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Prototype Progress

Over the last few days I’ve found a great pixel artist to start work on some of the art assets and replace my own terrible programmer art. I’m pretty excited at the prospect of seeing this little game idea start to take shape and give some insight into how the final product will look and function. I’m under no illusions that there is still a long way to go, but these little milestones really do help you to stay motivated. How many indie game projects have been started and never completed? More then I care to think about and I’m guilty of this myself. Other then a handful of small open source hobby games, I have produced anything on a commercial level. Hopefully thats about to change in the not-so-distant future.

Next step is flesh out the battle system and start to get some of the simple AI in. The game itself isn’t particularly AI intensive, but thats not really the focus for the player. The system exists in my little notebook right now and needs a little tweaking, but this week i’ll start to get it done in code form. Hopefully the first little in-game fight should happen soon! :)

Playing around with Physics

Been an interesting but unfortunately brief afternoon of physics coding. I often have tight deadlines with my work and client stuff has to take priority (it’s my primary source of income), so opportunities to work on games is few and far between right now. However, I am far more focused when the opportunity arises, which happens to be most of my lunch breaks and evenings.

Today was spent implementing the beginning of what will become a core game mechanic. It’s a fundamental piece of physics code, to say i’m rusty with maths was an understatement and something I quickly realised. I spent quite a bit of time reading up on the implementation and formulae and hacking away until I got something working. It’s by no means perfect right now, but it’s working and it’s something I can now start refactoring and refining. It’s a relatively small piece of code, but it feels good to get this little milestone done. There is still an extremely long way to go on the overall game, but this was frustrating chunk that is now out of the way (minus the refactor!).

Playing with some new tools today which should make the porting to other platforms a lot shorter. This always works great in theory, but I won’t know just how painful until that time eventually comes. The plan is for release on the Windows, Mac OSX, iPhone and iPad. I’m developing on a Macbook Pro, using TextMate for writing code if anyone is interested :)

HelloWorld();

This is my first blog post, so taking the opportunity to introduce you to me and what I am trying to achieve with DiscipleX Studios. My name is Richard Patching, I graduated from the University of Glamorgan with a degree in Computer Games Development. I am a massive fan of the indie games industry, both as a developer and gamer. When I am not writing software for our clients at utopia 365 LLP I am actively developing games and tools.

I have been programming for 5 years currently, professionally for nearly 3. Open Source is a passion of mine and you can find some of my projects over at GitHub. This small independent studio has the goal of creating some fun and unique indie games for as many platforms as possible. I am currently working on our first commercial game which I will hopefully be able to talk more about very shortly.

Hopefully this is gives some background albeit a bit brief!