Dev Log #05 - Damn news

Hello There,

For those of you who do not know my name is Matt and I am currently the lead developer for Game Of Engines. GoE is a game development toolkit that allows users to create their own games in a simple environment. Today's article will be regarding my f*** ups.

1. Welcome
Hello There. Thanks for showing an interest in Game Of Engines and I hope you will all continue to support this project. As you know, the toolkit Alpha will be released the moment we get 40 watchers on indiedb.com or moddb.com so remember to tell your friends and spread the love.

2. Events
I am not going to lie - This past week I have gotten near to nothing done. I have spent all week working on other projects and thus have not had much time to use the engine. However, the time I did manage to find - I used to destroy it.
Recently, as you may have heard if you follow our Twitter: I have been working on a ID system for our sprites that will increase the effectiveness of the engine and reduce LUA clutter. This ID system has been completed but not all of our functions use it fully yet as it is in alpha so be expecting a few un-used lua functions.
The ID system took me only 2 hours to make (1 of which was spent accidentally destroying the engine) but in the end I have managed to make the engine's LUA port look a lot nicer and a lot cleaner.

3. Oops
While working on the new Sprite Identification System (SIS), I also managed to mess up the normal spritesheets by forgetting to reset the tile offsets, so that had me distracted for a while (All I had to do in the end was change 2 variables):

As you can see from the image above, the dump-rendering began to occur and the transparency was overridden by a different spritesheet width and height that the one I was using.

4. In The End...
In The End it doesn't matter how good i am at programming: THE ENGINE F****** HATES ME AND DOES WHAT IT LIKES!!!! So, programming can be stressful :)

5. Four Guys And Their Meat
To test out the new ID system - I threw together this simple 200 x 200 map in the editor and I can safely tell you that the Toolkit is running a lot faster now that I have updated the shadow-tile delay.

6. Dreamcast
On a small side-note, a couple of people have sent me a message or a comment regarding the Dreamcast Port of the toolkit. I would like to assure everyone that the Dreamcast Port will receive an update soon to make it much like Light Engine X and Light Engine ALICE so do not fear.
This would have been done sooner but my Dreamcast has taken the knock recently so I am just fixing it and then I can resume playing... oh, i mean porting the engine over...

7. DS?
Much like the Dreamcast, I have also been sent messages asking about the Nintendo DS port of the engine. Unfortunately, I will not be updating the DS Engine anymore as it has become far too outdated. Instead, I will begin work on porting the engine over to the PSVita / PSP as soon as possible.

8. Lua Core
The LUA Core is a script that is automatically created when you launch your game - This script contains loads of useful built-in LUA functions as well as all the Sprite's you created in the Editor. This means no more listing every sprite manually, you can now simply type their name and away you go.
I intended to have the core ready by tonight but, as mentioned earlier, I was side-tracked by the bugs.

9. Thanks
Thanks for reading yall. If you would like this toolkit to be updated more regularly and reach ALPHA then please hit that "watch" button or follow us on Twitter. Sorry for the boring article, I planned to have cool stuff to show but, you know...

Thanks for Reading,
Matt