GMTuts #1: Debug Logger

For my first tutorial, I wanted to start with a utility that I wrote a couple of weeks ago and has proved to be incredibly useful so far while developing HackyZack. It is always useful to have some sort of text drawing while debugging your game so that you can check the values of variables at runtime and figure out if something is working properly, or why it is not. Before, I just used to write some code within the object’s draw event and that worked, but I found myself writing very repetitive code over and over again, which I later had to go in and delete after it was working as intended. As a programmer, I knew there had to be a better solution to automate this process, which is why I decided to write what I call my Debug Logger.

GMTuts #0: Introduction

I’ve been meaning to write tutorials for a long time, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to cover specifically. At first, I was going to start with random C++ utilities tutorials, then moved onto shaders, but realized that even though I’m very competent in those areas, there are people out there more knowledgeable and with better tutorials already. However, I did notice there is a lack of good tutorials for GameMaker on specific topics, such as shaders and useful utilities for game development. I would like to share the things I’ve learned and useful systems I’ve written while working on projects such as INK, HackyZack, and soon, Fara & The Eye of Darkness.

About two weeks ago, I went to my old University (Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela) to give a talk to the student association called DELU USB. This student group’s purpose is to meet other poepl who want to develop games and learn together. They asked me if I could give a talk on any topic I wanted, so I suggested Template Metaprogramming in C++ and How to Contact The Press to increase awareness of their game. Because not everyone in the association is a programmer, I decided to give a talk on the latter. Since I believe the topic and information to be useful and easy to understand, I decided to translate it to English and make a video of myself giving the talk to post it on YouTube. I also have plans to record myself giving the same talk in Spanish, for those who are interested. Here’s the video of the talk in English. Enjoy!

Rainbows seem to be pretty popular lately, so I thought I’d share this.

While working on a graphics assignment for school, I decided I wanted my lights to cycle through the full spectrum of colors. The problem was doing so while using RGB, since the loop can get a bit messy to achieve the effect. That’s when I decided to make an RGB to HSV converter, as well as an HSV to RGB converter. For those of you who don’t know, RGB and HSV are just two different ways of representing a color as a collection of three numbers. RGB stands for Red Channel, Green Channel and Blue Channel, while HSV stands for Hue, Saturation and Brightness (V is used instead of B to avoid confusion with Blue). Below is my implementation, which is the classical one with a slight performance increase trick that I found. I will provide all the links to my resources below.

Recently, I wrote an Introspection system for C++ with the aid of Randy Gaul’s Blog. There are many ways to achieve this in C++, but the one used by Randy was through Template Metaprogramming. So in order for me to fully understand his implementation, I had to do some research on the subject. And I fell in love with it!

I decided to write a series of posts where I explain what template metaprogramming is, some good reference material to start learning it and then just post some fun programs I’ve made with it.

Once again, thank you for all the support! For the second time, I’ve been part of a game that got Greenlit. If you don’t know much about INK yet, here’s a bit of background:

INK was created by Zack Bell as a late submission to Ludum Dare 32, but quickly turned into a small side project that he worked on for three weeks and then uploaded on itch.io for a couple of bucks. He also uploaded the source code to the GameMaker Marketplace, which is something he has been doing as a way to teach the community about game development. Here are some links to both of those places where you can find INK:

About three weeks ago, Zack talked to me and asked me if I could put INK on Greenlight, since I already have the pass from SUPER III’s campaign. I agreed and also told him I’d make a trailer for the game, in order to improve his chances of getting Greenlit, as well as organized the images and description for the Greenlight page, since I already had experience with it. Well, INK got Greenlit in only 19 days! This time around it was slightly easier for a couple of reasons: Zack’s community is a lot bigger now and the number of votes needed to get Greenlit has decreased significantly. Let’s show some numbers and contrast them with SUPER III’s numbers.

First of all, I have to say, THANK YOU! Thanks to everyone that supported us with our project by voting on it on Steam, as well as those who helped share our posts on Twitter and Facebook. It really means a lot to us to be given this opportunity. We were really not expecting this, since the game lot a bit of momentum after the Kickstarter didn’t reach its goal, but it’s good to know there are still people out there who care about small indie games.

Now, I’d like to make a small post-mortem of what I learned from planning and running this Greenlight campaign.

Time Management: Pomodoro Technique

Today I’m going to talk about a time management and productivity technique I have been wanting to try for a while. This technique is called The Pomodoro Technique, and a professor reminded me yesterday about it, so I decided to finally give it a shot.

As I approach the launch of my first Kickstarter campaign, I have a few tips I thought I’d share that should be taken into consideration when planning your own campaign. I will consider making a part two for this post after the campaign is over with everything I learned from it. These are things that I may have known before I started the campaign, but either overlooked or underestimated the time it would take to get them done. This is intended to be a short post, as I am getting ready for a very long trip (30+ hours of travel!) and I’m only a few days away from my campaign’s launch, so pretty busy at the moment!

Anyway, here are the tips:

This is the second part in the Kickstarter Planning series. To read the first part, just visit this link: Kickstarter Planning – Part 1

It’s been two weeks since I posted the first part of this series and I have done a lot of work towards my Kickstarter campaign, which has taken time away from updating the website. I apologize for that. There are still a lot of things I have learned over the past month that I want to share, but I figured I should first finish the section about Lobster’s guide. For reference, I will post the link again below:

A Lobster’s Guide for Video Game Projects on Kickstarter

Alejandro Hitti

Producer / Programmer

GMTuts #1: Debug Logger

GMTuts #0: Introduction

How To Get Your Game Noticed

RGB to HSV & HSV to RGB Color Conversions

Template Metaprogramming in C++

This time, INK has been Greenlit!

SUPER III Got Greenlit!

Time Management: Pomodoro Technique

Tips when planning a Kickstarter campaign

Kickstarter Planning – Part 2