Progress at Last

So, there were no posts for the last week or so because I've been pulling my hair out. But thanks to a 2 hour 1on1 graphics tutorial from Hamish Carr in which some viable pseudo-code was established some progress was finally achieved. I implemented the pseudo-code with a few bugs, but then this morning Eugene spent 20 minutes fixing the problem and now we have some proper movement.

The plans for tonight:

Eugene is going to turn the code into some delicous Object Oriented niceness.

Lar is going to create some new graphics and splash screens and maybe some sort of menu structure.

Oisín is going to start making some noise.

The next step in aiming for proper rotation is to implement a bezier curve to get a natural flowing movement. :(

FlowDS Beta is here....well kinda

Soooooo here's a screenshot of something simple ive put together. I still have to get the two body parts to rotate independantly of the head then ill get into better looking animation. wooo!

Splash Screen and creatures.

I'm currently working on the sprites for the game. I've also created a splash screen which can be seen here on the right. The creature is a little bit more awkward than expected but thus is the toils of game programming. Once the design of the creature is realised the next step will be aligning all the body parts to follow the head around on screen. I am also trying to figure out the best size for the creature. It will be one of the following (per body part) 16x16 or 32x32. Seacrest OUUUT.

Redesigning classes

Since playing around with the examples in the PAlib examples directory it has become apparent that some redesigning of classes should be done now.

What this blog is about

The aim of this blog is to track the progress of Fl0wDS. Fl0w DS is a recreation of the popular web game called flow.

We are recreating the game for the Nintendo DS for Software Engineering II under the supervision of Joe Kiniry. To the best of my knowledge the other groups, who have the same task, are programming their recreation in Java. So a big thankyou to Joe for allowing us to undertake our take on the project.

The game will be programmed in what is essentially the C programming language. The reason I say essentially is because we have to use some special libraries which are the ndslib and the palib respectfully. These libraries are based on devkitPro which is a full development kit for NDS homebrew games.

Another tool which we use is the no$ nds emulator which can be found here. This seems to be the most user/homebrew friendly emulator available and has helped in testing the PAlib examples, and our own modifications and testings on said examples.

So before we get into the details of our slavings. We would like to thank all the guys at devkitPro for their fantastic development kit, everyone on the PAlib forums for their support, the developers of no$ emulator and everyone in UCD for their help especially Joe Kiniry without whom this would not exist.