Tag Archives: gamedev

Latest Game Jam

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Another game jam!  After participating in the MeatlyJam in 2015, I recently created an itch.io account so I could enter the CoronaDefold Jam.  I detailed the development process of Asteroid Blaster in the game devlog, which you can read here:

https://prairiewest.itch.io/asteroid-blaster/devlog/10821/day-1-exploring

Voting is on now, but after looking at the other entries I don’t think my game is going to win any prizes. No matter, it was fun to enter and interesting to blog about the whole thing.  I’m still making small changes to the game, and trying to decide if I should continue working on it, or wrap it up and move on.

First Game Jam in 20 Years

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The last time I participated in a game jam was a couple of decades ago. Yes, literally 20 years ago in 1995. When I saw the announcement of the MeatlyJam I was interested and I decided almost immediately that I was going to be part of it.  It then took me 2 more days to commit to that decision and send in my registration. 🙂

The file of art assets was released before the game jam started, but I didn’t have any time to play around with it.  I looked at it and tried to get an idea for a game, but nothing was coming to me.  When the jam started on Friday morning I was at work, so I couldn’t start on it until later that night.  Then when I did start, I knew I wasn’t going to have the full weekend to work on it, so I truly needed to keep it simple. I didn’t want this to happen:

simple

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Relearning Game Development

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I first started programming in 1983 (read about my programming history here).  I don’t remember what I programmed on the Ti-99/4a, but I do remember one of my first programs on the VIC-20 was flying birds program, straight from the book that came with it:vic_20_flying_birdsIt wasn’t long after that when I started making games.  Sadly, none of them have survived my various moves across the country, however my friends still remember playing the games that I made – they were pretty fun for the time.

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Corona SDK Volume Sliders

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If you are developing mobile apps with Corona SDK that use volume controls, here’s a quick tip for implementing more natural feeling controls.  Assuming that the control is a slider with values from 0 to 100, all it takes is one line of code:

volume = (math.pow(3,sliderValue/100)-1)/2

But since I really like seeing things work myself, I’ve built a very small demo project that you can download and run:
screenshot
VolumeSliders.zip

If you would like to read more on why this formula works or why it’s even needed, this page may be interesting for you: http://www.dr-lex.be/info-stuff/volumecontrols.html