Are you going to develop/port for the pandora?

[AireTamStorm]

I know I have done some vectors, nothing too fancy, more cartooney, but I guess so... if you point me to a program that creates them

Inkscape is probably the most notable one I can think of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape
http://www.inkscape.org/

 

[Dunny]

Storywriters and game ideas even often come from people who haven't a clue about programming. Same for sound effects, sprites, models, gameplay implementation. In fact, probably one of the biggest turn-offs for programmers starting a project nowadays is not having those assets readily available.

Bang on, that man. I recently started my 2D game engine, and although it's up and running sweet the majority of my time was a) constructing tools to manage sprites, tiles, layers and levels, and b) drawing the test graphics. I'm kind of obsessive, and so spent 8 hours contructing some nice mud+grass tiles... Christ knows how long it will take me to draw a main character sprite

Capable pixel artists and musicians will be most helpful for me - but I would assume that 3D assets will need to be produced for those that want to code games that take full advantage of the hardware.

D.

 

[Bosbeetle]

As before, zero coding ability here. And I'm still mulling over other ways I could contribute (I have a few ideas now, so I'll just see how things go ).

same here

might dabble with a little bit of coding but I think it will be the same as always --> crap

I do have biochemistry skills but they are no use in this community

its useful, you just haven't realized it yet

Well I make a living with it, so for me its usefull

 

[Kyosys]

I know I have done some vectors, nothing too fancy, more cartooney, but I guess so... if you point me to a program that creates them

Inkscape is probably the most notable one I can think of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape
http://www.inkscape.org/

A google came up with sodipodi for me. I'll get into those, thanks

 

[OldGamer]

Well, I can't code a damn thing, nor can I draw or make music, but I would be happy to help with playtesting or perhaps lend a hand with writing documentation.

 

[Jon Grant]

I use none lossy bitmap formats like .bmp, but svg is ok, you can just save the images out as a bitmap or raw file to use in your games, the main problem for coders is actually getting good and consistent artwork, there's as much work (if not more) in the game art than the engine to be honest.

for example a menu screen can have say two backdrops (one ghosted...one or both may be animated), twenty buttons (may or may not be identical) in unselected/selected states, maybe light patches for same to illuminate background when selected, a sidebar graphic, animation panels, animated text (may or may not be coded), animations for sidebar opening/closing, small windows showing current options etc

say 100 bits of artwork/animations/video clips, and that's not for the actual game, just the player menu, when your best stick man looks like an asterisk you can see why many coders use "placeholder" graphics

the main issue is most artists lose interest after the 30th select icon or whatever, take a look at say the menu for Need For Speed II SE, how many individual bits of artwork can you see?, now select an option, how much did the total just go up by?, just that main menu has a huge amount of resources in it.

what normally happens is some artist offers to supply your game art thinking it will fill in few hours, then they find they are gonna spend all weekend doing the basic backgrounds for levels 1 & 2 of a one hundred level game , and when they have those done they can start on the sprites and animations for level 1 :huh: , thank you :wacko:

Imo game art is the biggest stumbling block for so many coders, I must have trashed hundreds of games (I write the code for fun mainly...like most people do sudoku or crosswords for fun), once the code works I generally just end up deleting it, nobody wants to play games with numbered boxes for players/npc`s, primary coloured rectangles for buildings and dingy green splodges for trees (and its embarrassing when someone says "you spent a month on THAT HAR! HAR! HAR!)

I guess there may be a LOT of closet coders around, likewise, an artist could spend months making artwork for some guy who is all talk and no ability, I have seen it happen, then all that work is wasted (unless the game is open source and it gets forked or taken over), or the game is 3/4 done and it turns out the artist has been pinching from someone else's work and hoping it won`t be noticed , then you are back to square one

plus a lot of people can`t see past the place holders to see what actually is going on in the game its self, it makes it hard to get anyone interested when you are going

"no! the blue box with 7 on it is a demon, the red one with 3 on it is a fireball and the fireball is one of 32 animation frames, the demon actualy should have a pitchfork, thats why the players green box with 1 on it gets damaged if you get less than twenty pixels from the demon, thats not bad coding, thats a game feature"

etc

coders have it easy, we think in our languages of choice, want a feature?, takes me longer to type it into the compiler and find the tryping erros :twisted: than to work out how to do it, artists and sound people are what's REALY needed in a project (imo)

Hobbyman

 

[pferguso]

Storywriters and game ideas even often come from people who haven't a clue about programming. Same for sound effects, sprites, models, gameplay implementation. In fact, probably one of the biggest turn-offs for programmers starting a project nowadays is not having those assets readily available.

Bang on, that man. I recently started my 2D game engine, and although it's up and running sweet the majority of my time was a) constructing tools to manage sprites, tiles, layers and levels, and b) drawing the test graphics. I'm kind of obsessive, and so spent 8 hours contructing some nice mud+grass tiles... Christ knows how long it will take me to draw a main character sprite

Capable pixel artists and musicians will be most helpful for me - but I would assume that 3D assets will need to be produced for those that want to code games that take full advantage of the hardware.

D.

I am not that great of a programmer, although I am a 12 year pixel artist and animator, and I do write games in Actionscript, which has a few similarities to C++. Up to now, I have done some audio for Ruck-Man, Snake on Dope, Space Varments, and the upcoming Animatch, but I hope start coding my own games as soon as I get my Pandora. I've been through a few tutorials in C++, and I'll probably have a hard time getting going, but this is something I really want to get going. I would be willing to provide some audio and possibly some pixel art and animation for your projects, if you can help me get my own coding projects off the ground.

I'd like to see what your graphic engine can do.

 

[Eniko]

I'm probably going to have a go at writing games for the Pandora (and PC) using Python and Pygame. If that works out okay I might try something more ambitious like actually compiled code.

The first will be a side scrolling platform... thingy, a la Legend of the Mystical Ninja/Ganbare Goemon. I wonder if you can use pixel shaders with OpenGL ES/Pygame, though, because I'll need to scale up to use all of the Pandora's high res, and scalers are just nice for that. Personal favourite is mixing bilinear and scale2x, although only because hqnx is too arcane for me to understand.

Pandora has really motivated me to make games again.

 

[atomicthumbs]

I'm learning Python just to contribute to the Pandora. My Projects page is here.

 

[Dunny]

Bang on, that man. I recently started my 2D game engine, and although it's up and running sweet the majority of my time was a) constructing tools to manage sprites, tiles, layers and levels, and b) drawing the test graphics.

I'd like to see what your graphic engine can do.

Bear in mind that this is currently a library written in Borland Delphi, not c/c++. It will have to be translated.

Currently the engine handles layers and sprites. A layer consists of 32bpp tiles which are alphablended when rendered to a static background. The engine supports special tiles which the user handles him/herself - say, a blurred window overlooking a landscape. Each layer can be any size, with the game being a moveable "window" on the layer. As such, you can use a few layers to do parallax scrolling and suchlike.

A level is a collection of layers and sprites. Sprites belong to a layer, so are rendered with that layer, and each layer can have sprites. The engine will notify the coder of any sprite/sprite or sprite/layer collisions at a pixel by pixel level if the coder chooses to do so. Background sprites and animations are possible this way. Tiles can have a different collision data field to their appearance - I currently have a set of landscape tiles that have alpha-blended grass which the player sprite does not collide with, but the mud below the grass is collideable, so the player appears to walk through the grass.

I'm looking at adding custom lighting routines and a particle engine at a later date when it's all running well. The trick with this is not to produce a game as such, but to get the engine into a state that it can be used as a simple delphi class. I also have to finish the tools I need to start writing games. Layer editors, sprite managers etc. I'm currently 50% of the way through and expect to be finished some time next week. After that, I can refine the engine and tune the source to make porting to the panda a bit easier.

This engine will be able to produce a framework for any 2d game from Defender to R-Type to Mario/Sonic style games. Beware that it doesn't write games for you - it just provides an engine to get sprites and graphics on the screen. You'll have to write the code to handle collisions and level transitions yourself.

D.

 

[PoisonedV]

I'm learning Python just to contribute to the Pandora. My Projects page is here.

Welcome to our club, please get your license and identification from the clerk!

 

[MDave]

I have ordered one and I will attempt to port one of the variants of Quake (first one) to it. Not the bug ridden glquake though, and I highly suggest anyone else the same interested in porting Quake. :wink:

Then I'll have a go at Quake 3

 

[corsec67]

I want to do some game development, mostly for fun.

I have an idea for a game involving zeppelins and biplanes set in about 1916. The first version might be 2D just to make things simple, with maybe a 3D version later.

 

[Vladsharp]

My first goal would be to port a particular C application that renders MOCAP data (a coursework we are set at our uni). We'll see where it goes from there on

 

[likwidoxigen]

I'll be coding but not my own games, just occasional patches.

I'll just bring over my kindle book converter (just needs python and bash) so I grab new books on the go without needing my laptop to get them properly converted.

 

[tjfbryantx]

Not much of a coder or developer....but I can hardware mod to improve functionality... I've done that with the original gp32 and f100 gp2x. Once modded I'll share my results and perhaps offer a service to help others.

 

[javaJake]

I'm trying to contribute myself in various ways that I can. I've got quite a bit of experience in programming, but a lot of stuff I want is already out there, just needs porting.

 

[lordmunk]

im not much of a coder, really so ill wait to see what others are making before i really consider doing anything, but im sure as hell gonna make something ^_^.

 

[Red Ring Rico]

I'm currently working on an application kind of like GameTap but for homebrew games on the Pandora. I'm hoping to get it up and running in time for the second batch. It probably won't be entirely done by then, but it should be workable.

 

[PokeParadox]

CromoZome will come to the Pandora. I have just fixed a critical bug from the collision routines. All that's left to fix bugwise is freeze. :wacko:

I'll do a quick compile for Pandora once it's ready, and then make a proper Pandora enhanced release later.