Devox Life

Meh

So over the past few days I’ve been making Devox some money by doing some programming work, coming along well. Just small jobs for peoples games, finished a DX8 mini-map a few hours ago.

On top of other things I’ve been looking around at websites, trying to get a feel for what we could evolve Devox into. Aaron is preparing a forum theme for the new forum before we release it to the public, we will allow access to a read-only archive of the old forum for you all to retrieve your posts.

Amori

Oh Amori … Landon and I have really been pumping it up. I personally have added in segregated isometric and orthogonal tiles, and maps. Both with their own rendering procedures. On top of that I’ve been working on converting the graphics of each base class to use a Sprite class for access to a graphic instead. The sprites are handled, just as the entities through a specific manager, SpriteManager and EntityManager respectively. 

Amori is turning into a very useful set of tools and an Alpha release is in the works! 

Amori

Things are really under way in the world of Amori! It’s been progressing a lot and I’m quite happy with it. So soon enough I’ll be releasing an alpha build! Don’t expect too much. I still have a lot planned for this project.

New Projects

Aaron and Landon are both working on new projects, Aaron an untitled puzzle, and Landon a sand-box dungeon crawler. You can track his blog for progress.

New Forums

The old forums, using myBB software were bugged all to hell with half working plugins, so we’re scrapping it for something else in the near future, just wait until then.

Tutorials

When the new forums arise, I’ll be working on a series of  java tutorials teaching how to build an RPG from scratch! Stay tuned.

I’m in a group video chat with 3 others - Click to watch or join: http://tinychat.com/picklesarentcandy

Amori (Ambiguous title ;D)

Well I’ve recently decided to acquire a copy of the Eclipse IDE on my current computer, though it’s shared, and that’s why it has taken me so long to get to this conclusion, though it will be temporarily until I’m reunited with my laptop.

Landon and I, though he’s a tad under the weather, have started discussing concepts of Amori, which he may very well be basing his next project on. When I was last programming Amori I had run into the issue of proper formatting of the maps. I had realized that for every layer, an array of tiles, each tile was being instanced with a wasted property, the attribute. This attribute was possessed by every tile on every layer, so I thought, what if I had two different tiles layered on top of each other that had different attributes or conflicting properties? Well I thought gee, that’s a real issue and in any case a waste of precious memory.

So I came to the conclusion of optimizing the map format, it will now work as such: The map will contain its own specific properties as it should, Max-X, Max-Y, an array of tiles, and that is about it. Then the tiles will be another class of their own, possessing their XPos, YPos, Type, Attribute .. and so on, while also possessing an instance of the Layer class which will primarily contain a graphic. This way tiles can possess multiple graphics layered upon themselves while using the same coordinates, attributes, and other properties.

Before this, we had the map utilizing the layer class which in turn possessed its own array of tiles, this turned out to be a big no-no as I have previously mentioned and has been corrected. I will now move on to adding in a proper game loop, and then moving onto animations.

Releases

I’ve decided to get some sort of Repository setup for Amori at least, and it will come in an importable JAR file format, as well as a project template containing what was previously my testing template to test every feature of Amori, this will serve as almost a sort of engine, demonstrating the powers of Amori and offering a base to quickly build a game off of.

More of that will be discussed in the near future.

Website

Well as I had previously stated, I spent my time reading up on web design and the like and this was the result after following many tutorials (mainly on slicing images as a font from a resource)

[ site ]

Feel free to tell me what you think!

NOTE: Consider this post more of a future outlook.

What’s goin’ on?

Not much really, thanks for askin’. So I’m still without the gear I need to further develop Amori and expand Devox, but that hasn’t stopped my creative ingenuity! I spent the weekend in fact, drum roll, learning valid HTML5 and CSS3 for future needs, in case Aaron ever decides to quit out on us. And I have to say, it’s a lot easier than I had previously expected, especially since I’m just using Notepad++.

Boxes

So if you go on over and check out this post on Landon’s blog you’ll be able to take a look at how far boxes has come along and keep up on current progress. I don’t know too much about the new features of the project, since I’m at a low contact level with the rest of my team, but from skimming it seems promising. (I’m downloading it now.)

Amori

So I was thinking last night about how I’ve done a lot of work on Amori, and various other projects that are of similar stature. And I was thinking, gosh why have I never finished one? Well that made me realize, throughout my coding, I try to heavily optimize things and think too far ahead, thus confusing myself and making me do things much slower with much over-complication. So I reflected back on an old quote that said something along the lines of, work as fast as you can, the right way, to get your project out and working, then do all your optimizations and improvements over time.

This sounds quite elegant to me, and I will be following it from now on, so be ready for a lot more updates when I’m able to code again.

Android

Wait, what? No, I meant for the title to say what it does. Little of you may know, but Devox started out as an android app development team between Aaron and myself. We had moved on to a greater idealism dealing heavily with game development, and now I’ve decided to expand even upon that. Devox Studios will now be a vast resource for not only Game Development specifically, but a vast array of products. Our new upcoming site will showcase everything we have to offer in it’s own organized way.

Though it may be a long time before all of our resources become available, it seemed to best to let the public know before they thought our idealism for game development support was shattered. It is still a large primary goal of ours to build the foundation for an provide, and that’s just what we plan to do.

Now you you may still be wondering, Android, what? Well we’ll be developing Android applications, games, utilities, etc. It’s something we’re skilled enough to do, and we’ve decided would be nice to peek back upon our roots.

We chose the Android platform for a numerous amount of currently disclosed reasons (meaning I’m too lazy to keep typing.) So we apologize to those of whom are avid iOS users. Once our bank reaches a stable point, we may begin developing under the iOS platform as well, but that’s far in the future.