asking for something cheaper (!! look, I don’t care about your store and your profits, but you’d better work with me if you want me back as a customer), and he says, No, “This is the least expensive thing you’ll find here.”

Ok, fine. I can live with the $15 deal. But I spend 5 more minutes browsing the adapters and cables they have in that section -

and what do I find right there?

“44-pin to 40-pin hard drive adaptor.”

For $6.

Good grief. Best Buy and Frys, your customer service really has room for improvement.

I went jogging this morning, for the first time in over a year. Wish me luck — and for my knees to hold up.

Particle effects have been fun. I’m designing a system in Orcs vs. Martians that allows up to three different particle effects for each game action.

1. action particles - particles that are a function of the action (attacking, building, paving, etc.)
2. ejecta particles - particles that are a function of the action target (to model flying debris)
3. impact particles - particles that are a function of the combination of action target + impacter (laser).

In other words, I’ll be able to produce particles specific to actions (e.g. paving kicks up some road dust), particles specific to the target (brick bldgs eject stone debris, wood bldgs eject splinter debris), and particles that vary with both the target and whether a Martian laser was involved (for sparks when striking metal, an energy corona from a laser, etc.)

One of the more fun particle ideas I’ve thought of is, when workers chop trees, make leaves drift down from the trees. The leaves would be particles. That effect seems like it would be a really nice touch - can’t wait to implement it!