Day 9: Conquering New Ground

For the ninth day of development of RubyTet, I am stuck with something that I do not know how to fix. Nonetheless, I managed to do my 10 commits.

I also started reading chapter one of the trig book that I obtained. Turned out that it was in my book bag the whole time. Once I complete the book, I hope that I will be able to complete the physics of my Space Fighter Ace game.

I also picked out the website design layout for RubyTet. The color scheme has not been picked(it will be picked once I get there) and I did not yet choose the technology for the site. Will it be ruby on rails, or picked off from the shell(wordpress, mediawiki, etc)? I do not know.

One thing is for certain, I am progressing rather nicely. If it goes according to plan, I'll start asking for my first ransom in December.

Day 8: A New Week

I started off this week fixing mostly bugs in RubyTet and end up wasting my ten commits for it. I should have tested it a little bit more before committing things.

As for the Libregamewiki, I did my editing duty as usual, racking up more than ten edits and significant expansion in the Widelands article. I am also talking to Qubodup about becoming part of the Free Game Dev network. Given how much I benefit from Freegamer's generous linking, I think I ought to give back. Plus, Libregamewiki will have its own forum section at their forum, which I hope will attract contributors and revitalize the wiki. So the Libregamewiki section at my new forum will goes the way of the dodo bird. However, since the forum is really only intended for my personal gaming network, this make sense.

Among other things, I am looking into learning web application programmming and writing a gaming website for RubyTet so I can have 1)A job skill in case I don't make enough money writing free games and 2)develop my process for building games and making money off of it.

I also worked on the next part of my tutorial, which will hopefully be unveiled later this week.

Wow, that's a mouthful!

7th Day: Lazy Sunday Edition

So this is one week into nonstop game development! Yay!

Not much has goes on for Space Fighter Ace I am afraid. My selection of book is poor and over my head so I have to start all over again.

As for RubyTet, I am moving toward writing a previewer graphical element which allows player to know what is the next part going to be. Not only this is a gameplay element, it will help me tremdously with debugging the game. Since not only it will be displaying the shape that it is going to drop down but also the name of the shape.

On the Libregamewiki front, there is nothing much happening. Though AVRS, one of the Libregamewiki contributor agree with me that we need to resolve the licensing issue somehow.

6th Day: Lazy Saturday

Despite tremendous times on my hand, I have decided regrettably to do the bare minimum. As such, I just barely got started on learning my trigonometry for Space Fighter Ace.

As for my RubyTet, which now have a project page at the KibaBase, I just finished making all the shape classes.

For Libregamewiki, I updated the planet. I am not going to take it down even though Free Game Dev planet already exists. It provide me with profits, so I keep. Not much else goes on with Libregamewiki, except the usual editing activity. I am thinking of expanding the wiki to other language edition provided that we have at least one fluent and active volunteer.

5th Day: All System Back Online

Libregamewiki is back online. It also got mediawiki upgrades. I also started the first topic on my new forum concerning image licensing.

As for RubyTet, I finally got blocks drawn. It isn't much but that's progress. That's 10 commits a day for you.

I also finished upgrading the Libregamewiki blog, but there will not be a new blog post until next week. So, I am left with only Libregamewiki's planet to update. After that, I'll have to figure out something to improve Libregamewiki's service.

Tommorow, there will be definte work on learning my trignometry for Space Fighter Ace, whatever that may be.

4th Day: Bumber Ride Progression

For RubyTet, my tetris clone, development is continuing along as usual. I got to the loading the blocks and then drawing part, except it doesn't draw. Moreover, I got the position of my graphics wrong. That's woe for anytime you do something new.

Unfortunately, there seem to be an outrage for the libregamewiki server at the moment. So I couldn't exactly make much progress to upgrading Libregamewiki blog. I just downloaded the latest version of wordpress. Maybe tomorrow, I'll have better luck.

The good news is...Libregamewiki got hit with stumbleupon traffic earlier in the day. It creates lot traffic, but it doesn't exactly benefit me ads revenue wise. So this mean I ought to increase the traffic flowing to Libregamewiki without somehow annoying users. If I can do that, I could get more contributors and more articles.

Day 3: The Forum is Ready for Business!

For day 3 in my development log, I continued my vague coding effort on RubyTet. I think we're close to something dropping down into the field.

With agonizing progress of 10 commits everyday, it may take a day or three for the first shape to drop. The important thing is that I maintain progress over time. That's critical discipline training for somebody who want to be a future owner of the first full blown free gaming studio.

Anyway, the big new is that my gaming forum is open for business. This will be the future home of all of my games and gaming services. Yesterday, Charlie of Freegamer suggest that I should abandoned my effort to create my own gaming forum for his general free gaming forum. I disagree.

I don't think I should be asking the guys at forum.freegamedev.net to populate their forum with my personal kiba gaming projects, especially of a commercial nature.

Anyway, since I am officially finished with revitalizing the forum, I'll move on to resurrecting the Libregamewiki blog.

2nd Day Complete: Progress!

Despite the fact that there was no posting yesterday, I assure you that there were activity in the pursuit of my goal outlined in my last post. That is, my aim to start writing games again and continue the development of my wiki.

Yesterday, I was merely setting up the game's inital source code, with all the graphics. It is very much the same today, in which I attempt to build a vague code organization that deals with the logic of the games.

I also began work on improving Libregamewiki's forum, which sits neglected for too long. My plan for the future beyond the current projects I am working on is to remake the forum as part of my overall free gaming franchise.

Changes in Direction

I know I haven't develop extensively since August because school exhaust my energy. I couldn't develop 28 hours per week via the 4 hours a day goal. So all of my gains are now lost.

Now, I am changing pace and keeping my Space Fighter Ace project on hold. Right now, I am focusing on writing simple games like RubyTet, a tetris clone. What I am going to do is institute a new policy of ten commits every day. Though commits doesn't actually represent progress, it will mean that I done a little bit everyday. This is more workable than forcing myself to do 2 hours of game development everyday when I know my school works varies so much.

However, I think I'll devote 2 hours every weekend for the Space Fighter Ace project and acquires all the trignometry knowledge I need.

Also, I'll be trying to keep up updating the Libregamewiki with at least 100 edits in the past 7 days everyday.

Then I will blog everyday to ensure that I keep up with my goal.

Rubygame Tutorial 3 & 4

Note: Tutorial for 3 and 4 of the Rubygame book are now located here and here.


Rubygame book part 3 and part 4 are out!

Part 3 is simply setting up the controller class, which will be where all the game happening will take place. Part 4 is where you get to learn about using the clock to regulate the game speed. It also shows how to modify the titlebar to fit your purpose. In this case, we are displaying the FPS information.

If you're not already following the tutorial, start from the beginning as the series built on previous work on the game code.

Lastly, if you have any question, comment, bug report, and suggestions, please comment!

If you don't like the way I wrote the tutorial, you could alway fork my tutorial, since it is licensed under the Creative Common Attribution.

A little request: Please vote up the FSDaily story for my tutorial.