Hydra Code

Catch up

Long time no see. Had some tries in game dev since then. With two friends we participated in Ludum Dare October Challange but failed unfortunately.

We had an ambitious goal, altough we aimed the minimum, it was ambitious compared to our experience. Unity and Blender were our main tools but we had minimal experience in bith. In the first two weeks we still experimented with the techniques what were necessary for the game. Then exams came and the whole thing fell apart. 

Altough we failed, I enjoyed working together with my friends. Every week we spoke about what did we do and what is left. Trello was used to track the tasks and the project itself and it worked pretty well. 

If I can once again pull together the team I would do a lot of things different. We would use tools that we really know and used with success before. And since we are not that experienced developers I would force a more easier goal.

These are well known pitfalls in game jams but we managed to fall into them.

October also has passed long ago and since then I started to develop a pacman and dungeon crawler hybrid using the oryx tileset. The idea is not too original but my main goal is to train myself. As you might suggest my next posts will be about that little game and the problems that arise during its development. 

I just started to play around with Ogre3D and I really enjoy it. Yes, in my previous post I was concerned that Unity will make me rich or something like that, but now I’m concentrating on learning fundamental techniques, especially using C++. And coding a game in C++ is much more fun, it gives you a feeling that you are a hardocre programmer. :D 

Of course problems started to arise pretty fast, but as always stackoverflow saved the day. :) Here is a list of my (and maybe some other people’s) questions. (I’ll put some other links here to just tom make the list longer :D)

• In the Ogre Wiki Tutorials in the Setting up the Application article helps to set up the project with an OGRE_HOME environmental variable, but my VS doesn’t seem to unwrap it:
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11771625/why-does-not-visual-studio-2010-unpack-system-variable
• While trying to use precompiled headers (which makes compile much faster, and made me very happy,  http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Precompiled+headers) I’ve ran out of heap (?) memory so this helped:  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4595404/c-getting-the-c3859-error-code-while-compiling-in-a-mix-of-c-cli-and-c
• When I was read the book Ogre3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide and then tried to compile the first code, it blown away. It was because Ogre is not a console application so I had to change the signature of the main function to this:
  INT WINAPI WinMain( HINSTANCE hInst, HINSTANCE, LPSTR strCmdLine, INT ) 

Brain

I get the best game ideas while I should study for an exam. Result: Cannot concentrate to studying, so it takes more time, what leads to:lack of time to think about the idea. Just great.

Game prices

Sophie Houlden was experimenting with prices during a week with her game Swift*Stich. For a week she changed the price of her game every day nearly randomly. This kind of ‘sale strategy’ war not really seen before. Here is the diagram that summarizes her results:

This shows that not necessarily high prices provide the biggest income.