Category: Games

Posts about creating and playing video games, one of my favourite things.

Greetings!

I’ve been implementing a second thread of execution in my current game project for the last few days. I had tried to do this in my previous set of code, but either had constant crashes or half the game not working because that second thread wasn’t ticking over. At that time there was almost no instruction online as to how threads worked in NME, but that has changed recently thanks to the (always excellent) Joshua Granick, whose blog post, “Using Threads with NME“, lists out some basic scenarios for communication between threads. There’s also some useful nuggets of information in this forum thread.

Continue reading “Thread synchronization in Haxe NME”

3D Modelling with Maya

(Note: This article is to be fleshed out once I can install Maya again to access my saved models and screenshot them!)

For a little while just before work began on that XNA RTS game that was quickly cancelled, I was trying to learn 3D modelling in Maya. Me and my accomplice were both programmers, we recognized we were going to have problems with art right away, so I volunteered to try and learn some modelling. I’m not saying I became a virtuoso, but over the few months I was working through the included “Getting Started” tutorial I think I learnt a lot of the basics, and I did produce a number of simple in-game objects that were sadly never used. The largest object I attempted was the main character for a future game which was to be a platformer/puzzle game where you controlled a mouse through a house full of wacky obstacles to escape to freedom. Obviously the game never happened, but I do have a short video of the rigged mouse model with a simple animation.

 

 

Pong project

Pong was a short project attempting to clean up my code base for Pinball, as well as rectify several nasty and hard-to-catch bugs who were only really present because Pinball was based directly on the first Haxe code I’d written which as you can guess, wasn’t totally solid. Eventually the need to rewrite a lot of my core code is what made me cease development on Pinball, although Pong did help resolve several issues. It was also built while Atari was running it’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge, so I wanted to experiment with some alternate game modes, hence the strange selection of gametypes on offer (multiball is still my favourite).

 


Continue reading “Pong project”

Pinball

Pinball was my first real project with NME, and influenced everything I’m doing with it now. It was very much an experimental project to gain understanding of how it all worked, and in retrospect, I wrote a lot of very heavy, slow code that was unnecessary.

 

lighting_05-02-12

Continue reading “Pinball”