Messages

1

Aquaria for iPad / Re: Maps + customization and ''screen saver mode''

« on: November 14, 2011, 06:58:28 am »

Why on earth would anyone want a screensaver mod for an iPad? Is the goal to wind down your battery life more quickly?

"Screen savers" originally came about as a way to prevent screen burn-in. Display technology has matured enough over the course of, say, 20 years to the point where you'll never see permanent burn-in, let alone temporary burn-in - especially on a device with an Auto-Lock feature.

2

General / Re: MacOSX version - when?

« on: November 10, 2008, 09:02:02 am »

tell company "Bit Blot"
     set aqauriaIsCompleted to false
     repeat until aquariaIsCompleted is true
          complete the application "Aquaria"
          set aquariaIsCompleted to true
     end repeat
     if aquariaIsCompleted is true then
          get money
          have a beer
     end if
end tell

3

Games / Re: Mac Indie Games

« on: October 03, 2008, 10:53:38 pm »

Not rez this thread, but I felt like chiming in here. It should also be noted that OpenGL is all but dead atm compared to DirectX  which is thriving. It's all really about the support structure for both. Whiel Direct x requires more from it's coder, it allows for more.

I've seen a game on both the PC and Mac maxed out, and the PC version blows the mac one out of the water. It's not becuase of hardware, but it[']s software. But windows on the mac, and you'll see the same graphics.

So while openGL has potential as it always did, it will never be able to compete with Direct X without the kind of backing Microsoft can provide.

That being said, DirectX is doing some pretty amazing things to advance the gaming graphics side of the house.

2d

It's really about how optimized the code is to leverage the graphics. OS X on x86 hasn't even been 3 years and it's uses aren't targeted at gaming. But it's also the sheer number of developers. There are more of them on the Windows side, and that's what happens. Where there are more developers, there will usually be more performance.

However, I'd disagree with your statement of OpenGL. If anything, it may be making a quiet comeback. More and more developers are opening to the iPhone and using OpenGL ES.

4

General / Wheres teh mac vershun?

« on: October 03, 2008, 07:43:13 pm »

 we mac usrs ben ril gud dis yeer!

 n i alredy upgaed to lprd

5

Games / Re: Our Favorite Downloadable Games

« on: May 06, 2008, 10:02:03 am »

Okay, time for another. This one is for practically every modern computing platform.



Battle for Wesnoth (http://www.wesnoth.org/) is an open source community game closely resembling games like Ogre Battle, Master of Monsters, or even the more popular Final Fantasy Tactics. In any case, whatever game it reminds you of, you kill your opponents through a string of scenarios, retaining your corps from each encounter (a la Myth). It's a fun game with a punishing AI that has decent graphics and is continually getting better.

Oh, and it's free.

6

Games / Less about languages, more about tools

« on: May 06, 2008, 09:47:05 am »

You should really focus more on the tools (guides, tutorials, references, real world examples, development environments, libraries, debuggers, etc.) rather than knowing the language. There's a reason why programmers have instruction books for their programming languages. They're really not just there for decoration or for sentimental value.

For kicks, this is the progression I learned languages in:


        HyperTalk (and essentially AppleScript)  •  BASIC (many varities)  •  Visual Basic  •  Java  •  C++  •  C  •  Perl  •  PHP


Yeah, I grew up on HyperCard. It was great. You could actually make some decent stack-based games. Hell, MYST was made in HyperCard!

If you can't tell, I love scripting languages. They are much win. (But, for making games, they are much fail.) Yeah, I should learn some Python. I'm so lazy. I guess that's next for me.

C and C++ are probably the best to know from a knowledge standpoint, as people have said before me, but ...


When creating games, I believe it's actually less about the languages you know and use and more about applying the tools for creating your work. What libraries do I need? What engine am I going to have? And, how do I use them? These are probably things best thought about even before choosing a language. And in some cases you may be programming in multiple languages, too.

7

Games / Re: Our Favorite Downloadable Games

« on: May 01, 2008, 06:04:23 pm »

Hmm... Doom baddies, re-cast into a different game genre...

Kind of reminds me of BOOM!



BOOM (http://www.factor-software.com/boom.php) is essentially Bomberman meets Doom. A very fun yet frustrating game that's harder than it looks, with violently innocent graphics, which is simply great.

Edit: By the way, it's Mac only.

Doom the Roguelike (http://doom.chaosforge.org) puts one of my favorite games into a genre that I really admire.  One of the simplest, most fun RL's out there.  And I may or may not be working on a graphical tileset for it in my limited free time (see my avatar)!

8

General / Re: The Widescreen Thread

« on: March 18, 2008, 08:20:16 am »

Awesome, I was wondering when this widescreen issue would be fixed, looks like it's almost (already?) there!
Speaking of the Mac version, wouldn't the Linux port also be ready? The platform is very, very similar. I doubt any changes would be required.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Oh, I wish that was the case — other than they are both UNIX and some of the code can be recycled, I'm pretty confident the platforms really are not all that similar with all the different technologies Bit-Blot has to leverage to get this out the door. My guess is, between the two, the graphics and sound are going to be very dissimilar.

9

General / Re: Aquaria font to Word

« on: March 02, 2008, 05:32:22 am »

If you really want to make a great font, my suggestion is to do a little research. I think you'll find the world of typography being extremely intricate, and to many, it's easily overwhelming.

Keep in mind you'd also have to create a lot of missing glyphs (there's only 6 different characters in "Aquaria", if you correctly consider the capital A as it's own glyph - leaving at least 46 more, plus numbers, punctuation, perhaps accent and diacritical marks...).

10

General / Anything to share on the progress of the Mac version?

« on: January 18, 2008, 06:34:47 am »

I'm going to ask what's probably on a lot of people's minds...

Can you share anything about the progress on the Mac version?


Much thanks for being awesome!