Posted by James on March 16, 2010 under Tasty Planet | 
Over the next few weeks I’m going to do some posts about the tools that we’re using to make Tasty Planet. I’m not talking about the commercial packages that we use like Photoshop and Visual Studio; I’m talking about the editors that I have created specifically to help build Tasty Planet 2.
In Tasty Planet 2, as in most other games, we need to know when objects are touching other each other. When the grey goo is rolling towards a cat, how do we know that the goo ball is actually touching the cat (so that we can consume to defenseless little creature)? In Tasty Planet 2 I’m using the Box2D physics system to answer this question, but we still need to tell Box2D what size and shape an object is. Enter the collision editor:
It’s a simple editor that lets us choose the object to edit from a list on the left (the taxi is chosen in this case), and then we can add circles and polygons using the buttons on the right. The green lines overlaid on the taxi show the collision area – if another objects green outline touches this object’s, then we know that they are colliding. If the object is complicated, we can use more than one shape. In the case of the taxi we are using an 8 sided polygon.
This isn’t all that different from Tasty Planet 1. One improvement is the use of convex polygons (in Tasty Planet 1 we were simply using rectangles). But the main improvement comes from the fact that we are using Box2D to detect and resolve collisions, so objects will behave in a more natural way when they collide with each other.
Posted by James on February 11, 2010 under Tasty Planet |
We’re hard at work on Tasty Planet 2. This is roughly what we’re aiming at for the visuals (click to see full size):
This isn’t in-game. It’s just a rough mockup that Kris did in Photoshop but it should give you a good idea of what the game will look like. (Ignore the seams in the grass.)
You can see that we’re changing the design of the grey goo a bit. We haven’t animated it yet, but the idea is that the center mass with the eyes on it will lead the rest of it, so it will look like it has a trail of translucent goo behind it.
Posted by James on January 16, 2010 under Tasty Planet |
I'm gonna eat you!
I’ve been working for a couple weeks on a sequel to Tasty Planet. We haven’t finalized the story or setting for the new game, but we’ve picked a general direction and things are moving along. Here are some features that we have in mind:
- Larger scale in levels. We want the ability to go from really small to really large in a single level instead of spread across multiple levels.
- Many more levels. I’ve been working on tools to speed up our ability to generate content.
- New physics system. This will make object interactions feel better.
- 2-Player Cooperative play. Should be super fun for parents who like to play the game with their kids.
- New visuals. Kris has started experimenting with different visual styles.
I’ll be posting more as development continues.
Posted by James on January 4, 2010 under Three Musketeers |
This is an animated logo that Kris did for The Three Musketeers: The Game. We didn’t end up using it because it uses Flash and I was worried that in-game Flash support was a bit flaky. I really didn’t want to risk having the game crash for some people because of our company logo.
Dingo with Hat Logo (It was supposed to be used at 800×600 size)
Posted by James on December 23, 2009 under General |
Have you been naughty? Santagnan challenges you to a duel!
Here are some last minute gift ideas:
The Three Musketeers: The Game
Tasty Planet
Laser Dolphin
Jack of All Trades
Not that I’m biased or anything.
They are all digital downloads, so you’ll get them instantly.
Posted by James on December 13, 2009 under Three Musketeers |
In doing research for The Three Musketeers: The Game, we watched many of the classic Three Musketeers movies. We didn’t watch them all (searching IMDb for “Three Musketeers” turns up 54 results) but we watched a lot of them. Here are my favorites:
The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) – Richard Lester
This is really one movie broken up into two (because they didn’t make four hour long movies back then). These are my personal favorite Musketeer movies. They stay reasonably close to the book and they get the mix of action, drama and comedy just right. Some people think that these movies are too slapstick, but I think that it fits the tone of the book perfectly (The book is funny! Read it again if you don’t think so).
There was actually a sequel to these movies based on Twenty Years After called The Return of The Musketeers (1989)… It didn’t live up to the first two. It was neat in that it’s the only movie based (loosely) on Twenty Years After, and it was actually filmed almost twenty years after the original so the actors had aged appropriately.
The Three Musketeers (1948) with Gene Kelly
This one also follows the book fairly closely. Using his dancing background, Gene Kelly did the best sword fighting in any Musketeer movie… too bad he was almost twenty years older than d’Artagnan is supposed to be. I usually have a hard time watching movies that are this old due to the slow pacing. I didn’t have that problem with this movie at all – maybe in trying to compress the entire book into such a short time they had to speed up the pacing, inadvertently making the it closer to modern movies.
Posted by James on December 2, 2009 under General |
All 4 cores are working
I’ve been playing around with my new computer. I wanted to see how much faster it is than my old computer so I’ve been doing some tests on common tasks that I do: compiling game, running scripts, booting game, reloading game scripts, etc. Everything is at least twice as fast, with some things much faster.
The most impressive result so far is compiling The Three Musketeers: The Game. On the old computer it took over 4 minutes. On the new computer it takes 2 minutes with normal settings. However, there is an option in Visual Studio to compile using multiple processes. Using the /MP8 directive causes the compiling to split up into 8 processes. This fully utilizes the 4 cores of my i7 processor (we use 8 processes instead of 4 to take advantage of hyperthreading). The build time using this mode is 30 seconds. Very impressive.
Posted by James on November 25, 2009 under General |
My New Computer is Nesting (in wires)
You need the right tools for job… And my tools were getting pretty rusty. My old computer was a mid range computer from 3 1/2 years ago. It would be fine for someone who just uses the computer for the web and email, but I work on this thing all day long. I probably should have gotten a computer last year sometime, as my old one was giving me problems and slowing me down towards the end of development on our last game.
Here are the specs on the new computer…
- Compucase 6C28B Case (cheap case)
- Gigabyte P55M-UD2 Motherboard
- Intel Core i7 860 Quad Core Processor
- 8GB G.SKILL Ram
- Asus Radeon HD 4650 1GB (Could have gone faster, but I don’t do much high end gaming on PC)
- Crucial CT128M225 128GM Sold State Drive (Super fast storage drive for Windows and programs)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB hard drive (Main storage)
- Windows 7 Professional Edition 64BIT (switching from XP… we’ll see how this goes)
- LG Lightscribe DVD burner (I use the lightscribe for making evaluation copies of my game)
I cut corners where I thought they wouldn’t make a difference, and went for some beefy parts where I thought that it mattered. The most impressive parts are the processor and the solid state drive. Both are super fast.
I kept my dual 19″ monitors (4:3, not widescreeen) from my old computer. These are nice for now… but I could always use more desktop space 
.
I’m a bit worried about switching to Windows 7 from XP. So far there haven’t been too many issues. The worst thing so far is that there are no drivers for my scanner.
Posted by James on November 18, 2009 under General |
Kris in front of Ski Hill
After working for so long on Musketeers we needed a break. So we took a quick vacation up to Whistler last week (we live in Vancouver so it’s only two hours away). There isn’t much activity up there at this time of the year, but we had a great time
Now we’re back at work again!
Posted by James on November 12, 2009 under General |
This blog is new, so I thought that I should write a little about Dingo Games.
My name is James Sayer and I started Dingo Games around 2003 while I was still in university studying Computer Science. The first game I made was a space trading game called Jack of All Trades. Later I made the sidescrolling underwater game Laser Dolphin.
I met my future wife Kristin doing varsity fencing. We made the “eat-em-up” game Tasty Planet together (Kris is an artist and was studying graphic design). We got married, moved from Toronto to Vancouver, and made The Three Musketeers: The Game.
That’s a quick summary of Dingo Games so far.
