Making a map with tiles

People use tiled game engines for several reasons. One of which is that it's easy to generate a fairly large world in a game from a small set of tiles and the tilesets used will have a smaller memory footprint than storing the map as an image. Another is that you can add unique behavior to the different types of tiles. Say you have a grass tile and a mud tile, you could have your hero walk at normal speed over the grass tile and at a reduced speed or not at all over the mud tile. Using tiled maps allow for a large world to be created easily with the right editor, enter Tiled.

New Theme and Mobile Theme

I have changed the theme of the blog.  Visually, and topically.  The main focus of this blog will be my adventures in game development, that doesn't mean that there won't be any posts covering other topics. I would just like to focus my efforts on game dev and other programming.

I have also chosen a mobile theme, so visit me on your phone!

Making a sprite sheet

Have any of you casual game developers been working on a project and got to the point of needing some character graphics?  Haven't we all?  You might ask, why not just Google for some filler sprites? Well, I tried that, it was difficult to find a sprite sheet that had what I was looking for. I was looking for sprites for an isometric engine I was working on.  Characters would need to walk in 8 directions.  Worst of all, I cant draw.

Toy Copter x2

I've recently gotten a new hobby of flying miniature remote control helicopters. I have wanted to get one since I first saw a remote control helicopter several years ago. This year on Christmas I received an Air Hogs Havoc copter, a small 6" toy helicopter.

Air Hogs Havoc Heli

The Air Hogs Havoc is a two channel (2CH) mini RC copter.  The number of channels refers to the number of control points the helicopter has, for example; the Havoc has controls for up/down and spin left/right, two channels.  A three channel helicopter would have up/down, left/right, and forwards/backwards.  The more channels a helicopter has the more control you will have over that helicopter.

Our saltwater setup.

About a year ago, my wife and I got ourselves a new fish tank.  We decided to go for a saltwater tank and picked up a 40 gallon tall square tank. 

40g tank only half full because of moving

New blog!

Got my new blog set up!