A long time has passed since my last post here, largely because I was hired by a great software company, and I’m having a great time there!  I would like to point out that due to the nature of my work, I am bound by an NDA, so everything I write here pertains to my own personal projects and not the company’s.  That said… while I have less free time then usual, I still have a huge drive to work on projects in that which I do still have.

I am currently working on some awesome things, which I want to get around to documenting, such as:

• Fast [quad / oc] tree ray casting using only bit shifts, for a voxel renderer, and a Fez clone.
• Writing an embeddable Java Virtual machine as a scripting language for my game.
• Refactoring and extending Fake86 emulator, to aid in writing boot loader games for the PC (largely through adding a debugger).

On a different subject, I finally got some time to make UI mockups for some programs I want to write.  The first picture shows an 8 bit chip tune composer, which should map nicely to my sound engine I have already programmed.  My goal here was to take my love of Albeton Live and push that into a 320×240 resolution for a fixed sound system.  I have never likes the text interfaces of other 8bit ‘tracker’ music programs.

Incidentally here is a screenshot of the sound core, showing 4 waveforms: SAW, PULSE, SIN, and TRIANGLE.  An interesting feature is that each channel has independent bit crushing, which can be seen in channel 3, and 4.  Channel 5 is the LFO or vibrato oscillator, and channel 6 shows the white noise source.

This is an incomplete mockup for a pixel editor I want to create.  I wanted to take my workflow from Photoshop and streamline it into a 320×240 program, with only the feature I use.

An interesting idea is to release both programs bundled together as a retro game makers app pack.  The sound engine for the chip tune composer could be released as a stand alone library, making it easy to plug into any games.

Also I found this a very interesting to read.  Someone has written up an explanation of a AI following and path planning system for platform games.  This is something I have often thought about myself, and feel it would be nice to experiment with in future.  Check it out:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/11/24/path-planning-ai-in-platformer-games-a-layered-approach/