Every time there’s a new Humble Indie bundle, I buy it, I buy it regardless of what games are in it, because I see it as a good thing and want to support it, I also buy a fair few other random indie games that I get linked to, because again, I want to support some indies and most of the games are good, if not exactly to my taste.

Sometimes a game that I pick up like this takes me by surprise, and I end up playing it from start to finish (which doesn’t happen all that much these days). The most recent of these is a game called Hammerfight.

Hammerfight is a game where you pilot a craft with a variety of weapons attached that spin in response to your movement, you move with the mouse (really want to up your sensitivity) and to attack you start to spin the mouse quickly, causing your weapons to spin and then move at the opponent dodging their weapons and shields to land a blow that will send them (hopefully) crashing to their death. Hitting people in this game is awesome, as it is accompanied by a large number of particle effects, bullet-time (for particularly good hits, perfect to line up the next strike) and coins spilling out from fallen enemies. You can also destroy and set-fire to large parts of the scenery, which is pleasant.

There are several game modes (you unlock them as you play), a story-mode that is fairly substantial, ‘GRIM’ where you and two AIs hunt the beasts of the depths, ‘Arena’ where you battle against waves of enemies to gain ranks and coins and ‘Hammerball’, where you have to hammer the ball into the opponents goal… But sometimes the ball is an explosive barrel, or sometimes the ball fights back.

There is also loads and loads of weapons in different types (hammers, swords, flails, guns, explosives), to suit any type of player (and you can duel-wield them for even more combinations).

So I’ve seen a few reviews of this game around the place (after I’d got hooked on it) and the same bad-points crop up all the time:

• It is hard
• There isn’t much it the way of help
• It is kinda buggy
• The control system will likely give you RSI

So prior to my current job at Eurocom, I was gainfully employed as a Research Assistant at The University of Derby working on what was then a secretish project. However, I arrived at my parents this weekend to be told that the project I had worked on had been on the news, so I decided to look it up.

The news report can be found here, complete with some footage of the games in action as it were. Also featured are David Day, who is responsible for the project (he set-up the project) and Andreas, my line-manager throughout the project (made him technically my boss, but since he doesn’t know much about making games most of the work was done by me).

So, the project is out in the open now, I really hope it does well and shall be following it’s progress.

Ok, as promised, it’s time to work out just what’s happening with the various side-projects I have going on. I have a bowl of tea and good music playing, let’s do this.

Tyr

Tyr is Ragnarok mark 2, the next step in my eternal quest to build a 2D OpenGL game engine. It’s already better than Ragnarok in some places, but not as complete. I’m not sure if it ever will be complete, history says it is unlikely to be, but the engine does get more and more complete with each iteration, so there is hope that one day I’ll complete this rather epic task.

OpenML

OpenML, the planned 3D model loader/converter written in pure ANSI C with no dependencies is being put to rest, whilst it was fun hacking around in C for a while, it wasn’t really different enough from my C++ projects to be teaching me things, and as such I lost interest. If I ever go into making a 3D engine/game it may be revived, but for now no further development is planned.

LibCT

LibCT has been on unofficial hiatus for a long time now, with very little if any development being done on it. It’s a lot of code, and difficult to get back in to, add to this the feeling that it is ‘finished’ (There’s always more features that could be added) and it becomes obvious that I have to make it official, development on LibCT will be postponed indefinitely. I do want to finish off the current task-list to take it to version 2.1 at some point, but at the moment that desire isn’t too great. We’ll see how I feel in a few months.

Cerberus

Cerberus, I’m happy to report, is complete. It does all the things I wanted it to do and more, I may add a few things here-and-there as I need them, but for now all active development will cease and no further development is planned. I am really happy with how it turned out and it was a great learning experience that has, among other things, given me a working knowledge of Python that I am sure to put to use in the future.

Nevermore

This top-down Advance Wars style RTS is most likely finished. It’s a lot of work for one person, and the co-developer on the project has dropped out due to getting a proper job (the cheek). However this project was born out from a desire to make that sort of game that I have had for a long long time, and still have somewhere, so I expect I’ll have another project along those lines at some point in the future.

You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue

2D light-based platforming game where you have to stay in the light to avoid that most unfortunate of fates. I like the idea of this game, I like the title, and I think it shows promise, but it needs more time, more time to come up with more light-based puzzles to actually make a game out of this, rather than a (rather shiny) 2D light simulator. This project will be completely on the back-burner but with a mind to occasionally put some time in to thinking of ideas. Hopefully enough ideas will form and I’ll be able to continue this project.

Subterfuge

2D submarine game with ‘Hunt For Red October’ style tactical game-play based around using sonar to sniff-out your opponent whist attempting to avoid them ‘seeing’ you. Pretty sure the main drive for even starting this project was to see how difficult it would be to draw sonar that bounces off arbitrary lines. The answer: Quite hard. I’ve mostly solved this problem, just a few edge-cases left, however I’ve kinda ran out of steam on this one and don’t think I’ll complete it. Status: Dead

Physics Engine

This project is so new it doesn’t even have a name. It also hasn’t started yet and I’m not sure when it will. Basically I recently bought a book (Game Physics Engine Development) which promises to take the reader step-by-step through building a decent physics engine. It is my hope that this will once-and-for-all cure my physics-ineptitude. Stay posted for updates.

Well that’s it, 8 projects listed, only 2 left in active development (and one of those not started yet). Sometimes, you just have to be brutal, especially in light of how much less free-time I have these days.

Wow it has actually been a months since I last posted. Oh well, such is life, now that I have a proper job that doesn’t allow me to finish at 15:30 and all. So what has been happening? Well obviously work has been keeping me busy, also I went on holiday for the first time in about 3 years on the first week of August, it was really rather nice to be by the sea again.

But I did manage to do some coding, I started a new 2D game engine that may or may-not ever get beyond the point it is currently at, we shall see. I started off hosting a book review site for technical books, the idea is that me and some of my mates that know their stuff will be writing short reviews on tekkie books rating both their usefulness and attempting to state what level of skill they’re aimed at, before you spend that £40 on a book that is way too basic, or way too advanced. Theres not too much there at the moment but I’m hoping activity will pick up once I’ve finished writing ones for all the books I own (about 10).

Also, on holiday, I ordered some more books from Amazon: ‘Artificial Intelligence For Games’ and ‘Game Physics Engine Development’. The first because I like AI and I’d like to have a few more experiments to try and the latter because I truly, absolutely suck at writing physics code. I always make the mistake of trying to over-simplify the problem and end up with messy code is more edge-case than anything else and will freak out if more than 3 things collide at once. This was a situation I was (obviously) not happy with and this book promises to take one through the process of creating a rather decent physics engine, so we shall see how that goes. I’m hoping for some good things and will obviously post progress.

I’m also working on a list of back-projects and shall do a bit of a cull of the ones that are never likely to see the light of day and officially end them, and hopefully task-out some of the remaining projects so I can actually get a move on and maybe finish some of them some-day.

Anyway, that will be happening tomorrow/Saturday so there will be an update then.