Ryan Makes Stuff

Official policy on youtube/let's play stuff

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:07:22 -0700

It’s really fucking stupid that I have to say this, but since the whole nintendo thing is going on here goes:

Let’s Play/youtube folks, please play my games. I love you, your videos, and the feedback you give me. Do whatever advertising you want on your videos, after all you put the work into them.

I would request (but not demand) that if you use one of my games you give a courtesy link back to my blog or the game’s page if it has one.

First look at having a pilot’s body in First Law. Huge...

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:10:14 -0700

First look at having a pilot’s body in First Law. Huge addition in terms of immersion!

First Law mentioned in The PA Report!

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:17:11 -0700

First Law mentioned in The PA Report!:

Developers are sharing their dreams of space, and far away places. Players are exploring hostile environments and seeing wondrous things from our offices.

Collected Feedback from First Law: Test Build 00

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:10:00 -0700

Last night I went through all the forum posts I could find and all the twitter and youtube comments that I got about the initial build, and tried to collate all of the individual items of feedback into a list I can work from. Some of the items were mentioned far more often than others (e.g. - improving ship handling was probably most common). I broke the list into 3 sections: Stuff that’s being actively worked on, stuff that’s on the TODO list but isn’t actively being worked on, and stuff that wasn’t even on our radar.

I was happy to see that a lot of the feedback overlapped with stuff I wanted to work on next, it makes me thing that I’m working with roughly the right priorities. But it’s a lot of work to do, so it will be a busy month!

Stuff already being worked on:

Controls: Better ship handling/physics
Controls: Recenter button for yaw drift
Gameplay: Boost/afterburners
Gameplay: Enemy turning speed
Graphics: Pilot’s Body
Graphics: More active screens in cockpit (objective screen, missile/ai command screens, etc)
Input: Joystick support
Sound: Laser sound
Sound: Weird effects at high speed
Bug: Screen info rendering in world cameras
Bug: Enemies can shoot you through meteors?

Stuff on the todo list:

Controls: In-game control mapping
Graphics: Asteroid Textures are too low
Graphics: Better explosions
Misc: Controls for non-rift players

Stuff that’s new:

Input: Hydra support
Input: Hydra positional tracking
Gameplay: Full newtonian physics
Misc: Customizable cockpit

A new video of my game First Law! I also released the first...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:15:24 -0700

A new video of my game First Law! I also released the first public demo for anyone who has an Oculus Rift, you can get it at http://rjevans.net/firstlaw

Early combat footage from First Law my April #1gam and first...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:45:01 -0700

Early combat footage from First Law my April #1gam and first project for the Oculus Rift. The sense of immersion is insane. Hoping to ship a small combat sim by the end of the month, and add some missions into the game next month.

Rubbertron 1.1 for Win, Mac, Linux

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:04:32 -0800

Now with configuration support for keyboard & controllers!

It’s not a fancy feature, but hopefully it makes things a bit easier for you if you have a non-traditional keyboard or want to play with a gamepad.

Download Links:

Rubbertron: A love letter to arcades of the 1980's

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:45:00 -0800

Play in the Unity Webplayer

- or -

Download for:

In the early 1980’s a mall near where I lived had an old arcade called Gold Mine. I wasn’t usually allowed in there but I remember sneaking in a few times to look at all the arcade games. They kept the lights in the arcade pretty much off, so everything was lit by the neon glow of arcade machines.

It was a magical place.

With my February #1gam, I wanted to make an arcade game that wasn’t a slavish replica of games from that era, but rather how I remember them thinking back to walking through Gold Mine. Loud, bright, glowing, fast, and challenging.

The best way to play this is hooked up to the biggest screen you can find and the lights low, trading off between friends to see who can get the farthest.

Enjoy!

A Sense of Scale - Cod of Duty's Weekend

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:06:22 -0800

The Press

So early on Saturday, I woke up and saw this:

Rock Paper Shotgun - Everyone Was Thinking It: Cod of Duty

Holy crap, right?! And then over the course of the next 48 hours, it was followed by:

The Verge
Polygon
Destructoid
Kotaku
The Escapist
Superlevel (German)
Indius (French)
Gamesblog (Italian)
Videoyun (Turkish?)
Game*Spark (Japanese)

Absolutely blown away both by the coverage and the positive response by the people who took the time to comment. Thank you, everyone!

The Players

As of this post, Cod of Duty has had 16,579 unique visitors from 116 different countries. Here’s a map of the distribution (darker green = more players from that country):

Preferred Play Method

Web Player: 5786 downloads
Windows Binary: 4525 downloads
Mac Binary: 745 downloads
Linux Binary: 362 downloads
Source Code Views: 175 clicks

I’m really glad that developing in Unity gives me a wide variety of options for deployment, since it seems like there’s no clear favorite for players. I’ll definitely spin a full set of builds like this for future games!

All of the downloads ended up generating just over 100GB of traffic on my web server this weekend - I’m very happy I have a good server, a lower end one might have melted.

Again, Thank You

It was a wild ride this weekend and one of the most encouraging ones I’ve ever had as an indie game developer. If you’re looking for more fun games to play, check out some of the other crazy games over at One Game a Month! And if you like the sound of co-op arcade multiplayer, come back at the end of February for when I post my next game. :)

Updated Cod of Duty builds

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:05:00 -0800

The only big change is an invert y-axis button for the folks who wanted that. Bring up the pause menu during play (esc key) and toggle to your heart’s content.

Download for:

Cod of Duty covered by Rock Paper Shotgun!

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:02:28 -0800

Cod of Duty covered by Rock Paper Shotgun!:

And then there’s the final battle, which is just majestic.

I’m blown away by the positive response. You folks are absolutely amazing.

CoD of Duty: The Premier First Person Shooting Fish in a Barrel Simulator

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:21:00 -0800

Play in the Unity Webplayer

- or -

Download for:

(Note: Hello good people of the internet! I also have a new free arcade game you should check out. It’s available for Android/Windows/Mac/Linux and iOS is coming soon. Click here f more info)

For my January #1gam, I wanted to do something that’d be both small in scope and something that I hadn’t really done before. Based on a joke that my friend John made about Call of Duty always being abbreviated ‘CoD’ on the internet, I decided to make a first person shooter where all of your enemy are fish.

A lot of the ‘joke’ is how I feel about the standard FPS single player campaigns. Short, not terribly interesting, and completely over the top with their story elements.

From a development perspective this was actually a lot of fun to work on, even if I spent way more time on it in January than I ever anticipated to. I had never made anything like a FPS before, and I had never had any sort of scripted elements in a shipped game before, and this let me try out both of those things.

Things I had wanted to do that I ended up cutting in the interest of time:

Co-op multiplayer
Controller support
An underwater level

In retrospect I think any more levels probably would have taken too long to play, and the joke frankly gets a bit old by the end of it. The 10-15m it takes to play through now seems sufficient.

Love Letter to Lightspeed - My game for Pirate Kart V

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:21:00 -0800

A game I made this weekend for Pirate Kart is now done! It’s called Love Letter to Lightspeed, and is inspired by games like Drifter, Privateer, and Elite. The goal in this game is to kill pirates, collect cargo, and upgrade your ship. There’s no “win” condition, just survive in the universe and have fun.

There’s a bunch of other stuff I’d like to add, but now that the initial 48h time period is over I’ll have to work on it as time allows.

Windows Download

Mac Download

EDIT: Link to playable web version

Screenshots:

Saw this tree when visiting with family over Thanksgiving. I...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:02:18 -0800

Saw this tree when visiting with family over Thanksgiving. I can’t remember I saw a tree that was so red (especially when compared to the rest of the trees in the area!)

Spent the last 2 weeks in maui. So, so nice.

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:19:01 -0700

Spent the last 2 weeks in maui. So, so nice.

Adding custom middleware to Ring/Compojure

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 11:41:47 -0800

One of the great things about Ring is it allows us to add request processing middleware really easily. Requests are passed through the middleware functions in sequence until eventually it hits your route handler. e.g:

client request -> ring -> middleware 1 -> … -> middleware n -> route handler

The structure of a ring middleware is:

So for a simple example, here’s a compojure app that creates a simple System.out logging system and adds it to the middleware chain:

Now when you start this app and point a browser to http://localhost:8081, you should see the following in your terminal:

{:remote-addr 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1, :scheme :http, :request-method :get, :query-string nil, :content-type nil, :uri /, :server-name localhost, :headers{accept-charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3, accept-language en-US,en;q=0.8,accept-encoding gzip,deflate,sdch, user-agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.224 Safari/534.10, accept application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5, connection keep-alive, host localhost:8081}, :content-length nil, :server-port 8081, :character-encoding nil, :body #<Input org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser$Input@7dc21ece>}

A better logging implementation would use the clojure.contrib.logging API, and have some sort of configuration for a file to log into. But this is a great way to get going and have some insight into what the request object is giving you.

Session Support in Compojure/Ring

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:59:21 -0800

This took me a bit, but in the end it’s pretty easy to get working.

As before this is with Compojure 0.5.3, and ring-core 0.3.4.

project.clj looks the same as it did before.

core.clj:

Notes:

I added ring.middleware.session to the :require list, since it’s the default handler for sessions.
By default it does an in-memory session store. If you look at the ring github page there are some libraries for storing in other systems like mongodb.
Our route destructuring map is: {session :session}. This is because the session middleware adds the session info to the request map before passing it on to our handler.
The -> syntax now seems to be the preferred way to add middleware. The old wrap! and decorate syntax no longer seems to be supported.

Clojure, Compojure, and Ring Notes #1

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:31:15 -0800

For the last few days I’ve been evaluating clojure and compojure for use in a game server. I’m really enjoying working in a lisp again and I’m rather fond of compojure’s design, but the documentation is incredibly sparse. Even worse, most of the notes you can find online are wrong because they refer to earlier versions where the api was significantly different.

So as I make headway I thought I’d post my notes here. It’s not going to be a tutorial, more rough “I had to do x to make y work” lists. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to other people struggling through their early phases of compojure development.

Current Software Versions at the Time of Writing

Clojure & Clojure Contrib - 1.2
Leiningen - 1.4.0
Compojure - 0.5.3
ring-jetty-adapter - 0.3.1
ring-json-params - 0.1.3
karras - 0.5.0

1. Compojure “Hello World”

(This assumes you have lein already installed and on your path — let me know if you need notes on that too)

% lein new comp1

Creates a new project called “comp1”

Edit project.clj to read:

the :dependencies section lists all the libraries we’ll need for now
running lein deps will pull the libraries from clojars (or your local cache if you already have them)
See the bug at the bottom of this post for an explanation on :keep-non-project-classes

Edit src/comp1/core.clj to read:

defroutes is the Compojure macro that you use to create a handler
Routes are tested in listed order
It’s important have a catchall like route/not-found at the end, since some middleware will break if you return nil instead
A single route is in the format (<http method> <what to match> <request destructuring map> <response generator>)
A sample of a destructuring map would be something like: {params :params body :body}. This pulls the values of :params and :body from the request map and binds them to the variables params and body, respectively. You can then use those variables in your response generator.
A response generator can just be a map that gets returned, in the simple case like we have here. You can also define functions that return maps and use them to make your code easier to read
The start-server uses future and var so while on the repl we can pickup any changes simply by saying (require ‘comp1.core :reload-all). This saves us the downtime of spinning jvm’s up and down.

Bug: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: compojure.response.Renderable

Some googling indicates that this bug is some weird interaction between clojure and lein. More details are here and here.

Workaround:

Add :keep-non-project-classes true to your project definition in project.clj. After doing so you may need to do a “lein clean && lein deps” before lein repl or lein run will work again.

Welcome!

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:21:49 -0800

I’ll be posting my thoughts on iOS development here, along with any tips and tricks I pick up along the way. Stay tuned!

Let me know if there are any topics you’d like to see covered, I’m happy to take requests.