Archive: November, 2010

As a test of Isogenic’s platform game capabilities I’ve been putting together a very quick game called “Squish”. It’s nothing spectacular but it helps to debug the platform game stuff, so meet Squish! (Click the image for a larger version).

Whilst working on the IGE, I have written MANY classes. I originally started using the MooTools class generator to create and use classes in Javascript, however I have decieded that I do not want to rely on MooTools as a dependancy so I went about writing my own class generator that accepts the MooTools class definition but does not rely on ANY MooTools code.

You can find the code for the class generator Read the rest of this entry »

Hey folks, time for another update.

Although Isogenic is excellent for creating isometric games for the web, you can also create 2D games with ease. Here is a quick demo video showing you parallax backgrounds and a couple of platforms on the screen. This is just to show what Isogenic can do and is not meant to wow you with lots of exciting new stuff… but feel free to get excited if you like… I always do!

When Microsoft announced that they were creating a motion sensor for the Xbox I was quite intrigued. I’d played around with the Nintendo Wii a few times but I’d never been impressed enough by the speed of response or the accuracy to put my hard-earned cash down to buy one; I just couldn’t stand the noticeable lag from my action to the avatar’s response on screen and it all felt just a little too scripted and not really under my control. That said, I could see the potential that motion-based games could bring to the industry because who doesn’t want to have a good work out whilst been tricked into thinking it’s actually a “game” you’re playing? <- That is not sarcastic!

My wife bought me the Kinect for my birthday which was yesterday (the 17th Nov) and I immediately went about Kinnecting (sorry) it all up to the Xbox in the front room. After about 5 minutes I turned on the Xbox and had to run through a number of updates to the console which left me waiting another 20 minutes before I could try anything out.

Finally I was presented with my first game, Kinect Adventures which ships with the sensor. The first thing I noticed was the nifty way the sensor tilted around to “see” me properly. You don’t notice it when you’re playing and it doesn’t make ANY sound but if you watch it you’ll see what I mean – very cool!

Kinect Adventures

I was a little sceptical that the game would be something I’d enjoy; the box looks like it’s marketed at a 10-year-old and there Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working really hard recently… *REALLY* hard. I’ve been pulling very long hours and working 13 – 18 hour days to get the engine ready for the beta launch.

Anyone who knows me will know that I like to sleep in during the morning hours because most of my creative output comes during the witching hours, and Isogenic’s development is no exception (I suspect that Witching Hour creativity is a common “feature” of developers around the world… drop me a comment if you are like this!). Recently I’ve been up at about 1:30pm in the afternoon and literally don’t stop coding until after 4:30am next morning, listening to Huey Lewis and The News, Dire Straights and even the Spice Girls (I’ve been on holiday from my day job for a couple of weeks now and have a couple more to go). My wife has been exceptionally understanding and supportive!

Lots of exciting new stuff is becoming finalised in the latest version and I’m almost ready to move a whole decimal on the version. Currently all updates are being applied to version 0.0.6 but the level of activity and excellent coding progress means that I am probably going to skip 0.0.7 and go straight to 0.1.0. As some of the followers of Isogenic will know, I’ve been moving towards a beta release for some time now and once I push out version 0.1.0 I intend to release the beta. This means that I may be able to release sooner than I had expected to, mostly because my wife has taken it upon herself to see to my every need when it comes to promoting development. She is a real star and I couldn’t do this without her! She’s even started to learn JavaScript so she can help out!!

For those of you who may not have read some of my previous development blog entries, version 0.0.6 is a COMPLETE re-write of the Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone & Android Engine Testing

I’ve been very busy recently getting the engine to optimise based upon the device / browser being used on the client-side. Android on the Samsung Galaxy S is a very good performer and I understand that the 2.2 update to Froyo makes another good performance boost although I’ve not had a chance to try it yet.

I’ve found that the Android browser performs better with HTML based output rather than Canvas-based up to a point. The more HTML elements you push to the dom the more it slows down and eventually redraw speed becomes intrusively slow, however this is pretty much moot because of the offset created on the size of the graphics being displayed on the browser… let me explain…

The browser on a normal iPhone or Android device is much less powerful (in performance) than its desktop equivilent not because of the available features but by the available CPU and RAM specifications. This makes optimising for the devices quite important, however there is a pretty big silver-lining to the CPU and RAM cloud… screen size. Screens on these devices are quite small compared to your average desktop computer so the amount of stuff you can display on screen at any one time is reduced. There is also a need to increase the size of the graphics being used for a couple of reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you for all of your support and help with Isogenic, life and everything. I *love* you. Happy birthday!

xxx

My Wife: Suchada Evans – Yes I know… she’s HOT and I’m a very lucky guy!

And finally, the reason why my wife is super awesome… she lets me do stupid things like this: