Here’s an article about what to try when you’re just plain stuck on a problem or you’ve run out of motivation.

Getting Over the Hump

Blue Dino Code and SDLTutorials.com are teaming up!  You can now find a forum to discuss the games, libraries, and tutorials on this site.  There’s also a forum link on the left panel.  I might not update all of the pages until the Blue Dino Code site itself moves to the new format I have planned (more dynamic, for sure).  Be sure to take a tour of SDLTutorials.com if you haven’t been there before!  There’s a lot of good stuff for beginners to either C++ or SDL.

MiniLD 14 is just around the corner (Nov. 13-15), and it has been announced that it’ll be all about teamwork!  If you’re ready to push creative limits and get something awesome accomplished, send me an email to join my team!  As should be obvious from this site, my thing is C++ and SDL.  I have been working on a secret side project lately to brush up on OpenGL a bit, so that’s an option too.  It has also been good teamwork practice, since I have very little to do with the game design.  See you there!

goodio has been updated to v1.1!  I added a FileReader class that makes all your problems with ifstream go away (output will come eventually), as well as ioExplode() for help with parsing certain things, and little improvements like changing things such as ioStripDir to ioStripToDir (to make what it does clearer).  I also found a way to get the program’s executable path in Linux, so I’ve replaced the ugly argv stuff with that and the equivalent code for Windows.  So now you can use ioGetProgramPath() with ioSetCWD() to make sure that your relative file names work even if your program is called from a weird place (like /usr/bin).  Comments?  Suggestions?  Let me know!

With Knight of the Cave Dragon, I finally added sound to a Ludum Dare game.  I was really surprised by how easy it was, so I’ve polished the library that I used.  Here’s the first official release of MixBox, a C++ library that wraps and extends SDL_mixer.  You can download it from the SDL page and read the quick usage guide to get more details and to get started.

Ludum Dare 15 is over!  That makes another game on this site. In “Knight of the Cave Dragon”, you play Sir Camus, a knight on a quest to slay a dragon.  If that’s not original enough, then consider this:  The dragon lives in a cave!  Anyhow, it has some fun elements having to do with light and darkness.  No full page yet, so you can grab the LD version as linked from the LD page, or get the latest version here.

When I was writing Frank the Dinosaur, I ran into a question:  How should I handle game events?  Of course, since I was on a bit of a time crunch, I just did it the naive way.  I checked each condition once every frame.  I knew this was a bad way, since some events were time-based and hence would not be triggered out of order.  Yesterday, I wrote up the first bit of a library that will deal with this problem.  JEL Event Library holds both time-based and action-based events.  The action events are stored for quick access in a vector.  The time events are stored in a sorted tree.  In this way, many time conditions can be skipped altogether, meaning fewer checks and a more efficient system.  Borrowing from the GRO_gui codebase, JEL events trigger Signals, which are typesafe wrappers for function pointers (i.e. events call the functions you give them).  With Ludum Dare 15 starting this coming weekend, I’ve uploaded the initial implementation here.  There are pieces missing, but the basic functionality is there.  Future plans include a conditional system that automatically checks variables that you provide and triggers events as their conditions are met.

StickyInput is a C++ library that makes it very easy to put joystick support into your games.

Hey, another Ludum Dare over the weekend.  The theme was Advancing Wall of Doom…  48 hours and here’s my game (Slugs v Salt).

I’m happy with what I accomplished. It is a fine start to what could be a very good game in the future.