January 24, 2010

Why is my file so huge?

My latest game was absolutely huge! And I'm not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file.

It was 14,6mb!!

Now every way you look at it, that's incredibly huge. It's like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the exe file which should be small, except that it's not.

Incredible I thought, what the heck did I do wrong? I mean my code isn't really good but I never knew it was this horrible. So today I was determined to find the cause of this obscene mutant ant.

I started out chopping off everything regarding exceptions, cause all c++ resources I've read say exceptions will take space like a mutant gremlin. Okay I thought and chopped away everything - but nothing happened.

Now that's weird, what happens if I scrap this.. and this.. It ended with me beginning a big revamp of my whole "engine", or rather collection of stuff - nothing inherently wrong as it was badly needed - but nothing happened with my exe file! It was still almost 2mb big with basically only a hello world...

Then it struck me! I had been using -g with gcc and without any optimizing at all. When I turned on size and speed optimizations and scrapped the debugging the change was quite extraordinary.

The mutant 14 637 kb was magically transformed to a more fitting ant size of 856 kb. I couldn't save much of the total file size (23 254 kb -> 20 768 kb) so while I apologize for hogging your bandwidth, time and harddrive space I'm hoping you won't be too mad at me.

January 19, 2010

Postmortem: The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

My first shooter! It's working (although a friend got a null pointer error) so I'm a little happy.

The Time

I spent about 24 hours on this game. A whopping 30% was break time, mostly me eating, reading manga or playing games... This is proof of me being really lazy this month I think.

It's pretty cool that everything regarding the scripting, loading the little levels I had from lua files and writing them took only a mere hour! I could have saved so much time if I would've scrapped the whole levels idea completely. (Levels are more than just the code it takes to load them from a file... a lot more)

Immersion

We all love big bangs and loads of stuff flying around on screen and sadly I didn't deliver. I had all these ideas of pieces of dead afros flying around and dead things piling up on the ground which you'll walk over... but I never did any of it which is sad cause it would be pretty damn cool.

Another thing is the messages on the left side. Pretty cool - if they would actually say anything, but again I didn't have time or the inclination or whatever to do anything with it...

All we're left with are the quakes which are kinda cool but they could do with some tweaking, maybe shorter and less frequent to really get the omg effect.

Gameplay

It plays okay. Not a lot happening, it's just a race against time. The immersion part would really hot up the gameplay cause really, it's fun to blast things into the sky!

Conclusion

The game feels like it's not finished. The whole afro thing was cool but it's not revolutionary or anything different. It's stuck in the middle between random ideas and mediocrity. Too bad.

January 18, 2010

My Dream Game: The RTS

Even if there are a million great games there's one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It's not the game I've played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming seriously for once; sure I had played online with cs but I was never serious. I did nothing to improve myself, I didn't really care - as long as I didn't have 1-10 or a silly just-beginning-stat.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...

January 16, 2010

The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

Aaah feels good having a game ready after the last month's failure! This time it's a small shooter.

The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

Bullet masher - can you keep up with 100 enemies at the screen? Try it!

Download
afro.zip (19.8 MB)

Instructions
W: up
A: left
S: down
D: right
mouse: shoot
space: leap into the sky!

Credits
Music: The Last Prophecy - Matthew Le Blanc (SynthR)
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/100-things

January 1, 2010

New Year, New Theme: 100 Things

Happy New Year, Everyone! 2009 was great in many ways; I drove a submarine (yeah quite literally), I released 6 experimental games and recently I discovered the completely amazing game Evil Genius but lets try to make 2010 even better!

So let's forget our small mishaps (yes I'm looking at you - December month without a game) and roll out a new theme. As usual I'm following The Experimental Gameplay Project's theme which happens to be 100 Things.

And Things could mean anything from sprites, sound effects to pixels or enemies.