As the title of this week’s post suggests, the changes this week are less for ts-tennis and more for ts-game-engine and giving it an ability to use sprites and sprite sheets. This was technically already semi-possible because the rendering code can display images just fine, but I wanted to be able to do some animating, and the idea of having a bunch of images and flipping between them manually made me break out in a cold sweat based purely on how crufty that seems.

This snowballed a tad bit, as touching engine code tends to do (I seem to be a natural born engineer), but various features tend to cross each others path with sprite sheets at the nexus. Well, in my brain they do. Your mileage may vary. Thus, besides sprite sheets, animations, origins and rotations are also in. All because what I really wanted to do was implement collision detection. What?

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This week in game development news, I finished porting the tennis game from the Chris DeLeon course on game programming from its original Javascript to TypeScript (see previous blog entries for more information on that; links to source and such are in the sidebar). This is a faithful port of where I left off with that project previously with the sole exception of it having an “attract” mode (and screen shot creation, since ts-game-engine supports that out of the box). In any case, there is now an actual playable game posted on my GameDev site. Going forward that will be updated as new features are included.

As my overriding goal is to go through all of the classic games in the course and (more importantly) follow along in the text book that comes with it and try to finish all of the exercises it contains, after I finished the initial port I went back to the text and started reading it from the beginning again just to catch myself up on everything that was said/taught up to this point. I can’t remember at exactly what point I branched away to work on something else so I’m not sure how many exercises are actually left at this point.

Along with development I’ve also been spending some of my free time playing games instead of working on making them, and I also did a little research, because that’s how I roll.

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Another week, another bloggity update on game development goings-on. A lot of this week was spent in setting up some “behind the scenes” stuff. In particular, I set up a new subdomain, http://gamedev.nurdz.com for posting my game development explorations. Currently there are only two things posted there, Rx (the same code as is posted at itch.io, see previous post) and a nascent page for the upcoming pong port, which seems to be called Tennis Mania.

I also tweaked up the blog a little bit so that there are links to all of the relevant code repositories. Somehow in all of this business I actually ended up doing some game development stuff!

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Now that Devember is over and I’ve gotten back into the rhythm of regular workdays again, it’s time to proceed with more game development plans!

I’ve mentioned before that I used to do game development in the past, although back then my audience was limited to basically myself and friends. I gained some critical acclaim in a rather boring drafting class in high school by writing a multi-player Tron game that had a boss key that popped up a visual of the drafting software that we used, but that’s about the widest audience I ever achieved.

Since that time technology has moved on quite a bit (why back in MY day, I had to develop my games in the snow, uphill, both ways!) and although I am a software developer by trade, what few specifics of programming games I used to know are a little bit hazy and outdated.

Time to fix that!

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