Hi Everyone,
I've decided to retire this project for a couple of reasons. Including higher priorities, and frustration with the Cipher Drive code base. I won't get to make the demo of the game I was planning on, but I've learned from the experience of trying to put this thing together, in the sense that I found a lot of ways not to build a game.
I dissect the outcome of the project in detail in this last video.
Thanks to anyone who engaged with the project at some point.
Hey everyone,
I just recorded a series of several installments of the Cipher Drive project, the first installment is uploaded right here. I had a good deal of fun finally getting everything in the asset system setup the way I originally envisioned. Hope someone can find something of interest in there somewhere!
I decided to do a batch of recordings so that I could avoid the "forget everything about everything" that slows me down when I do just one short session a week, I am hopeful it will allow the project to move along a little more quickly.
-Allen
Today I brought Cipher Drive back to the internet with my first episode of the new year now available here.
In this week's episode I started working on unifying what I have to admit was just a catastrophically bad setup for my asset system. It is a good lesson in the fact that, even if you are going to go back and make something "real" later, that doesn't mean you shouldn't plan somewhat carefully what you're doing now to make sure that transition will be... you know... possible.
Anyway, all I want out of this post is to let everyone know that Cipher Drive programming is back. For those who haven't caught much or any Cipher Drive programming, for me the project is about trying some wacky game programming ideas. The first big one I am working on is setting up a system for editing the game and assets from within the game.
Bye bye for now everyone.
Hi everyone!
I am moving into my office at the end of this year, and I am a little more busy than usual with the end of the school semester. So I have decided to discontinue Cipher Drive streams for December. In January I will start to record my sessions on Mondays offline, and then upload them, because I don't feel like getting ethernet in my new office.
When the programming videos comes back you can look forward to me working on:
So the team decided to take a break from the project for the month of October. We were instead jamming on one of our favorite games from the past "The Most Undead". It has definitely been a lot of fun, but we should discuss real quick why we took a break.
It looks like right now the Cipher Drive project has hit a bit of a problem. The programming team was always a little behind the hoped schedule and by the time October came around the art team had lost a lot of enthusiasm for the project. Right now it is unclear how long it will be before we can produce the game in the originally intended scope and style.
The game jam was intended to give everyone a break from not knowing how we were going to do Cipher Drive. Now that the break is over we've come to a decision on what to do with the game. Right now the programming team will keep moving forward until they've built the rest of the engine they first set out to build. Then w
Hi everyone, I am here with the follow up on the Cipher Drive stream today. I ended up working on rectangle packing because I need it to complete the font atlas baker utility. I could have just written something dumb and moved on, but the problem struck me as interesting so we dug in and had some fun with that.
On stream the idea I got was the sort the rects by height, so that I could place them in rows. Since I place the tallest rects first, I can treat the first rect of each row as defining the height of that row, and all future rects are guaranteed to fit in that row. Every time I go to place a rect I can either insert it at the end of an existing row, or make a new row. I set it up to make it's decision based on whichever choice minimizes the difference in the width and height of the entire atlas. I chose that method because the obvious move of optimizing the area at each step tends to prevent it from ever starting new rows. Keeping it square some how intuitively meant to
Hey folks,
This is Allen posting on behalf of the team. I would just like to let everyone know that not much has happened this month. I've have been on my internet hiatus and vacation. Other members have been shifting around some of their affairs.
To rectify the silence on this project I will be streaming new development September 1st.
Until next time everyone!
Dropping Anchor
So we finally made it! Albeit nearly a week after we thought we would dock but the seas of handmade.network are rough to sail, and the S.S. Overreact lacked sufficient navigational tools to make the trip any shorter. So many thanks to Abner, Jeroen, Andrew, Matt and Martin for all of their work guiding us into port. We are excited to officially be a part of the gregarious community. We strongly believe in the handmade movement, and we wish to head towards quality rather than taking the easy route. With moonstone in hand, we will be sailing day and night towards that destination. For us it is an honor to join such a proud fleet of principled developers.
Who is Overreact You Ask?
Overreact is no single artist, developer, musician, or designer. Overreact is a conglomeration of humble developers who do whatever they want... because it's the right thing to do. You see, over the years of playing god awful games we came to the conclusion that w
