Month: July 2011

ClanDestiny Update: 5 Hours

July 27, 2011
40-Hour GamesClanDestiny
0 Comment

And now we’re back to this:

Now, of course, that represents lots of work under the hood, making data structures, deciding on terrain types, etc, etc, etc.

Trust me, it’ll look better soon.

I deliberately used sprites from Ultima V because a) it has all the river and road transitions I want and b) when the time comes to replace this art with real art it’ll be easy to see what needs replacing, since I’m so familiar with these sprites.

Next comes some terrain generation, which is going to be kind of specialized, since I’m not sure if I want boats in the game or not. Since this is supposed to be a much smaller-scale game, boats may not make much sense. On the other hand, they may be more fun to play.

You know what’s fun?!!!

July 25, 2011
Family
3 Comments

ROLLING BLACKOUTS!

So. I get home Thursday and discover that I can’t get the garage door open. I park in the driveway and walk inside to discover a stifling house with no electricity.

It’s now ~6 PM Thursday. My wife tells me that we don’t know when the power will come back on – and it’s been off for hours already. We were blacked out to protect the rest of the power grid during a particularly hot weekend.

So! Time to retreat to a hotel. Finding one took hours because all the nearby ones were full of people affected by the blackout as well. We finally find a vacancy around midnight – a room with two queen-sized beds.

There are five of us.

We go out to eat, and then my wife realizes she’s left something important at home so we stop by the house. It was well after sundown and the entire complex was black as night – no street lights, no lights in houses, nothing. She goes inside and cannot see a thing so I lend her my phone to use as a flashlight. She finds her precious item (her World of Warcraft authenticator, to be precise) and we return to the hotel.

(Anyone who knows I own a laptop but wonders why I didn’t post over the weekend can do this math: 1 laptop + 1 WoW-hungry wife = no laptop.)

After a horrible night’s sleep, I realize I’m not going to be able to go to work on Friday and phone in. We eat, and then we just…hang around. Waiting. Waiting for word on when we can go home.

And I start thinking about post-apocalyptic games and how completely unrealistic they are 🙂 Somehow, all of them, despite the ruin of the world, have working power and most of them have working water as well. It’s as if all the buildings fell down but the most vital services remained, when in truth, the exact opposite would be true – many fully-intact standing buildings but with no power or water making them practically uninhabitable.

ANYhoo. The power finally got turned back on around 10 PM Friday night, so we returned to our abode, exhausted, hot and full of very bad food. Fortunately, the power didn’t go off again.

So that was my weekend! How about you?

When the Internet teases, she teases HARD.

July 12, 2011
40-Hour GamesClanDestiny
1 Comment

I was looking for some basic terrain tiles I could use for the ClanDestiny prototype.

I found some.

I found this on some guy’s photobucket.

It’s got everything I need – trees, grass, mountains, tundra, desert, rivers, huts, villages, cities – and has a slightly Japanese feel to it without being too over-the-top.

For a while I couldn’t figure out where they came from, leading me to believe that I might be able to use them for ClanDestiny.

It turns out they are from Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword for the Game Boy Advance.

Sob.

I can still use them for the prototype, but at some point I’m going to have to pay for some art, and good Lord, art is expensive. This is why I couldn’t get any animated tiles for use with Inaria, and instead had to go with public domain stuff.

Oh yeah, the blog!

July 6, 2011
Cool People
2 Comments

I’m so sorry guys. First I was semi-crunching on the Inaria update and then I was getting ready for Independence Day (we had a big ol’ cook out).

The good news is that I have this whole week off (GM shuts down for a whole week for the Fourth). So more updates will be forthcoming.

Plus, I’ve been participating in the Indie Conversation. This is a YouTube channel where several full-time and part-time indies have been posting videos straight from their webcams discussing various topics. It’s been pretty great; you guys should check it out. Just remember that it’s a “conversation” and thus the videos are effectively sequential.

More updatey stuff in the near future!