Trouble in Development

It is somewhat unfortunate that I have to break out this bad news that seems like a complete dejavu of what happened with checkmate-chess. My A-Level (O-Level during checkmate-chess) exams are coming in October/November, and I realised that I have been lagging slightly behind on my studies and my original thought of juggling between studies and programming no longer seems feasible to me. Therefore, if you were hoping for a newer release, don’t expect it anytime this year unless you are a programmer and want to fork the project. I am sorry it has to come to this.

The Flying Penguin 0.1 Released

Resuming from my last post, I have finally settled on the name The Flying Penguin (Unix codename: flying-penguin).

For the uninitiated, The Flying Penguin is a game where you try to fly the penguin as far as possible with limited fuel. While in the air, you have to collect floating fish to gain extra fuel. I had initially thought of calling the fish flying herrings, until I realised that herrings are Arctic fish whereas penguins live in the Antarctic.

The game is finally ready for its big debut after weeks of coding, polish and testing. To me I am pretty anxious because this is - in certain way - bigger than my chess game, and I actually held back the code for a few extra days from planned just to get more testing done.

There are still some work to do, such as variable screen sizes (currently if you want something other than in 800×600 windowed-mode you need to change it in the code) and there are still some areas of improvement in terms of visual interface. However, these are small hiccups that would be addressed in the next release.

So, I have held you back long enough. Without further ado, The Flying Penguin

A Slight Change In Direction

I had managed to finish most of the code for Penguin Glider (which was supprisingly faster than Checkmate :|) but after plenty of play-testing, I had realised I missed out on one important fact. Gliding realistically is only fun for those who really understand it. Examining a few of my friend’s playing habbits, the main cause is that without propulsion, it is far easier to stall a glider than a plane. Thus, they stalled the penguin and it ended up with its head dug into the snow.

Rather than giving a long boring lecture about falling with style each time, I gave the penguin propulsion so that it can fly like an aeroplane and hence is far less likely to stall. As a result the game can no longer be called Penguin Glider anymore. I’m still thinking about a new name because Penguin Plane doesn’t sound right. I am quite thankful that I hadn’t uploaded it to GitHub yet, otherwise the renaming process would have caused plenty of problems.

Other than that it is coding as usual.

Penguin Glider Announced

So, with my exams over and Checkmate Chess out of the way, I’ve been scribbling down a game idea that has been floating in my head for a while. In this game, penguins would be able, with physics!

The art style has been set and most of the drawings are done. All that is left for me is the physics engine. While, applying what I have learnt in physics is easy, the biggest challenge for me would be taking that into real time game-play. However, a challenge is always what I need to keep me on my toes.

Once a significant portion of the code is done, I’ll upload it GitHub.