by pixelpusher on Wednesday 1 September 2010
[Blog, Software]
Creative Pact Day 2
Today I’m going to create more of a “game,” eventually called CatFishTron. No, really. I’ll be learning how to add sound to a game, a moving background, and maybe, if I have time, add some self-removing sprites (for explosions, etc!)
First task – to make a sprite “blow-up” in AndEngine you use a SequenceModifier and attach it to the Sprite:
this.mBlowupModifier = new SequenceModifier(new ScaleModifier(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.2f));
final IShapeModifierListener listener = new IShapeModifierListener()
{
public void onModifierFinished(IShapeModifier arg0, IShape arg1)
{
// this is a function in my main Activity that removes a sprite entity and physics body in a separate thread
destroySprite(_spriteEvent.mSprite);
}
};
//set a listener to listen for the modification having finished
this.mBlowupModifier.setShapeModifierListener(listener);
// attach it to the sprite entity object
_spriteEvent.mSprite.addShapeModifier(mBlowupModifier.clone());
Here’s today’s code (again, it’s not complete, just building on the previous day, but you might find it interesting…)
Here’s the app itself, you can open the link on your android phone to install it.
It’s a work in progress, remember. It take a bit to make a video game… even a crappy one!
Also, I promise that at the end of this I will write a tutorial.
Now go play MeowTron.
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 31 August 2010
[Blog]
For Creative Pact 2010 I’m going to be teaching myself how to make a game using the open source AndEngine for Android mobile devices. apparently, Android apps are the next goldrush, the biggest thing since skinny jeans, and I never got a pair of skinny jeans so I might as well jump in the deep end here.
Firstly, I already blogged about starting with AndEngine, so I won’t repeat myself here. I’ll instead start with my current app, which is going to be a physics-based game with draggable characters.
AndEngine uses Box2D under the hood as its physics engine, which you can find here in project form. Of course, you don’t need to download the project unless you want to see the source code (which can be useful as I couldn’t find any javadocs as of yet). You can instead use the Java jar that comes with the main AndEngine project from GoogleCode.
To get started, I imported the main AndEngine project into Eclipse (New Project->Android Project->create from existing source) and followed the 5 minute video on starting a project in Eclipse, then dragged one of the Physics example Activities from the main project into my new game project (called, funnily enough, GameTest).
The next bit caught me – I need to drag the andenginephysicsbox2dextension.jar (whew… what a name) into my lib folder from the AndEngine main project, and also create a libs folder in my new project and then drag the libandenginephysicsbox2dextension.so from the main project’s libs folder into my new libs folder. If you don’t do this, you will get immediate, fatal errors every time you launch your new app. Of course, in hindsight, this seems perfectly obvious, doesn’t it?
Ok, finished the app but ran out of time to explain – here is the code and all that fun.
Try installing the apk on your phone!
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 4 December 2007
[Blog, Past Performances]
Nov. 25, 2007
Here in the European heart of global finance that is London, there are no shortage of closed, corporate-sponsored, invite-only events promoting proprietary products with secret formulas and patented ideas. A refreshing break from this trend is the perennial [tag]Openlab[/tag] series of events, now in its fourth incarnation. Openlab is a loose collective of artists, computer industry professionals, and performers whose main goal is to spread free software an ideas through events with talks, workshops, and performances.
Openlab4 took place 25 November at Melange, an aspiring art-friendly venue just north of east London’s art-clogged arteries of Old Street and Shoreditch. Read more… »
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