GDC Day 3

I'm dead again

If I don't lose 10 pounds by the time this is done I will be shocked! Meeting lots of people. Went to an awesome marketing seminar and I'm starting to get my web presence known. Coming back to the hotel after a day of GDC-ing I am asleep as soon as I hit the pillow. I'm getting ready to go out again. I think I have the subway system figured out now.

It rains an awful lot here.  

GDC Day 2

I'm writing this the morning after because I literally died last night when I got back to my hotel room. Somehow I was resurrected this morning by my legs feel like noodles. It's a strange environment here. You just walk to up to interesting people and say hello. You chat for a bit, throw out your pitch and have a conversation. I have talked about game narrative, styles, publishing, business, and lots of others just in random. I even pulled an old prototype game from years ago to show to some interested Japanese and swapped cards.

There are vary famous people here. Amusingly, during the GDC 101 talk I attended we were warned to kind of stay "at our level", nothing wrong with striking up a conversation with Mr. Video Game Superstar, but there won't be much that guy can do for you.

I have a video demos of what I have for ROE done on my phone read to go at a moment's notice and people have been interested and have given me great feedback. It's also been fun looking at the reactions from C++ programmers about the thing I've had to do to pull 20 year old code kicking and screaming onto new platforms.

Today the expo proper opens so we will see what goes on there... If you are coming here from the link on my business card. Hello! My whole adventure is here for you to read. Thanks for coming!

GDC Day 1

I'm exhausted.

Flying is fun!

I kind of misjudged days and spent my first day of GDC just getting out here. I'll be getting my badge at 7:00 tomorrow and start making the rounds. I have a few missions, most having to do with the marketing side of ROE. I'm going to hunt down a few publishers just to say hello, and chat up companies that do what I do, namely port legacy programs to new platforms.

I'm flying back business class though!

Into the Breach

Broke though the sound problem and now super productive again! Go me! I was battling an issue where the game would only play two sounds and refused to play the rest. For the last two days I could not get the sound to work at all. That was two days of going though the documentation and everything. I even got in contact with the library developer and sent him sample code and he didn't see why it wasn't working either... Do you want to know what the problem was?

smpl_hits = al_load_sample("res\hits.ogg"); //<---- was not working
smpl_hits = al_load_sample("res/hits.ogg"); //<---- working

Yup I had backslashes in my path. This was even a dumber mistake because here I am trying to abstract the filesystem away, only to use relative resource paths on the filesystem. After I found that I immediately removed all folder references and used Allegro's path system instead. I am now almost done with the filesystem stuff, but came across the functions dealing with loading Breach 2 data. I now had a choice. I could disable it for now or implement it in case I have an opportunity to port Breach 2. I didn't have any samples of the files I needed, so I started to comment out the functions. I then realized this was breaking the whole reason why I'm keeping binary compatibility. I guess if I'm going to make the game feature complete for the beta, I need to  have the Breach 2 stuff functional as well.

I procured myself a copy of Breach 2.

Old School DRM

When I opened it, I was hit with a screen asking me to look up page 27, line 2, word 1 of the instruction manual. It took a bit but I was able to procure the manual too. I then went into Breach and created the files I will need for ROE to work. Added that a new TODO in Trello. Now going to see if I can't get these guys to link together.

Game is still going forward!

Sound Test Below....

More Prep Work

Successful repo download and compile

So today I didn't spend a lot of time in Visual Studio. I did update the repo with build instructions. Most of today was spent nursing a sick laptop to what I was hoping was better health. Also it was my first time really exorcising Git to make sure I could check in and check out thing correctly. After fixing my commits that was all smooth too.

Sadly the laptop has seen better days. The charging circuits don't work and it has a dodgy power connector. I'll probably just take the chromebook make some presentations using pictures and video from the blog here. I can always RDP from the chomebook back home if I need to get some work done. So that means was mostly marketing research. I spend time online chatting with others who are going to be going to GDC and arranging meet-ups. I'm also fleshing out a schedule of what to do while I'm there.

Other than that, nothing special. Oh, the sound mixer in Allegro has a bug in it and one of the library  developers are looking into it. I sent him example code and he confirmed that it's acting bizarre. That the thing about when you use computer systems daily for hours. Even with commercial systems, sooner or later you will find a bug.

Going to GDC - and other things

So on Monday I'll be in San Francisco for GDC. That's going to be fun. I spent all day today prepping for it. One of my tasks was bringing my travel laptop back from the dead. It hasn't fared well. The last time it was fired up was when I was in Japan last year. I've been spending most of my day getting things updated and moved around.

I bit the bullet and got a GitHub account and uploaded ROE to it so I could work remotely. Also, my online backup is expiring next month so it was better to get a copy of my work somewhere safe. I'll be switching backup providers as well. I worked in I.T. far too long to see what happens when you don't back up your stuff. Heck, even the provider I have now saved my skin when a HDD blew out. The provider I have now is moving to company-only solutions and exiting the home market.

 I need to still get VS2015 on this machine and get a sync going as well. This means getting Allegro set up and a copy of ROE compiled. I also think my power plug may be dodgy. I'll investigate that too. I'm hoping I don't need a new laptop. If worse comes to worst I'll set up remote desktop and use my chromebook.

Game-wise all the sound effects are complete, but the implementation is acting up. When I monkey with the sounds, I'm losing my audio subsystem all together. May be an allegro bug, but I can use another lib if push comes to shove. It would be a bummer to add a dependency after working so hard kicking lots of the legacy stuff out.

Came across a new development word today; "Darkwork". It's a term for when you code something and the result was no different visually then before. It was used by a coder who was making his own engine and was describing when he was coding up the infrastructure. Meaning he had to do a lot of Darkwork before he had anything even functional towards an engine. I've had Darkwork days too, but as I move to Ugly Beta, there will be a considerable amount of prettiness coming up. I should be thinking about what the new theme is going to look like. I have some ideas, but will need some time in Inkscape/Gimp to see what I can achieve.

Fwreep Fweep Fweep!

So I spent most of today in Audacity working with hundreds of public domain sounds. It was time to implement  the sound effects in the game and that meant getting rid of the old Star Trek effects. This required the playback of many many audio files to see if I could find anything close to what I was imagining in my head. You also have to make sure you use the right search terms. You can't just look for "Door Schloop noise" and find anything useful.The last bit is also making sure what you have is in the public domain. I would be dumb to replace a sound effect you don't have rights to with another you equally don't have rights too. I'll probably have the effects loader and player all done by tomorrow.


I also had a crack at printing TTF fonts on their side and was able to get some matrix transforms working. I can print downwards, but upwards uses the original function to make sure one of the return values are calculated correctly.

I should be getting rid of the rest of the non-Allegro filesystem commands. One requires a filepicker and I'm wondering if I should just use the OS's one via the Allegro hook. I'll see how it looks.

On a closing note, Trello is pretty rad and have been great for me to track what I'm doing and what needs to be done. I was told by some of my indie peers that it's great for small stuff, but does not scale at all. I'll see when I start to roll other people into it.