Game Development

Publishing Pico8 Games to itch.io with GitLab CI I’ve been developing with Pico8, a game development engine for pixelart games with constraints. Pico 8 can export games as HTML/JS that are runnable on itch.io. Itch provides an API tool called butler for automating project releases. I’ve put together a repository with the necessary components and instructions for setting up GitLab CI to automatically build and publish Pico8 projects to itch.io via butler....

Pico 8 Conveyor Belt Project I’ve been working on a game for Pico-8. It’s a sort of demake of Factorio, combined with, apparently, Zelda elements. (These things seems to evolve themselves with my own interest/motivation/limitations.) In the spring of 2021, I started the project just wanting to learn more about Pico-8, and it evolved into a reasonably-sized project. I’ve recently revisited it, and am making enhancements to publish it on itch....

Yep This is the 6th iteration of this idea. I finally realized the term for type of game I’ve been failing to finish over and over is ‘Colony Sim’. I have loved these games since I was a kid, but didn’t really experience many until the last few years. I spent hours and hours playing SimAnt, but that was about it. Later, I played Age of Empires and Empire Earth, but really only enjoyed them for their colony management features, which are limited because the core of the gameplay was RTS combat, which I was not very keen on....

I’ve been struggling with this one for months. It has made me stop working on this game altogether (as have other things). First off, the problem doesn’t make much sense. I’m using equivalent logic to handle the positioning of some elements in one view as I am in another. The game is the latest iteration of my resource management sim idea. Villagers get assigned to work stations that produce resources the villagers need to survive....

I’m working on getting back into using AWS tools, and ran across their game hosting tool: Game Lift. It has support for Unity 2019. We’re hosting a game, yo. Bullets from main tutorial: Each version of your game server is called a build Game servers are deployed into fleets of one or more Amazon EC2 instances (this takes a while) There also seems to be a hard limit of one instance for free (?...

Works in Progress Please see my portfolio for videos and published demos. I focus mainly on the core logic of the game engine, since that’s my primary area of interest/experience. These are my works in progress. I would consider Centipede feature complete, but there are open issues (both enhancements and bugs) that I plan to continue to work on. Resource Quest in Unity is nearly feature complete, and needs polish, but you can view the source code from the link on my portfolio....

Impatience waiting for a creature to come eat my ship led to a new crazy game mode! If you can survive 8 or so waves it gets easier, since the sheer amount of mushrooms makes the processing time longer than the interval timer, so everything slows way down. It’s a feature! And here’s the finished leaderboard implementation

Step 1: Bask in the glory

Week-long test coverage montage Right into the danger zone Risin’ up to the challenge of our rival Oh darlin’ my heart’s on fire Lose your blues, everybody cut footloose Key takeaways beforeEach does not reset any spy that it sets. Will need to find another approach if this is needed. I think setting testObj from a copy of the target object, then spying on that is enough to avoid problems, but there are instances where spy is being set on the nested test objects directly, which will likely affect the tests for those objects at some point....

Loading the canvas libs Now that Karma is all wired up, I can start poking at the tests. The first problem I need to fix involves canvas-libs. knobsAndLevers uses the supporting object in canvas-libs to set a randomized initial spawn interval for the creatures. The usage is: 1 this.spider.initialInterval = supporting.getRandom(this.spider.interval.min, this.spider.interval.max); But knobsAndLevers.init() fails, because supporting is not available: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 $ node_modules/....