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9th November 2011
Today's long, long, long day of development was 100% iOS related.
Having put it off entirely yesterday, I figured I'd better port that level builder doohickey.
I opened TextEdit on the Mac, copied the level builder function from BlitzMax, and set about converting it, line by line, to something that XCode would compile for iOS.

800 lines of code, an estimate of "should only take a few hours, surely!" and then a completely exhausted Jay who just about managed to get the thing working 8 hours later.
ARGH!!

BlitzMax and C are similar, but trying to convert things really helps to point out those quirks!
grrr..

-=-=-


View on YouTube

It's messy, isn't it!!
I'll have to tweak it for a long while, to get things looking neat again.
Part of the issue is that the game's actually shrunk a bit.
The PC edition has about 13 onscreen tiles, down the screen.
The iOS one has been reduced to only 8 for three reasons.

1. Speed! Either I'm not doing it right, or iOS is shit at tilemaps, 'cos this is pretty much all I can achieve if I additionally want a bunch of sprites in the game!!
(note, there's also no background tiles.. A single bitmap will have to do, instead.. grrr)

2. Crispy!! I'd originally scaled everything down a bit, to fit an extra layer on there, but..
eeeeuuwww..
When you started scrolling the scaling made a lot of the sprites go a bit wibbly wobbly, and some of those thin pixellated lines really didn't agree with it!
.. trying to get this going well on iPads will be an extreme case of crossing my fingers!

3. Visibility!!! The screen is tiny, and your thumbs are going to be on there.
I've got about 4 different control scheme in my head, so trying to fit them all in will be tricky, but I'll do my best.
The gameplay "should" be ok! I'll try not to throw random garbage at the player!!

As for the game being "the same"..
.. It should be more or less the same.
It's obviously having to have a few tweaks, but the basic elements should all be intact.

.. ok.. Second topic..



mcobit : RE : JNKPlat 2010
Hi,
I like your game very much!


Thanks! I do, too!

Have you heared of the OpenPandora?
( www.openpandora.org )

It is a little linux ARM handheld device.

Indeed, a great little system, and if I were in any sort of situation where I could splash out a little cash on such a thing, I'd've most definitely done it already.
.. but I'm not, so I've not.

Would it be possible to get a armport of this game?
Is it using opengl and sdl?


Technically, JNKPlat DS08 is already an Arm port, because a DS uses two Arm processors.
But it's done using the lazycoder's favourite function set, PALib, so it's not exactly easily transferrable.

If you like, I could try to port it to this platform for you.
I don't like.

I'm very clingy to JNKPlat, and Platdude.
There is are good reasons for my clingyness.
For starters, he's my avatar on 100s of sites. People see Platdude, they think of me..
Second, It's got my abbreviated name in it's title!! It's literally IS JNK's Platdude game..
Handing a port over to someone else.. REALLY not something I'll be doing anytime soon!

Thanks!

mcobit


You're welcome.

Next year is JNKPlat's 15th anniversary. I'm aiming for a super-duper release at some point in the year.
I'll be attempting a multiplatform extravaganza, and will be trying to keep the same engine intact for all, so that all levels play identically on whichever system they're played.
This'll be tricky.
... but only in as much as I've never actually bothered to do it before!!

Keeping everything going on iOS, will also cause multiple issues... I've tried many JNKPlat attempts on there, and none of them have worked!! (lack of buttons, and all that..)

Pandora has buttons, though, so that's good!
I still don't have one, and to be honest, I'm not very happy about attempting to write games without owning the system. I've not trusted emulators for a long long time.

If I attempt a Pandora edition, you should hear about it some time next year.
.. if I don't, you won't!

Can't say fairer than that..
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