A year a go I had a run-in with a table which shattered the digitiser of my phone. Being a master of postponing and never getting stuff done, I have pulled myself together and installed a new digitiser. It took an hour because I was not able to get the old digitiser out of the front-casing. Fortunately, I was able to find someone with the same problem who had used a hair-dryer to warm up the screen and casing in order to pop it out, and it worked for me too! Now I can enjoy a crack-free screen again. 🙂
Above is a short video of a game I have been working on called ‘Cake Adventure’, the objective is to collect several items in order to bake a cake for your friend. As you can see, the game is far from being finished, I still have to put all the items in-game, write a system for dialogue, and a way to select items from the inventory and use them on your surroundings. I have created this game as a promotion for the tutorial I have written on how to make an adventure game in Flash using Flixel. By placing a link in the menu called ‘Make a game like this!’ I hope to encourage people to take a look at the tutorial and pick-up game-programming as a hobby.
I am currently working on a new Flash game, a Sokoban clone. Although this is ‘just another game’, I have taken a different approach in creating content for this game: I’ve used XML and a level-editor, doing this has increased workflow dramatically. The screenshot above was made in the editor while creating a level, which is then to be exported to a Extensible Markup Language (XML) file. The fun of XML is that I can easily expand and extract information about the levels. In XML the level looks like this:
Because my editor is very simple, I have to manually edit the id and name tag of each level. There is no way of loading a level, I can only create and export them. The editor is only meant to create the levels and not to be used by the public, so it serves it purpose. The implementation of XML was easier than I had expected and I think it would be useful to use for other games such as adventure-games, where I could for example write the dialogue in XML.
Using some acrylic paint, I was able to paint four of the arcade buttons in different colours. In the first article I described a test I did using minature-model paint, and I can say that the acrylic paint covers a lot better. Depending on the colour, I did 2-3 layers of paint.
At the moment, my plan is to make a box with the layout as following:
I’ll have to think some more about which material(s) to use for the housing, stay tuned!
In my previous article on making an arcade-controller, I was thinking about using an Arduino development-board to register the button presses. Turns out one can easily modify an USB game-controller for the task. By looking at the picture you could argue that my soldering skills still aren’t the best, but I think I did a pretty good job. 😛
I soldered plugs on the little board, so I can easily remove the buttons from it, and to be able to recycle both for other projects. On all the female ends of the plugs I have put some tape with the number of the key they represent in Windows. I will daisy-chain the wires in my next soldering project, because now all the wires are a bit tangled.
Next up is making a box for the board and the buttons.
The video embedded above shows an electronic dice that I put together, I bought the kit from www.digibytez.nl. Last time I picked up an soldering-iron was in high-school, so it took some time to get used to it again. Practising soldering on this fun gadget is part of a greater plan, that I revealed earlier to you: making an arcade controller.
In my previous blog-post I have discussed my idea’s on selling games on floppy disk, now I will show how I fitted a 3.5′ floppy disk in a CD case. Please note that I have used a standard (10.4mm) case, otherwise the beads won’t fit.
What I have done, as you can see in the picture above, is to remove the CD tray and glue four beads in a square formation inside of the case. Using a floppy disk as an example, I was able to make it fit tightly but with a bit of space left so the floppy could be easily removed and placed back.
The advantage of this method is that you can save a lot of money by re-using old CD cases you have laying around the house, instead of buying speciality floppy disk cases. The downside is that it takes some time to glue the beads in place and for the glue to dry. Something that I still have to test is if this design would withstand the violence of being mailed to someone. The glue I have used was standard miniature-model glue, so I think it will be sturdy enough to withstand some shaking.
A while ago the idea popped in my in head to sell floppy disks with my games on them. Since all my games are available for free on the Internet, and floppy disks are a bit outdated, I doubt there is a market for these. Either way, I made a prototype featuring one of my upcoming games: “Kees’ Adventure 4”. The sticker I used was larger than the floppy itself, so I had to cut it a bit as you can probably see. The printer I used was a cheap one, so the colours have faded a bit, which is a shame.
If I want to go through with this plan, the design will have to be adjusted so it won’t overlap with the sides of the casing. On top of that, I’ll also have to think of something why people would want to buy this game if it would be online for free, for example by including the source-code or some other extras such as a map.
Maybe there are people out there who would buy new games on floppy disks just for nostalgia sake, like there are people who buy their music on LP records instead of CDs.
