Saturday, January 31, 2009

Halfway through the Job

The no-fluff graphical engine for ruby-warrior is for all practical purpose, finished. It can load the maps, captives, sludge, and other monsters I didn't think of. Pretty cool.

I am just playing or rather, programming my AI to play the game to ensure that I didn't miss anything. It will be interesting to see if I can get the codebase merged back into the original game itself.

All that is left is the bonus programming that I will do. Two week is twice the estimation of this project. This is good. It is better to overestimate the difficulty and duration of a project rather than underestimate them.

My first patron is excellent. He gave me some good advice on how to manage a project and he paid me half for getting the project halfway. When the project is done, he will pay up the rest.

Now all I need is to do some bonus programming for the rest of the duration of the job and polishes them up.

I could probably promote the game at the end of this project and make some extra cash in the form of ads space. Not sure if it is a good idea to do it. Maybe it is tacky and unethical? I did create the graphical front end for it so I can probably promote my graphical front end.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Game Programming Job Scored! Victory is mine!

I got an informal contract from a fellow ruby hobbyist and programmer to work on the graphical frontend for ruby-warrior for 50 bucks. It is a small amount of money but hey we got to start somewhere, right? (For the record, 50 dollars is a lot of money for me)


Ruby-warrior is essentially an AI programming game in a hack and slash setting. It is something that only appeal to the very geeky crowd of programmers but it is also a lot of fun. My job is to basically blot a graphical engine on top of it to give it more oomph. I won't be doing pretty arts though.

Since the author already worked out the parsing details, making an engine should be a piece of cake. I done it mutiple of time already in my own projects over the years. The best part is that all the work will be made libre and freely availiable.

What I am hoping is jobs beyond this project and of course, more libre games. Every job to me would unlock the path before me and help me make my dream of writing FOSS video games for a living come true.

You can see details of the job here.

Feb 5-6 is the deadline. Let hope I make it!

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

RubyTet 0.0.1 is out!

Rubytet is out! It is a complete clone of tetris, although a bit different. It took me six months, on and off, working to get this finished.

So there it is, a clone that doesn't really particulary stand out. However, that's ok because it is a stepping stone to bigger and fun projects. I think I really get the memo that truely good games take long time to create, a year of nonstop coding I believe.

There you have it! My game.