News
June 30, 2010 - Y'all like Sudokus?
I made a little Sudoku solver thingy:
http://abstract-productions.net/game/sudoku.html
It's not perfect yet - harder Sudokus will still require some brain work to solve, and there's no way to correct mistakes... I'll make it better some time later.
Oh, by the way, I finished off the final version of Superluminal: Warp Two a couple weeks ago, give it a try if you haven't yet.
June 08, 2010 - SL:W2 in beta
So here it is, the beta release of Superluminal: Warp Two
http://abstract-productions.net/game/sl2.html
Still working out some kinks with the game, but I'm pretty close to a final release of it. Give it a whirl, everybody.
May 14, 2010 - Superluminal: Warp 2
The sequel to Superluminal is coming along nicely. I'm resisting the urge to post WIPs of the game. I want to wait until the game is totally complete and fun before releasing it.
What I can say right now is the game is going to have a lot more variety than the first one. Lots of different enemy types, and there's going to be some mesmerizing "bullet hell" style waves of destruction flying towards your little spaceship.
May 07, 2010 - Pew pew pew
Got my game "Superluminal" featured on http://www.canvasdemos.com which is pretty cool.
In related news, I'm going to put The ARC Legacy on the back burner for a couple of weeks to create a bigger and badder sequel to Superluminal. This is going to be pretty sweet. Trust me :)
May 05, 2010 - Surprisingly Painless
Wow, that flood fill algorithm was way easier than I expected to program.
You know, every time I program something with a recursive algorithm, I feel like a genius :)
Further update: copy and paste functionality was pretty easy to program as well. I am invincible!
May 03, 2010 - Map editor progress
I've been working on the map editor a bunch. I figure that every hour of work I put into making the map editor quicker and more user friendly saves me 10 hours of future development time.
Two big and useful functionalities are left for me to code - copying/pasting and a tile flood fill. I understand the concept of a flood fill and how it has to be a recursive function, though I have never actually programmed one yet, so I don't know how much of a headache this is going to be. But it will save me from drawing hundreds of individual tiles one by one.
I'm about to tackle copying and pasting.
April 25, 2010 - Maps
I've got a functional map editor working for The ARC Legacy now. W00t!
I'll be working on giving the map editor some more functionality to make the editing process easier over the next few days, but it's functional enough to edit anything in the map now.
April 23, 2010 - Progress!
Getting some major progress done on the engine. Still having trouble with drawing speed in Firefox, but I don't think there's much I can do about it except wait for a future version of Firefox that matches Chrome's rendering speed.
I'm starting work on the map editor now, because the engine is in a state where I can start putting the world together again.
April 20, 2010 - Finally updated
Finally updated the Games and Music pages.
Thinking of taking the "Comic" link out of the left side of the page since I just made 6 comics last year and gave up :)
April 19, 2010 - Scripting everywhere in this bitch
Added something interesting to the engine - the ability to queue up scripted movements and waiting pauses for an entity on the map, and have those movements happen during the game loop regardless of what else is happening.
What this opens up is the possibility of having scripted movements happen while the player still has control, something the old ARC engine didn't support. So now an NPC can say "Follow me!" and run ahead of you and wait for you to catch up to him on your own time.
Summary: I'm awesome.
April 18, 2010 - Movin' along
I've been really cracking away at developing the new ARC Legacy engine. It's actually going to be much better than the existing one.
I've run into some problems with Firefox though. It seems that the drawimage function runs pretty slowly in Firefox with full-color PNGs. However Google Chrome runs it perfectly smoothly, in fact with a lot of processor power to spare. So I'm going to keep going the way I'm going in the hopes that Firefox gets up to speed by the time I have this done. HTML5/Canvas is still an emerging technology at this point, and the browsers are in a bit of a JavaScript speed war at the moment, so I'm hopeful that most browsers will support this game properly in the future.
I've already got the scripting engine going, though I still need to add methods for things like text boxes and scripted character movements. The BIG advantage of this scripting engine is it's based on JavaScript itself, using the eval() command. So the scripting engine can be used to affect ANYTHING in the game, opening up all sorts of neat opportunities that the old engine's scripting was incapable of.
Of course, this also means that there's a heightened chance of causing game-crashing bugs through the scripting engine, so I'll need to tread carefully.
April 12, 2010 - HTML 5 and Canvas and ARC
I've been experimenting with HTML 5 and Canvas with Javascript lately. So far I've made a little space shooter game with randomly-generated waves of enemies of increasing difficulty.
http://abstract-productions.net/game/shooter.html
It should work on the latest version of any major web browser except for Internet Explorer. I've found that Chrome and Safari have the best performance for the game right now.
I've decided after that experiment that I'm re-writing the engine to The ARC Legacy in HTML 5 with Canvas and Javascript. Reasons:
- This way what I make will be cross-platform automatically
- I'll be able to make a much more user-friendly map editor because I'll be using some of the built-in GUI functionality of a browser.
- I won't need to roll my own custom scripting engine and deal with its limitations because I can just use JavaScript itself for scripted events.
- Semi-transparent PNGs and Canvas drawing functions are sure to be a hit for the graphic effects.
The only potential problems I see are:
- Not sure if there's a reliable standard for audio and sound effects in HTML 5 yet
- Loading times include download times, so I'll have to be smart with preloading
- Saving and Loading may be problematic, though I could make those routines in PHP
- JavaScript can at times be a pain in the ass. However, I don't have to support any old browsers with this, since older browsers won't support the game period. So that cuts out 90% of the pain right off the bat.
Also, I really should get back into this game development, since the magnificent Josiah Tobin will be lending his pixel-wrangling skills to it.
August 10, 2009 - Hello!
Damn, I need to update my music page. I've made a few more songs since my last update but haven't been posting 'em on this site. I'll get to that this week.
January 28, 2009 - Mystic Chemicals
New song up, this was my entry to the December 2008 Dwelling of Duels.
http://abstract-productions.net/music/MysticChemicals.mp3
It's an old-fashioned rock 'n roll cover of the Mystic Cave and Chemical Plant themes from Sonic 2.
December 23, 2008 - Cyanide - Overdose!
So here it is, a remake of my old rendition of Cyan's theme from Final Fantasy 6. The arrangement quality is much higher on this one than the original one, and there's more showoffy guitar work:
http://abstract-productions.net/music/cyanide_od.mp3
Enjoy!
April 30, 2008 - This was a triumph
I'm making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS
http://abstract-productions.net/music/stillalive.mp3
March 25, 2008 - Long Mario Level
Long mario level is loooooong
http://abstract-productions.net/long_mario_level.php
October 02, 2007 - Entering the Realm of Webcomics
I've decided to start my own webcomic. An interesting choice considering my lack of visual artistic skill, but I'm hoping to improve that over time. Besides, there's a ton of popular webcomics by artists of marginal skill who have a great sense of humour.
The title of the comic is OMGWTFALIENS and the storyline will be based on aliens on Earth, but I don't wanna spoil too much so you'll just have to see how the plot plays out.
First strip is up, but I don't have the comic site design yet so it's on a temporary crappy page:
http://abstract-productions.net/omgwtfaliens/index.php
July 24, 2007 - Song-a-day update
Due to a lack of available time, the song-a-day project is off for now (I got up to day 9). It's still alive and will be completed, but I'm not limiting myself to one song a day anymore.
June 29, 2007 - Song-a-Day II
Starting tonight, I will be composing one song every day, allowing one day each week as a break. I did the same thing last year, though that album was all over the place both in terms of genres and quality. This year I aim to create a cohesive concept album. All the songs will transition into each other and the CD version will be released as one long 30-40 minute song.
Wish me luck!
May 07, 2007 - PHP Update
This server's PHP updated recently, and in the process became much more strict in warning messages, so I've updated the forum code to comply with the new coding standards.
Also, if you've registered for the forum, you can edit your profile now.
February 14, 2007 - Another Section
It just occurred to me that this site is missing a "random crap" section for me to post the various completely random projects that I work on. I shall add this section post-haste.
As usual, post-haste means any time from tomorrow to five months from now :)
January 14, 2007 - Another Project
Well, that burst of activity kinda came to a quick stop. Ah well.
Anyway, I'm putting The ARC Legacy on the back burner again because I just got involved with a really interesting game project, which will be using an adaptation of my engine for The ARC Legacy with some interesting modifications to it... not sure what I can say about it at this point but if this project comes through it has the potential to be pretty big.
Now, the battle against laziness truly begins.
December 11, 2006 - Status update
Got some sprite artwork done for some NPC's and the inside of houses in the city of Pruthe. The indoors areas are starting to look a lot more real now. Also worked on the neighboring city of Zydnia a bit. I'll get some screenshots up soon.
December 10, 2006 - Whoa.
Did I just go and actually work on The ARC Legacy? Man, I haven't touched that project in about two years, but I'm totally going back into it now. I think I'm going to release another demo once I've got a respectable amount of content in the game. First order of business: construction of the city of Zydnia.