Devox Life

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.

Long time no see

Well dang, hello to you too. So over the past month or so the Devox team has been under going a flurry of tasks, mainly getting ourselves more organized as we recruited a new member to the team, more on that later. I’ve had to get the team back on track, but that’s been hard to do since I’m once again technically disabled (not in possessing of a laptop.)

I’ve been developing ideas along the side though, and before my technical disability I had been working furiously on a project that was supposed to be a demo of a few of Amori’s features. But then I realized .. jeez, I really left out a bunch of generic and essential functionality in Amori, so I further developed this demo and it turned into what I would like to call our Tile-Based Template. It includes Entities, Tile based maps, layers, tiles with attributes, and a nifty little game loop.

So then I started thinking, would it be better to create the game library for Amori now or later when we have more to add? Well I decided it would be better to put forth this bare bones project “template” you can import into your Eclipse IDE. It already intertwines with a goal of Devox’s which was to supply tutorials to fit this sort of situation, well then that means we won’t only provide you with this template, but we’ll also give you the education you need to fully utilize it and explain everything piece by piece!

Once this template expands to far, which will probably be soon, we’ll be incorporating it into the Amori library and offering a smaller template utilizing that instead.

New Recruit

I’ve recruited a new aspiring pixel artist to the Devox team, his name is Andy. I found him on a forum where he was posting mock art of a tile based game he wished to create, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and brought him on board, so not only do we have a new artist with a new broad perspective, but we have a new project to work out and put under our belt for your enjoyment. We’ll have mocks available soon.

Please welcome Andy to the team.

Website

Well, Aaron has been working on ironing out the kinks of MyBB and as he is doing so, we’re deeming the site unavailable to new traffic due to embarrassment. So in other words, no website for you. D:

To track progress you can follow Aaron on twitter, or his blog, which you’ll find information for at the bottom of this post.

New Policy

So as I stated earlier, in my time off I’ve been working on utilizing our ways of development as a team. Well in doing so I’ve decided to re-write our policy. Obviously as a boss I can’t be on top of everyone 24/7, so I’m entrusting a sort of development checklist for the members of my team, to keep you all informed, and them on track and even give the sense of them getting something done.

Policy ::

    When proud of your work, why not post about? Not much done? Tweet! Need inspiration? Get the coffee burning :D !

    Frustrated? Feeling down? Need an idea? Take a break, crack open your twitter account and hop on IndieDB, maybe the forums, share word of your difficulty and experiences for all to here until you achieve that sense of “I can do this.”

We’re all about the people, and this will help ensure that word gets out!

In other news ..

Landon has been working very hard and has been getting a lot of work done on his game Boxes! Formerly known as Box Runner. I’ve been giving him advice and he’s worked out a new instanced Menu and procedure for getting right into the game! I’m hoping a demo for the world will be out soon enough.

Conclusion

I’m hungry. Hope this was enough catch up for you :D !

Contact ::

   Aaron - http://www.htmlsdayoff.tumblr.com/ & @litarded