DS development has been slow to say the least. What little time I’ve had to sit down and plug out some code has been spent trying to figure out why my player sprite won’t draw itself on the screen. I’ll pop what I have up on the DS Projects page and any of my developer-type readers can take a look and see what’s wrong. Do I have any developer readers? Do I have any readers at all?!? In other DS news, I learned that I’m actually a 9 year old girl. I’ve been playing the hell out of Pokemon and enjoying it quite a lot. This has nothing to do with me not progressing with IQDS, I assure you (OK, maybe a little).

AEOU? That’s ASDF in Dvorakish. For those not in-the-know, Dvorak is a lesser known alternative to the standard qwerty keyboard layout. I won’t get into specifics but it offers faster typing with fewer errors at the cost of having to relearn how to type. They say it takes a few months to regain your original typing speed - we’ll see how it goes for me. Jumping into a new keyboard format will slow down my typing considerably for a while, which may be frowned upon by the people who pay me to type fast.

I’d like to say I typed this whole post in Dvorak, but then I’d be lying.

I poked around the DS code, attempting to remove the player icon from the map layer and make it into a sprite. I didn’t get very far. It probably has something to do with my brain being fried from the week before. I’ll poke around a bit more later.

In other news, I’ve been homebrewing more than just DS games over the past few months. I started a batch of homebrew hard cider in October of ‘06, and it has finally finished aging. It tastes delicious! $40 worth of cider for a mere $15 in materials. JOY!

Three cheers for IQDS updates! I got the second layer drawing the player icon and it can move around and lay bombs and stuff. I’d like to thank Blur, PUSA, and Great Big Sea for keeping me sane for this release.

After 10 hours programming for work, and 7 more for fun, I’m really quite tired. There’s a screenshot for those who don’t want to venture a full download. If you do want to try out a demo, it’s available in the DS Projects section of this site. Download it and have minutes of fun!

Here’s a screenshot for your viewing pleasure. Marvel at my wonderful graphic design abilities.

I updated template.zip to include documentation about the changes from the default DevKitPro template and how to set it up with Code::Blocks. I also changed the filename generated by 7zip to make them shorter. May not seem like much but documenting the stuff you do is a bitch and I’m glad I got it done. I really hate when I really need documentation and I don’t have it, and I don’t want others to feel the same way when looking at my stuff.

I’ve been working on IQDS in bits and pieces. I would like to do a bit of refactoring to extract some more commonly used procedures - like setting up a screen to use a specific graphic mode, etc. - and move them to a separate file that I can use in all my projects. I have made some changes here and there already but not enough to warrant a release. I have some *gasp* free time tomorrow so I’ll be able to work on that.

Now I just need to find a way to work on IQDS and play Puzzle Quest simultaneously.

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.

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.