Wednesday 11 June 2008

Don't Vote For K2 if you don't like it!

There's zero chance in a hell snowball wrapped in petrol flames that I'm winning this TIGSource thing, so I'm not going to beg for votes. However, I do insist that you give a few entries a try, and vote on it.

As far as K2's progression goes... well... I've been having to build my flexi-time back up at work recently, so I've been a bit too tired in the evenings to continue. This is because I had to go to the dentist and have a filling on my birthday, last week. Plus, I deserve a bit of down time after pulling a few late-nighters, right?

Last weekend, I got a stub program running OpenGL using the Tao framework, but I still have a lot of work ahead, porting over what I already have (need replacements for XNA's pretty fantastic Vector Math libraries). It might even be worth starting it from scratch, and just copying the more choice pieces of code over from the prototype... after all, prototypes are there to be learned from, and thrown away.

I've set up a TIGSource thread for it. First post is just a look back in time at the original K, though I'll probably be returning to a similar aesthetic (the prototype is just a multicolour mess at the moment). Yuss. I think that this K could be special.

I've also been trying to help JP with his home brew project, Purity. We had about an hour long knock-around online, but our distance, and my wifi connection hardly gave me the best latency to appreciate it properly. It's going in the right direction, and a lot of the core game play is already in. The biggest issue to fix for this kind of "naked" abstract game is clear feedback. When there's no naturally limiting real-world metaphor to work within, you're completely free to express mechanics in any way you like, and thus, your approach to feedback simply becomes "What's the most informative and intuitive way to get this idea across?", rather than "What's believable?". Gots to watch out for information overload, though.

Oh, and my new company interviewed me for their website. I always get self-conscious about photos, and this one is not exactly catching my MySpace angles.

I saw American McGee putting forward his wishes for a mind interface. I think I have a rant brewing about that. Nothing nasty, just some issues I think we'll probably see with the early attempts.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How are you doing your main loop? We just started with C# and so far it's awesome, except for how it locks you in a stupid event-based paradigm.

Everyone seems to be doing a really hacky "use win32 dlls" thing, but that's not really a proper solution if you want to run on mac..

Bez said...

Chuck me an e-mail - I'll send you the source.

I'm sure you've got a far better way and could school me :).

For the record, I bloody loved working in XNA. It's the issue of end users completely giving up on the redist nonsense which I can't take.