I finally got a chance to sit down and start sputtering out some code for IQDS. For those who haven’t yet heard, this is going to be a clone of the classic puzzle game Intelligent Qube for PSX. To add to that great news, I actually got something that runs for my first daily build! For now, you can tap the screen to lay a bomb, and press B to clear the bomb. Source is included in the distribution. I spent some time making it extra squeaky clean for anybody who wants to check it out.

Also, I found another bug with the makefile in my template. When you make a distribution between 00:00 and 09:00 it cuts off the first 0 and replaces it with a space. This was confusing 7zip causing the time and the .zip portion of the filename to be left off. The bug has been fixed and the new template package uploaded.

As always, both of these can be found in the DS Projects page.

Update: The bug that made this demo not work on hardware has been found and squashed. The link on the DS Projects page has been updated.

For this first edition of Tuesdays with Flannel, I’m going to tell you about the fierce rivalry between Wood and Water.

A long time ago before Wood was used to make furniture and the Spruce Goose (yea, the one Yogi Bear flew in 1987), Wood and Water had a normal friendship. They helped each other whenever they could, and they lived happily ever after.

But not EVER after. Back in the 1850s, Wood formed an alliance with the dirty humans, and Water didn’t like that. The traitorous Wood was allowing the wretched humans to carve and shape it into forms other than the graceful Tree, such as the wooden chair, the wooden nickel, and Log (it’s better than bad, it’s good!). Soon the humans were even using wood to boil Water with flaming Wood and sail on Water with wooden boats! The horror! This perturbed Water to such a degree that it placed a curse on Wood; whenever tainted Wood touched water, it would slowly rot and become discolored.

Next week, I’ll reveal the truth about the Birds and the Bees.

I’ve spent the last week tweaking the included template for DevKitPro to suit my development environment. Some features include:

• A smart(ish) sprite/map image converting script.
• New makefile targets for testing/packaging/cleanup.
• A way to trick Code::Blocks into compiling and running my code at one fell swoop.

Better documentation about the changes from the vanilla template and how to set Code::Blocks up to use this template to its full potential will come in the next few days. Additionally, StarsDS was updated to include the updated environment template. Both packages can be downloaded from the DS Projects page.

No, not my friend code. My programming code! I’ve made a page for all my DS projects. As I said earlier my only offering as of yet is StarsDS, a tech demo of sorts that really doesn’t bring anything new to the DS Dev table. If you want to check it out, I tried to comment it as thoroughly as I could. Maybe valuable to someone as yet another dissection of some graphics routines. I’ll include periodic builds of my real game as I make them.

Oh, and it’s my mother’s birthday today, so HAPPY BDAY MOM!

Update: The link to StarsDS was broken, but it’s fixed now (uploading files to Mediafire is a bad idea when they’re doing updates). The new download has changes in the build environment so it’s, like, better than the one I had up before. Details on the DS Projects page.

So DS development. Yeah. Gonna be super fun when family members stop calling me to fix their computers and shit. *sigh* I guess I can’t complain too much - they feed me while I’m there.

I started to play around with the graphics routines last week. Visited each of the links to the left at least 3 times each and they were all wonderful in deciphering the non-existent documentation for LIBNDS. In my studies I made a little demo program thing. Nothing really impressive, just getting the hang of button/screen input, FB graphics, BMP backgrounds, sprites, scaling, rotation, and other really basic concepts. Why go through the trouble when there’s things like PALib? As I code, I like to know how and why the code I write works. Using libraries that hide that from me makes me uneasy. It’s not that I don’t trust the PALib guy to write non-bloated, fast code. I just like to know that I can write such code myself first. Some of the stuff in the library is quite amazing though. I might have to use it in future projects.

The only thing I didn’t explore in the demo is tiles/mapping (and sound, but that was out of scope). I plan to use what I learn playing with that stuff in my first real game I have brewing in my head. It’ll be a game closely resembling a classic PSX puzzle game. That’s all I’m gonna say about it for now. I’m really really excited to get started on it. After I fix everybody’s computer in the entire world.

Ooh goody, I get to use the Procrastination category and my blog isn’t even 10 hours old. In my first post I promised no less than 3 posts today. They were going to be an explanation about the various post categories I will use in my babblings. I decided to make them all in one About this blog page. You can click the tab at the top of the screen or the link to the right if you want to read it. They are both labeled About this blog for your convenience.

I’ll put some stuff in about my DS work tomorrow. Probably.

“Welcome to Wordpress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!”

The nice folks at Wordpress took the liberty of automatically filling in this little blurb as my initial post. I’m pretty sure that’s word-for-word what I would have typed there anyway so I thank them greatly for doing that. This page will be used for my personal journal thing that nobody will read but I’m going to write as though I have a large audience hanging off my every word. Y’know, the normal run-of-the-mill blog.

I’m sure, 5 years down the road, someone will stumble on this page when searching for Nintendo DS3 roms or whatever and wonder why it hasn’t been updated in a year and a half. Again, like the normal run-of-the-mill blog. Today, however, there will be no fewer than three posts (including this one) describing where I stand with respects to DS development, Tuesdays with Flannel, and other things nobody really cares about.

-Jason “Plaidman”