Patreon
I have transitioned to using Patreon for those who wish to support my development efforts.
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Book: OpenGL ES 2 for Android
When I started out, I knew almost nothing about OpenGL. The framework I wrote for spacedust utilizes OpenGL ES 1.0 and recently I’ve discovered I would like to use some of the 2.0 features. Mainly shaders!
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Encyclopedia Galactica
Spacedust is an adventure. And part of an adventure is exploration!
SPOILER ALERT
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Space Lag
Premature optimization is bad! But space navigation had caught a serious case of lag. It was bad enough to annoy me, so I decided it was time to fix it.
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Status Update #2
It’s been two months since my last update. I’ve been able to finish nearly everything I had planned for the first release.
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Map & Exploration Enhancements
I couldn’t resist adding a couple more features to planet exploration.
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Maps - Screenshots
I am trying to keep the very first version of my game simple - otherwise I will just keep adding new features and never release it! But I felt maps were an important part of exploring.
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Planet Surface - Screenshots
I am a programmer, not an artist. I consider anything graphical as placeholder art until I can replace it with something better. In the meantime, I do my best! I’ve created a very basic dirt/water/grass tileset for the different types of planets and the start of a character.
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Status Update #1
I have been working hard. Recently it has been mostly on back-end framework code, so not something I can easily show off. Things like improving how the game saves all the data it generates and changing how it manages the state of the game. But I wanted to post an update on my progress.
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Planet Details - Screenshots
I’ve been working hard on finishing up the basic parts to the space interface so I can move on to planet terrains. I have a lot more planned for the space interface, but the first version will have just the very basics in place. I want to focus more on the planet simulations and surface exploration first.
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Space Interface - Screenshots
I have some new screenshots to share. They reveal a little more of the interface for interacting with the stars in game. Enjoy!
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Book: Beginning Android Games
I had a few false starts while trying to figure out how I wanted to write my game. I tried to learn a few Android game development frameworks but I kept running into roadblocks. I would find myself wanting to do things that seemed just outside the bounds of what the frameworks could do. And since I didn’t really understand what was going on behind the scenes, I wasn’t sure how to proceed.
That’s when I decided to take a step back and learn more about OpenGL and how things work at a lower level.
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First Look - Screenshots
A lot of the initial work for a game is building the backend framework. It was really exciting when I finally got to start making the actual game. First step? Space!
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Hello World!
Playing computer games and programming have been two of my favorite activities since I was a kid. I didn’t even know what a function or array was before I was making stupid little 2D space shooter games in Visual Basic. (Yes, the code was terrible.)
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