Rudy Faile

Tag: indie dev

  • 2021: Complete projects, current projects, and beyond!

    2021: Complete projects, current projects, and beyond!

    It looks like it has been about 2 months since my last post 😬! November and December were crazy months for me in both my work and personal life. 2020 kept coming until the bitter end…

    When I wasn’t up to my eyebrows in work, I carved out some time to finally work on and complete the multiplayer board game I had been working on since September:

    Image of the Cavatars Thumbnail from GitHub

    Cavatars (Codenames with Avatars – clever I know) is a fully functioning multiplayer game playable in a web browser. I developed it in JavaScript using NodeJS, Socket.io, and Phaser3. The full source code is on GitHub:

    https://github.com/rfaile313/cavatars-game

    It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever written but it plays like it was intended. What I was most surprised about when testing it with friends was how well the latency responded across multiple states. We had players in California, Texas, and Nevada with the server being located in San Francisco, and there was no visible lag:

    Cavatars’ maiden voyage 🚢

    Far more importantly though, the project allowed me to meet all of the goals I set when I started this project. All of the decisions I made when developing the game were for specific purposes:

    • Far greater proficiency in JavaScript, which I considered my weakest language at the time.
    • Better understanding of multiplayer gaming, client/server network architecture.
    • Learn Phaser3, a framework I have never used before.

    As one of my friends pointed out, there is no real purpose to the movement of the characters other than the fact it was to hone in on the movement for later projects down the road – which brings me into some of the stuff I have on the table for 2021.

    Building on the art kit I purchased and set of skills I developed to finish Cavatars, I have decided to start working on some other, longer term projects:

    1. Working on a Final Fantasy Tactics type game with my friend Travis. The game is yet to be named and we are in the very early stages. Travis brings a wealth of game knowledge and experience to the table and will handle most of the mechanics, balance, and lore. I will be handling all systems, programming, and development.
    2. Working on a longer term MMO passion project. These sprites and this art kit are perfect to put something like that together, so why not. There aren’t many 2D mmos that have come out in recent memory, so the idea of chipping away at one over the next few years seems exciting!
    3. Working on a smaller game to ship earlier, I’m thinking about a 1v1 multiplayer PVP arena type game.

    Aside from that, I reached out to The Greater Gaming Society of San Antonio which is a game development community in San Antonio that apparently has some folks participating in the upcoming Global Game Jam taking place this week, January 27-31. With any luck I’ll be able to connect with a team and follow up with a post about my experience 🙂

    Until next time…

  • Draw! is now Open Source

    Draw! is now Open Source

    Howdy everyone!

    After working on Draw! for a couple of months, then reaching the logical end of the purpose of making it (ship something using C and raylib) I have decided after publishing the game on the web last week, to open source the code on GitHub under the very permissive MIT License.

    The code lives here: https://github.com/rfaile313/draw_game
    You can play the game here: https://draw.rudyfaile.com/

    The code has always been on GitHub, but has lived in a private repository which is now public. The code itself isn’t the finest example of best practices programming or game development programming, but there is a single dependency (raylib) and I can say with confidence that I wrote every line of the code from scratch. There are also some live videos out there for most of the development process.

    I also wrote successful build scripts to four platforms: Windows, GNU/Linux, MacOS, and Web (HTML5/WASM). It’s never code I’ll look back on and think is great, but it *is* code that I’m proud to have written. It also served its purpose: make a small game from scratch in C programming, and learn and use raylib.

    Speaking of raylib, @raysan5 was just awarded an Epic Games MegaGrant:

    I couldn’t be more happy for @raysan5 and his project. He is a great developer, nice person, and is totally deserving of this awesome recognition!

    Back to the code. My hopes in making it open source is that folks learning C programming or raylib can have another source of reference for a working, published game. Perhaps someone will even fork the project and improve on it, isn’t open source amazing? 😁

    What’s next for me? Well, I have a few things on my plate at the moment. There are some work projects that are taking up the bulk of my time, but in addition to that, I plan on participating in Miziziziz‘s 48 hour game jam in four days. I was thinking about using Godot for the first time in this jam to learn it, but I also might use C and Raylib 😁. The concept of these jams that Miziziziz does is pretty cool: multiple game developers use the same art kit and have 48 hours to create a game with it. Here’s an example:

    Aside from that, I have been working to stay healthy and sane during these unprecedented times. Exercising a bit and trying to stay sharp and productive – I have also been playing a little bit of Starcraft2 and Hearthstone after a long, long break from gaming in general 😊.

    After the game jam, I was thinking about starting my next big project/game to chip away at for a long time. I have some ideas, and I’m thinking about an RPG/Roguelike as the general idea, but hopefully completely different than anything anyone’s seen before. I have some ideas 🤠.