Welcome to IndieZen.org, home of the Indie 2.0 Revolution

If you've been following along with our progress lately, you'll see that we're nearing the completion of Zen Engine frameworks and mostly we're tying up loose ends and preparing for a spectacular series of software and documentation releases.

One key change is we've recently decided to pause development on the "World Builder" level editing project and focus on integrating with Ogitor.  This has allowed us to focus on other things and leverage the talented developers on the Ogitor team.

In the near future we'll be completing the integration of our Game Builder entity editor with Ogitor, starting with import/export of entity designs and eventually moving towards a tighter integration.

We have our first game engine (Indie Game Engine) developed using the Zen Engine framework coming close to public beta testing, and we're extremely excited about other developers working on their own custom game engines. 

The distinguishing advantage Zen Engine has over most other game engines is our "less is more" attitude and our impressive modular design.

We've paid particular attention to what needs to be done after the prototyping stage.  With Zen Engine, progressing beyond the prototype into the final game has never been easier, giving game developers and designers more time to experiment and more time to create innovative, fun new games.

In the end it all boils down to this... innovative game development, less risk associated with technology, and faster time to market equates to better return on investment.

    Unless you have been living under a rock or in some wonderful world that we all need to move to you know that those of us in the US are in an economic recession. Even the long rumored recession proof game industry has felt the squeeze. In this article we can see that the game market declined in this past year.

    The economic decline has put a strain on the game development world for professionals and indies alike. As such, there becomes an emphasis on quality. Producing quality games is what has lead to successes like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which raked in something close to 500 million in cash during week one. Of course, I am not implying that one can easily create such a juggernaut but this is a valid example of what quality can produce.

   So what does this mean? In my opinion, it means that we as developers need to take our time in developing our games. Make sure that what we are releasing is a good game that we are proud to say, “This is my game! I made it and you should play it!”

Then again, I could be completely off the mark, but I don’t think so…

-- Jason 

This week I spent the bulk of the time working with CEGUI.

I integrated the Lua scripting so that I can directly access CEGUI from FracU scripts, but I'm being careful as to not add a dependency to Lua in the common Zen scripts.

I added some functionality to the StateMachine implementation so that it'll handle nested state machines, and then I created a new state machine that handles transitioning through a series of splash screens, and you set it up by defining your own custom splash screen Lua table.  The FracU one looks something like this:

local splashScreens = 
{
    -- State machine to which this splash screen sequence will belong
    stateMachine = game,
    stateName = "splashScreens",
    nextState = "loginScreen",
    sequence = {
        -- image is the image for the splash screen, can be nil if method is not nil
        -- duration is time to display the splash in seconds
        -- interruptable is whether or not the 
        [1] = { image = "FracU.jpg", duration = 5, interruptable = false },
        [2] = { image = "gbslogo.jpg", duration = 5, interruptible = true }, 
        [3] = { image = "IndieZen.jpg", duration = 1, interruptible = true }
    },

    showMethod =          function(state, splashItem)
           ... this method shows the splash screen
        end,        
    hideMethod = 
        function(state, splashItem)
            -- Clean up in the state's onExit function 
        end, 
        
    onTick =
        function (state)
            ... this method handles fading in / out 
        end
} 

12 December 2009

Working through the weekend…

We all know the perils of neglected backups, but what do you do when your backups fail? I recently had a glitch while installing FreeBSD 8.0 in a multi OS configuration. It seems that with a SATA drive array one can cause all manner of problems with a simple alteration of the drive configuration.

As I mentioned, I was installing FreeBSD to boot from the same drive as another OS, Ubuntu, when I encountered a glitch.