Austech's Blog

Nature 2 has been going pretty well since I last posted about...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:38:49 -0500

Buying a desk in the shop

Placing a desk in my (small) house

Let's put a TV on that desk

TV's aren't fun turned off

Let's place it down here for midgets

Ah, wonderful afternoon in Tech Ville

Nature 2 has been going pretty well since I last posted about it, with furniture working, player houses, flowers, and a new looking HUD.

One of the main things in Animal Crossing is being able to decorate your house with tons of cool things, and now in Nature 2 you can do just that! As of now you can buy furniture in the main shop, and just like Animal Crossing the furniture and items in the store will be randomly selected each day.

In addition to being able to buy this furniture, it’s also functional too! Furniture can be placed in the player’s house, and if it’s dropped outside, it will just be a pick up item (similar to Animal Crossing’s leaf for items). There’s also special properties to furniture allowing stacking items on other items, such as placing a TV on a desk.

Animal Crossing also had various flowers and weeds. At the moment, I added 2 basic flowers, a red and yellow flower. The flowers can be picked up, re-planted, and sold. The flowers add a nice touch to the world, making it more than just trees, buildings and players.

Finally, I decided to work on the HUD, and I believe that it’s a great addition. The HUD displays the player’s character’s name, the player’s town name, the player’s cash, and the date.

That’s all the updates I’ve been working on. But before I end this post, I’m considering re-naming the title from “Nature 2” to “Nature: ” and then some title at the end. Similar to “Animal Crossing : Wild World”. It’s not “Animal Crossing 2”. This isn’t to copy Animal Crossing though, my main reason is that the first Nature wasn’t released to public do to strange bugs and errors that I couldn’t fix at the time, so there really wasn’t an open, public “Nature”. Now, I don’t want to call this game “Nature” because it’s not the first. So, I think “Nature: Some title” would be better.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more info regarding Nature 2, or “Nature: Some Title”.

So I’ve been working for quite a bit this Monday since I...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:33:00 -0500

Look at all these trees!

Cutting down one won't hurt

Three more...won't be noticeable right?

Oh my, what have I done!

I guess I'll just plant them back.

There we go

PLANT, ALL THE TREES!

So I’ve been working for quite a bit this Monday since I had no school.

I’ve worked on a few sprites (every thing was actually drawn by me except for the play sprite, credit for those go to Sean Howard).

I worked on the rendering order, so now you can actually be behind trees (I was so excited to see that when I compiled, no lie), as well as other things depending on where they’re placed.

I also added a new tool, the axe (so dangerous), to chop trees! As you can see in the pictures I posted along with this.

I worked on planting trees as well. Now you can bury fruit, which will eventually become a tree. You can also see in the pictures, trees that are currently growing are shown as little trees (so cute, right?)! Eventually as time passes, they’ll grow into a big adult tree, in which you can shake fruit down from them, or chop down, WITH THE BRAND NEW AXE! *cough*

I also added some puffs of smoke, as an effect for chopping down trees, as well as a sound effect. I also touched up on the tree falling effect. I must say, this made chopping down trees so much more fun. Even though the puffs, sounds, and tree falling has no functional value at all (it’s just some sprites and sounds being played), it made it so much more rewarding. As you can see in the pictures, I had so much fun that I cut down a big chunk of the forest! But don’t worry, I planted it back……..so i can cut it aga-

ANYWAY! I also recorded my working today, I know I haven’t posted another YouTube time lapse, but I’ve been lazy. But right now I have quite a bit of footage. Right now I have a total of 10 minutes of video length, it’s quite a bit, though I had to combine quite a few of time lapses I’ve recorded to get to that length. I’d rather have 1 good video, compared to 4 small, little videos. (I also want you to hear the whole song that’s played in the background of my videos!).

Well, that’s about all I have to say, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more posts!.

Day 3 and Day 4 of my RPG development

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:01:07 -0500

Day 3 and Day 4 of my RPG development

Day 2 of my RPG development

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:01:56 -0500

Day 2 of my RPG development

Day 1 of my winter game development goal. Check out more in the...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 04:34:04 -0500

Day 1 of my winter game development goal. Check out more in the YouTube description!

New video on youtube, it’s been a while. :P

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:01:52 -0500

New video on youtube, it’s been a while. :P

Master Server in the works, new main menu layout, and more

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:27:00 -0400

Game play is important, but next in line is how you actually get to that game player, the menus!

So right now I’m working on a new menu design, one that can nicely hold player data, a server list, etc.

In case you didn’t know, a server list does require a master server, which is pretty much done. The master server for this game is very lightweight. When you create a game server, it informs the master server. All clients that actually want to play, it tells the master server to give them a list of open server, and the master server sends the list.

As for the last announcements, I am hoping for an open alpha test. No guaranties, but I do, it will be posted here first, and then off to sites such as reddit/r/gamedev.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading! :)

Player Classes are fully implemented

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 09:23:00 -0400

Classes are now fully implemented. What that exactly means in Layman’s terms, is that the clients (the players), can tell the server “Hey, I want my class to be this”, and the server checks if it can (based on last switch), and if it does, it informs everyone else.

This is very important, and it now makes things a lot easier. Now all I have to do is make more player class types and it’ll be able to work on the server and client! :D

Team assembled, Tiled Level Editor implemented, and more

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:40:37 -0400

So a quite a bit has been going on.

I posted a request for graphical and audio help on reddit, and got a lot of replies. Though I am very grateful for the amount of responses, I can’t accept everyone.

Now the team consists of 2 artists, 2 music composers, and myself (programmer)!

As for the game aspect, implemented Tiled, a great level editor for tile based games. With the ability of hand made maps, this allows for more creative, strategic, and balanced maps.

And yes, a server can host any map, and the client downloads it and can play on any map, which most likely means custom, user-made maps.

As I said previously about there were some things to be done,...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:02:18 -0400

As I said previously about there were some things to be done, this is one of them.

My friends got tired of me re-sending them my game every time I needed to test something, and recommended that I would make an auto updater before sending the game again for another test!

So that’s what I did. There’s not really anything unique, pretty much every updater is the same! :P

But here’s how it pretty much works; When you start the actual game (not the updater), before the window even opens it’ll do a quick check to a master server holding the latest version number. The game itself will check it’s version number to the latest, and if it’s not the same it’ll close itself and run the auto updater.

The auto updater then downloads and extracts the latest version of the game, replacing old files. Afterwards you can re-start the game and play the latest version.

If the master server happens to be down, the game will timeout after a few seconds, and alert the user that it’s possibly out of date and can’t check for updates.

If the updater is ran and the server is down, it will alert the user that it can’t connect to the server.

That’s pretty much it, thanks for reading! :D

I’ve been working on this for about a month on and off,...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:28:00 -0400

Title screen

In game

I’ve been working on this for about a month on and off, and this is my second post on tumblr, and I’ve never announced anything about this yet!

So here’s a little bit of a catch up, and let me explain what you’re actually looking at!

Team play shooter (Work in progress name ;P ) is a summer project I’m currently working on. The goal of the game is to be a public, online multiplayer, top down shootem’up game, where you level up skill attributes by killing your opposing team, and eventually win by destroying your enemy team’s base at their spawn.

What’s currently done is a nearly full functional client/server connection. Clients can connect to servers, level up, kill other player enemies. Nearly everything in my current goal!

So the game is currently playable, and is very smooth when it comes to other players and lag! But I can’t release it, for there is still things to get done. Like settings, better art and stuff like that. ;)

But, I’m only a programmer working alone on this project, and being a programmer, the art for this is pretty bad. I just threw a color scheme down, and did some free hand stuff in paint.net. :P

Just started a blog on tumblr, and started blogging in general

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:07:00 -0400

Hey this is Austech. I do software development, mainly developing games but am not limited to that of course.

I’m pretty new to blogging, so it may take me a while to get used to this, but I’m pretty much going to try to post about what I’m working on, what I’ve got done, and pretty much anything regarding to game development and software development.

Also, big thanks to simon from Pixel Prospector for helping and encouraging me to get a tumblr account! :D

Anyway, that’s pretty much it, thanks for reading, and I hope I can get the hang of this and keep updating!