new .plan post: doing a computing science degree the hard way, or how Tim Cain saved the day
want to learn how a programmer's lack of experience with a specific kind of computing science problem leads to a year-long rut in building software? i wrote about how Exigy got the ability to save and load, because I refused to take a CS course in Data Structures.
whenever I think about perfect interfaces for kids, two games immediately come to mind: Myst, and Amanda Goodenoughβs Inigo Gets Out - both were hypercard stacks
maybe itβs time i refocused my efforts on making Exigy (https://exigy.org) kid-friendly enough that, with a little parental handholding, a kiddo could make their own Goodenough-like adventure.
but what would that UI look like? π€
#indiedev #indiegamedev #exigy #hypercard #macintosh #ui #ux
so one of my big goals for Exigy - my graphical IDE and software development toolkit for lua/love2d - was integrating networking
i've never written a line of networking code in my life until two weeks ago. learning network code necessitated writing Events-driven code, which was mostly new to me too.
i needed some kind of 2d game to test out the network code, so i spent a couple of days hacking together a mini Lunatic Fringe game, if you remember this old classic After Dark module.
for the first time since i was in high school 30 years ago, i had to re-learn trigonometric theory. just making that little ship turn and thrust in the right direction took me WAY longer than i'm comfortable admitting to π¬
these two lines should probably be tattooed to my forehead:
xPositionIncrement = -cos(shipAngle)
yPositionIncrement = sin(-shipAngle)
so as of today, Exigy now has server-client networking over UDP. π€ i'll be able to get a dollar store quality Lunatic Fringe server up and running in the next few days to test out the networking code
this short note shoehorned into a tiny space in mr mikeβs Gaming Coding Complete programming book is the most important thing no one else told me about building games that are capable of saving to disk/state/network (aka serializing)
iβve spent months figuring out ways of trying to work around missing address bugs in Exigy, and 100% of them were because i had made a fundamental architectural error in designing game objects from the beginning.
i was using their (Lua table) addresses to keep track of object instances. this works great when you have a program that runs once and terminates.
but when you want to reload a saved game, you canβt count on those addresses remaining the same.
i had written all kinds of hacky remapping voodoo to deal with resetting those addresses after loading a save. but the real solution was to keep track of objects myself using a manager. indexing objects by unique number from the beginning would have saved me months of sweat and tears.
good learning experience for a novice game engine coder like me!
adventure game studio users: what do you think of AGSβs animation editor?
iβm building a drag and drop animation editor for Exigy, and iβd like some input on what AGS gets right/wrong.
what would make your workflow less tedious/annoying?
local artist kelsie gosse sells her character portraits for $10 on fb marketplace.
i wish i had a good name for this particular style of furry art. it's something that was popular in the late 90s and early 00s when Furcadia was at its peak.
what makes this so charming to me is how unpretentious it is.
the kind of games you badly wanted to make when you were in junior high, noodling around with line art and coloured pencil at lunch time. you didn't have friends to play d&d with locally, so you found places like Furcadia online instead.
it's *exactly* the kind of novice that i'm trying to aim for with Exigy: someone who loves drawing and wants very badly to make role playing or adventure games, but doesn't want to deal with unity or godot.
today i'm building a NeXT-inspired interface skin for my little game/shareware construction kit called Exigy
https://exigy.org
nextstep in monochrome has exactly the right number of colours π
000000 (0, 0, 0) black
555555 (85, 85, 85) dark grey
AAAAAA (170, 170, 170) light grey
FFFFFF (255, 255, 255) white
@asie Iβve been working on Exigy for the past year if the concept provides any inspiration. https://exigy.org
my goal was to build a game toolkit/IDE that is capable of modifying the game at runtime. no compilation. I chose Lua for that reason.
it is now at the stage where it is a little like ZZT meets Ultima: you can script objects with behaviours, run around the world, and draw tile maps, all in real time in the editor.
i considered a codeless approach but in the end i really wanted to provide flexibility to game creators. right now iβm working on a drag and drop action/event system so creators can add basic behaviours without having to write lua.
my touchstones have been MS VB, Hypercard and Delphi which were all statically typed and class oriented.
but lately Iβve been reading a lot of Smalltalk-80 and (Apple) NewtonTalk, and Iβm rewriting my object system to be more prototype and mixin-oriented. no more classes.
there is so much open territory to explore here, depending on your goals. i didnβt want to make something like pico8 which had its own stylistic decisions. i wanted something friendlier, more organized around experimentation and goofing around.
it might be helpful to imagine the kind of fantasy console youβd like to build towards
jobs demoing a codeless UI using NeXT/OpenStep's Interface Builder at macworld expo in 1997
making games in Adventure Game Studio taught me how fast games can be built when designers spend their time working on scenes and gameplay instead of coding scrollbar and button behaviour
i admire and get inspiration from hypercard for the same reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY
i'm trying to implement something similar for my little game construction kit, called Exigy. if you've got UI suggestions on how to do this well, i'm all ears!
https://exigy.org
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