New web site is up

I have completely failed to keep you all up to date with the latest development news from me.
A few days ago, my new games development web site went live. Even if I do say so myself, I think it's pretty cool. The entire site is coded by hand (apart from the Lightbox scripts). I prefer to create my own sites this way, so that I have total control over the content, without relying on, or being limited by, a third party content management system.
Anyway, if you want to have a look (and I know you do), then hop on over to: http://www.krazypengwin.com.
Second bit of news, probably not as impressive, but I think it is equally important, I have made some changes to the Colour Code Generator I mentioned before. It is now possible to drag and drop colours from the custom colours to the main colour button, and vice versa. It is also possible to use drag and drop to reorder the colours in the custom section. A little more important, I have added the possibility to drag and drop a colour from the application directly to the source code, and it will insert the colour, in the format selected, into your code. Not a massive change, but it could be useful and save a few seconds, rather than having to click Copy and then Paste. Some more formats have also been added, so the colours can now be formatted for the following languages: Monkey, BlitzMax, Xojo, Cocoa for OS X, Cocoa for iOS, Lazarus (and Delphi), Python, HTML, CSS and as either a list of decimal or hexadecimal values.
This little tool, along with some of the others I have written, will be available from my web site once I have written the help documentation.

Yet another in house tool created

Not been long since my last post, but I thought you all might like to know about my newest in house tool that will save me a lot of time in the future.
First of all, the reasoning behind it: both Monkey and BlitzMax have the facility to import animation strips for using with your sprites. These are images which hold all the frames of a particular animation, so that you can load them at once, rather than having to load multiple images, which is a lot slower.
The concept behind it is dead easy, each frame of the animation has the same height and width, and therefore, the image is easy to break up into the individual frames as the animation progresses. The downside of this is the time it can take to manually create an animation strip, particularly if you have a lot of frames, it is not uncommon to use 15 separate frames just for walking in a single direction. Below is an example of the animation strip I used when I created Mr Wong's Loopy Laundry:

As you can see, there are 59 frames to animate Mr Wong. I created this by hand and it took quite a time.

So, to help ease this process, I have written a small program I call Image Stitcher. I guess you could call it the sister program of Image Slicer. What it allows me to do, is import each of the frames, select the output height and width of the frames (in case I decide to enlarge or shrink them), the drawing style (scaled - maintaining aspect ration, stretched or cropped) and the number of columns in the animation strip. This is then exported as a single image, like the one above.

As you can already see, this is a massive time saver, that will hopefully save me hours of work.
As with my other tools, it was written with Xojo.

New tools

OK, time for another update (already!?).
I have been in the process of developing some in house tools that will help me write the games. I generally create tools as and when I need, or want, them. I could probably go to the App Store and find other peoples versions myself, but I figure, why pay for them, when I can write them. After all, if you are a plumber, you don't call someone in to fix the sink.

So I thought I would show them to you, just so you don't think I've been idly sitting on my arse.

These are obviously jus the icons that our amazing art department (erm... me) created. I shall go through each of these in order.

First up, the Colour Code Generator:

I don't know about you, but I hate having to work out colours and insert them into the source code, or web page. So this little tool allows me to select a colour, using the standard OS X colour selector and it will then display the colour codes in decimal and hex, as well as a source format of my choosing (at present, it will display code for Monkey/BlitzMax, HTML/CSS and Xojo/RealStudio). I can then click copy which will copy the source to the clipboard for pasting into my source code. If I already know the decimal or hex codes, I can enter them manually and it will adjust the colour accordingly. It's a small app, but quite a time saver.

Next, Database Analyser:

This is quite an old tool I wrote some time ago and it is a major headache remover when developing database applications in Xojo.

The analyser will load an SQLLite database file that has been created in the Xojo IDE and kick out the source code required for Xojo to create a new database file on the fly with the same structure. If you have designed quite a large database, this can save you, literally, hours of coding time, converting it to source code.

Font Builder:

Although the Monkey language is ideal for writing cross platform games, one of the areas where it is lacking is font and text support. In fact, it virtually has no font support. So to remedy this, Font Builder allows me to create a PNG image file of the required font and it also exports a definition file that is then loaded into Monkey (using my own custom class) and the font can then be used within the game. But, it is not limited to the standard TrueType fonts that come with a Mac, nor just to those that are downloadable. Because the Builder uses PNG images, it is also possible to create your own fonts, in colour, for your games. This can allow a much more vibrant screen display, without having to create a bunch of extra image files.

Image Slicer:

Working on my current game, I came upon a few limitations in Android that prevented me from using large images effectively. I also noticed that some of the images I was  using were pretty inefficient, memory wise, as there were large areas of transparencies in them. Image Slicer allows me to slice images in a grid pattern of my choosing. I am also able to select which slices are to be exported and which are to be ignored. This way, I can more effectively manage the memory usage of my games and also obtain a few speed enhancements.

Finally, Max Debugger:

I have shown this one before. As I do most of my coding in BBEdit, rather than the Monkey or BlitzMax IDE's, I needed a way to debug my BlitzMax games without having to fire up the IDE. Max Debugger is just that, simply a debugger for BlitzMax games.

I do plan to enhance this further at some point in the future to also act as a debugger for Monkey and to allow remote debugging for multiple platforms.

All these tools were written with RealStudio (I haven't actually upgraded to Xojo yet) and compiled as Cocoa apps.

Wow! Seems like months since I last posted anything here.

Oh, wait. I HAS been months!

So, what have I been up to in the world of programming?

Well, I have begun work on some new games under the Krazy Pengwin Games label. I'll post some more news about them soon.
I have switched game development language to Monkey. This is also by Blitz Research, in fact, it can be seen as the little brother to BlitzMax, but it has a neat little trick that BlitzMax did not. Whereas BlitzMax was cross platform, allowing me to compile to Mac, Windows and Linux, Monkey goes even further. With a single source project, I can create games for, not only the desktop operating systems, but also for Android and iOS. Monkey also supports XNA, but I'm not too interested in publishing to that platform right now. So the upshot is, the games I am working on will also be available to mobile user, firstly Android, but hopefully iOS by the end of the year.
I'm still using RealStudio (now called Xojo) for in house tools, but not much in the way of commercial applications. Once my new web site is up and running, I will be making some, if not all, of these tools available for free download.
Well, that's it for now, so just watch this space for details of new games and stuff.