Category: Game Development Page 3 of 5

Pixi.js – HTML5 for Flash developers

On March 24, 2013

In Actionscript/AS3, Flash, Game Development, HTML/CSS, javascript, Uncategorized

pixi js Pixi.js is another javascript framework that attempts to recreate some of the features of Flash. It even replicates a lot of Flash components: MovieClip, Sprite, Stage, DisplayObject. It’s an impressive javascript library. You can download the source and some examples from github. I spent a little time hacking around on the examples and picking through the source code. Here’s a video introduction if you prefer that, or you can skip down to the text below the video…

Here’s a quick primer on Pixi.js:

It’s really comfortable for Flash/Actionscript developers. The folks who created Pixi.js are clearly very familiar with Flash and used a lot of Flash terminology in Pixi.js. It also feels like they worked hard to make it very easy to dig in and start creating cool stuff with minimal boilerplate code. I really appreciate that.

There is no built-in way to set a target frame rate in Pixi.js. Technically, there is no way to force a specific frame rate in javascript and it will only do the best it can, but Flash worked that way too and you could still give it an FPS target. The Pixi.js examples seem to rely on requestAnimationFrame() to run at 60 FPS. This is not reliable, so if you use Pixi.js, be sure to write some code to handle the rendering frame rate.

Pixi.js has a really clever renderer: It detects if your browser is WebGL enabled. If not, it falls back to an HTML5 canvas renderer. Not only is it cool that it handles this for you, but browsers with WebGL (Chrome, Safari) are hardware accelerated. This means that they can unload the rendering from the CPU to the GPU, making everything run much faster. Firefox also supposedly has WebGL capability, but from what I’ve read, the performance is questionable. The WebGL thing is going to be a big deal as it becomes more widespread. As usual, IE10 doesn’t support it, but it does have hardware accelerated canvas.

As a side note, the hardware acceleration is all based on your browser and hardware configuration. So, if you have a relatively new device and an updated browser, it just kicks in automatically. iPhones and iPads all support hardware acceleration and many Android devices do too. Obviously, how you handle older browsers is the challenge. In most cases, a less full-featured backup may need to be served up. In a few cases, the user may need to have hardware acceleration to run your game or app at a reasonable frame rate. A smart way to handle this is to check the frame rate of the game and alert a user if it drops below a minimum threshold.

So grab the Pixi.js code and start building some HTML5 goodness.

Creating a simple iOS game – Bouncing Babies

By Andy

On March 14, 2013

In Game Development, iOS Game Dev, Uncategorized

The first post in my iOS game development series…

I like to create games that use interesting gameplay mechanics – things I’ve never seen before, or an interesting twist on a classic game. The problem is that new mechanics are difficult to code. If you want to make something standard, like a Super Mario clone, it’s easy to find a game engine that will do most of the work for you. But new mechanics often require modifying a game engine, or even creating one from scratch. This can be time consuming and frustrating.

I’ve been working on a conceptual game prototype for a while now and it has me pulling my hair out at the moment. To make matters worse, this is a “stripped down” version of a larger game that I want to create. I thought this light version of my concept would be easier to code, but it has turned out to be pretty complex too.

In the meantime, I’m interested in creating a game for iOS. So, I’ve decided to create a very simple game from scratch and blog about the entire process. I’ve never created anything for iOS, so I will have a lot to learn. I also plan to post all of my progress publicly on github, so anyone who wants to follow along can pull my code and see what I’m doing. Since this is a learning process, there will likely be a lot of bad code and blind alleys. And since I have a day job and a family, progress is likely to be slow.

With these constraints in mind, I’ve decided not to design my own game entirely from scratch because I will inevitably add some seemingly simple gameplay element that will derail the entire process. Instead, I’ve decided to remake a classic DOS game from back in the day…

Bouncing Babies was a deceptively simple arcade game that I used to play on my first PC – a Tandy 1000 (yes, I’m old). Here’s a video of the game:

Like all classic action arcade games, the gameplay is simple, but it’s surprisingly addictive. It was one of my favorite games when I was a kid and there are few good remakes of it. Considering my time constraints, this is a project that I might actually be able to finish in a reasonable time period. Additionally, the game code shouldn’t be too complex, so development shouldn’t require any weird hackery (famous last words). I can still do a full redesign of the graphics and animation, but the gameplay will be the same.

So, stay tuned for more updates as I dive into this. This whole project may go down in flames, but I promise it will be an interesting ride.

Here’s a link to the github repo I will be using:
https://github.com/wastedpotential/bouncing-babies

Make Good

By Andy

On March 5, 2013

In Game Development, Uncategorized

For the past week, I’ve been mired in a complicated mess of Actionscript that I wrote myself. I’m trying to untangle it so I can move forward with a game prototype I’ve been building (on and off) for nearly a year. On top of that, I just realized that I had overlooked an important concept that threatens to derail a big chunk of the game. It’s been a bit discouraging, so I was happy to come across this video of Neil Gaiman giving the 2012 commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I thought I should share his encouragement. The speech is a bit long, but definitely worth watching.

This speech is just what I needed. I would only change the tagline from “Make Good Art” to simply “Make Good.” Whatever you do, even if you think it isn’t art, Make Good.

Version Control Throwdown – Git vs. SVN

By Andy

On February 7, 2013

In Game Development

Version control throwdown - GIT vs. SVN I see a lot of forum threads and blog posts on “which is better – Subversion or Git? The real question should be “which is better for my workflow – SVN or Git?” I’ll attempt to help you sort it all out.

I’ve been handling version control on my projects with Subversion (or SVN, for short) for the past couple of years. I switched to using Git about 6 months ago and have been using it for version control in most new projects. Git and SVN both have their strengths and weaknesses. Which one you use should be based on the type of work you’re doing.

The way I used to handle version control was simple. Any time I made any serious updates to a project, I duplicated all of the files into a new folder and started working. That way, I still had a copy of the previous, stable version if I needed it. This is a ridiculous way to handle it, but it’s simple and it works, as long as you remember to duplicate the files before you begin working.

SVN is an older model of version control that handles this for you. The files live in a repository on a remote server and you create a local copy on your computer (or even multiple computers). “Updating” pulls the latest version down from the remote server and updates the files on your local version that are out of date. “Committing” pushes any local changes back to the remote server when you are done working. You can revert back to an older version of a project (or even a single file) if you need to. It’s a great way of tracking a project without needing to retain duplicates of every file. It is designed purely for keeping track of project versions – If multiple people try to commit changes to the same files, a conflict occurs, which you must resolve, usually by comparing the 2 files and manually merging them. The goal is to keep your local and remote repos in sync at all times. I used Tortoise as my SVN interface and I’m fairly happy with it.

Git differs from SVN in a fundamental way. It’s a distributed version control system, meaning that it’s designed for multiple developers to work simultaneously on the same project. You again have a remote master repository and a local copy on your machine. The big difference is that when you “commit” a change, the changes are only made to your local repository. Then, when you have finished your work and the local version is stable, you “push” all of your local commits to the remote repository. The idea here is that you can have version control on your local machine and only merge your changes into the master when they are finished and stable.

Git also allows for “branching,” which means that there are different versions of the project stored in different branches. Master is the stable, production branch. Then you could create a branch for a new set of features that you are developing. This way, another developer can make bug fixes to the Master branch while you develop new features on the other one. Then you merge them together later. Git allows for many branches to be created, so different developers can work simultaneously without jeopardizing the stability of the Master repo. I’m not sure why, but Git is also generally faster than SVN for updates and commits. A lot of Git users do everything on the command line – I prefer a decent GUI, so I use SmartGit. Mac users tend to like SourceTree.

So, from my description, it would sound like Git is superior, but that isn’t completely true. It really depends on your project.

Git is designed for large projects with multiple developers working simultaneously. It handles this use case very well. The branches help prevent developers accidentally overwriting each other’s work, or creating instability in the master repository. The downside is that Git has a much steeper learning curve than SVN. I’ve been using it for months and I’m still getting the hang of it.

SVN, on the other hand, is really simple to work with, if you only have one or two people working on a project and the chances of creating repository conflicts are small. So, if you don’t need the “distributed” part of version control, SVN is a great choice.

Another thing to consider is the number of large binary files you will want to have version controlled. Binary files are non-text files, like videos and Flash source files (FLAs). Neither of these version control systems can keep track of changes in binary files, but SVN plays nice with large binary files – Git does not. Git purists argue that large binary files don’t belong in the repository, but I don’t necessarily agree. So, if you plan to have a lot of videos or Flash files in your repository, Git may not work for you. You can tell Git to ignore the large files, but that seems to defeat the purpose of version control.

remote svn repo on a usb flash drive Which do I prefer? Again, it depends. For my projects at work, Git has been great (unless I need to version a bunch of videos, Then, it stinks). I have a handful of personal projects that I prefer to handle with SVN. I have a USB flash drive on my keychain that contains the remote SVN repositories. So, no matter where I am or which computer I’m using, I can update from the USB drive and work, even if I have no internet access. You can do this with Git too, but since I’m the only developer on these projects, I don’t need the fancy-schmanciness of Git and SVN is less hassle.

Hopefully, this will help you decide which version control system will suit your workflow. If you want to set up a USB thumb drive repository, here are simple instructions for setting up a local SVN repository. Here are instructions for doing it with Git.