Blog Entries

How to use wxGrid correctly

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0100

WxWidgets is a beautiful thing. Coupled with wxFormBuilder, you can make relatively complex GUI applications in a fraction of the time a traditional C++ app would take... still not as quick to build as C#, but then again, if you have a huge library of useful C++ code lying around, the relative value of C# is dimin [...]

Picking a 3D object with a 2D pointer

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Yes, it's another episode of Can't Google My Way Out, with your host Jason Hughes!

While working on our editor, we just recently got to the point where we needed to do mouse selection of objects. There were two methods I was considering for accomplishing this: 1) the obvious method that involves ray casting from the near-plane out to the far-plane and selecting the nearest object the ray hits, and 2) rendering all objects to a render target that has object IDs stored per- [...]

We're certified!

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Good news for us! We're officially licensed Sony developers for PS3 and PSP. Now, as a studio we're able to work on every major piece of hardware (except the DS, which doesn't interest me). Very cool indeed.

So, what are we working on? Uh... can't say much, but that we're putting a lot of effort into building an editor. Finally, we're taking the time to accelerate our development. Funny when you say that out loud, but it's true. It's really amazing how time consumi [...]

Weird behavior in MSVC 2005 SP1

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So, during a refactor of a large section of code, I ran into an oddity with Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler in the way templates, default parameters, and namespace/class works. Really odd, particularly because it had been my (naive) understanding that a namespace and a class are quite close to the same thing if your functions are all declared to be static inside the class... truthfully, I (and most people I've talked to) believe that a class wrapping a bunch of static functions is just a nic [...]

Sample map

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I fixed most of the unsightly bugs and added a few features today, so I guess now it's worth posting a map. And no, we don't plan on making a rogue-like game. We needed a quick way to experiment with level sizes for a game without putting a lot of time into an artist building it by hand, so I auto-generate levels at various sizes and we 'play' through it as quickly as we can to get a sense of scale and rapidly find the magical Goldilocks values. We also need to know if large rooms with lot [...]

Fun with dungeon generators

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Today/tonight, I spent about 12 hours writing a random dungeon generator, very much in the style of a Rogue-like game. I've done it before, sorta, but never was impressed with the results. I think that was partly because I expected too much from such simple algorithms I was implementing. This go-round, however, I used industrial strength techniques and added a little control through parameters I pass in. The end result is a kind of nice set of maps. Once I clean up the rendering, I'll tr [...]

Fighting 20 year old bad Microsoft code

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

It's been one of those rare days when things go from bad to worse just when you think the problems are licked. But a fun day, nonetheless. Let me explain.

I'm writing my second article for Game Engine Gems, one about an advanced palettizer technique that works for colors and non-colors alike, and does a remarkable job... but I'll save the details for the article. What is important is that today, I had to generate a couple of sample images to compare with Photoshop. My good frien [...]

A New Day

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0100

It's been a hard but exciting development season. This whole year, we've been working with RedFly Studio to bring their Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked title to life by providing the majority of progamming for the game. Meanwhile, we also did a complete port from PC to Wii retail for North America (EU coming soon, we hope) of Dr. Fizzwizzle's Animal Rescue, for Replay Games (correction).

Right now, Jeff and I also are wrapping up the final build for a November 3rd r [...]

typedefs are weak

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So, there's a lot of issues with C++ and the poor support for creating new types. Particularly, it's often useful to make a type-safe integer... for example, if you have several different functions that do similar things and are easy to confuse the values, since an int is an int is an int. It'd be really nice to have the compiler help you when you pass an integer you got from one function into another that means a totally different thing.

Let's get more specific, since all this dan [...]

Tap.. tap.. tap.. this thing on?

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Hooboy... looks like some folks picked up on the last post and got the wrong idea. I want to first be clear to anyone who didn't realize I was taking a poke at ourselves as much as anyone else when expressing disappointment about B&S's performance. We made the game, and in a sense it was an experiment (I'll explain below), but there's nobody to blame for the final product except us. We built something from nothing and shipped it. Whether it was a blockbuster or not, I'm very proud of [...]

What are we up to?

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Some folks have been asking about Bruiser & Scratch, about what we're up to right now, and about what we're planning to do in the near and far future. Some folks are just complaining that I don't post enough. Given that there's no good way to answer all of this to each person individually, and that I'm pretty sure we can release the information, here's the scoop.

Bruiser & Scratch has been available on WiiWare for a while, and as expected, we haven't been blow [...]

Visual Studio rebuilds forever

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

A small tidbit for frustrated developers. I have Visual Studio 2005 and generally like it a lot... still lacks some of the features that we had in 1995 with VC6, but the improvements have grown on me. However, occasionally I'll run into a serious snag that makes no sense and I have to spend hours or days worrying about it. Here's one of them, and how to solve it:

I have a large solution with about 50 projects in it, mostly libraries. I had all the dependencies set correc [...]

Various bits of news

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

It's been a little while since the last blog post. Quite a few things have been happening around here, so I guess it's time to put up some news, in no particular order.

Andrew Gilmour has moved on to greener pastures. We wish him well at Frozen Codebase. So, we're looking for an Art Director again.
Steel Penny has agreed to help our friends at Red Fly Studio wrap up a couple of titles that needed some additional man power. This is a great opportunity for us, and if all goes well, w [...]

Bruiser & Scratch Post-Mortem

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

It's time to do our post-mortem now that all the facts are in and we have had time to catch our breath before diving back into development. I'll use the traditional Game Developer Magazine format, since it's easy and familiar.

What went right:

Build our own tech. One of the goals in starting a game company, for me, was to get a chance to do whatever technology I found interesting. A selfish reason, I admit, but most entrepreneurs are selfish in this way. Whil [...]

Release Details Announced!

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

It's official! Bruiser & Scratch goes live on WiiWare on Monday, December 8th. If you have 1000 Wii Points, you can redeem them for a copy of our first and finest. Please do, and let us know what you think (in the forums).

Best wishes,
The Dev Team

Independent Games Conference 2008

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I had a pretty decent time at the Austin IGC 2008. To be honest, I didn't know what to expect, but in the end I did come away with a few new shreds of wisdom and several useful contacts. The latter being more important in the short term these days, actually.

Our main objective was to attend Demo Night on Thursday and show off our game, with the hopes that some press would cover it. We weren't disappointed. Other than accidentally losing my mind and talking directly to the camera [...]

Last Bug Before Submission

brad@avilay.com — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

We're officially an "E for Everybody" title, according to the ESRB! That's great news, although I wasn't really worried on that front. We also received our first set of bugs back from Nintendo. Honestly, I was pretty worried about this one, but overall it wasn't so bad. Now that our manual is fully translated into French and Spanish, and I also have final logos for both the company and the game (yes, logos are hard), all that was left is a couple of small issues that I fixed right away, and one [...]

The Waiting Game

brad@avilay.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Well, there's a lot going on right now, just not so much in our office. At this very moment, Nintendo is rummaging through our game, looking for problems that would prevent us from shipping on the Wii. We hope they don't find anything significant to hold up the show.

We've also got Brad James working on our new web site. Should be pretty and more functional. We've got a young lady translating our submission materials into French. And otherwise we're just polishing up the last few t [...]

The Big Crunch Countdown, Episode 9

brad@avilay.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Big sigh of relief. I fixed the graphical glitch. That was the hardest bug of the game, at almost 12 hours to fix. Additionally, the deep concern about size constraints has evaporated now that we definitely fit under Nintendo's maximum package size. I've sent off our first submission for basic checking, and am mailing out the ESRB demo reels today.

Yeah, we might actually ship this thing! It's funny. I've shipped a number of games over the years and while I was always proud of my team [...]

The Big Crunch Countdown, Episode 8

brad@avilay.com — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Yes, it's always a $25 cable that holds up a $20 million game. Okay, a little exaggeration in our particular case, but it's no joke that the tiniest thing can stop a freight train dead in its tracks. Today was a disaster of epic proportions, in that sense.

A dear friend, Brad Clark, dropped by to say hello and check out the game. In about every 30 runs, I'd seen a pretty serious graphical glitch maybe once, but it has been utterly unreproducible. The whole time Brad played, objec [...]