Educational indie game: "Air Forte"

[Brendon]

Hi all, I wanted to share my work-in-progress indie game, Air Forte. This is an educational game where you pilot a small airplane through arenas.

I'm using SFML's .NET bindings and Mono for this project, so the game is portable to Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.  I was quite pleased with SFML's feature set and how easy it is to use. I'm using v1.6 for audio/window and v1.5 for graphics, and I'm definitely looking forward to checking out v2.0 for my next project.

 

Try it out, and let me know what you think!

Here's the links to the demo:
Mac osx: http://www.blendogames.com/dev/AirForteDemo_ub2.dmg
Linux: http://www.blendogames.com/dev/airfortedemo_v2.tar.gz

The windows version should be up soon.

Edit July 2: updated with new builds.

[K-Bal]

Looks nice. Can you provide a Linux 64 bit binary?

[Brendon]

Hi K-Bal,

Does the build not work on your 64-bit machine?  Does an error message appear?

I was hoping to create just one Linux build that works on both 32 and 64-bit machines.

[Ceylo]

It couldn't start on my MacBook. It's just taking 99% CPU and nothing more :/.

I also noticed it was built for PowerPC mac only (not the native architecture on most today's Apple computers).



Edit: here is the log: airforte_log.txt.

[K-Bal]

Hi K-Bal,

Does the build not work on your 64-bit machine?  Does an error message appear?

I was hoping to create just one Linux build that works on both 32 and 64-bit machines.

There is no 32-bit build of mono in the repositories and I'm lazy

[Brendon]

@Ceylo - Thanks for the log output.  I mistakenly packaged the powerpc files instead of the universal binaries - hopefully it'll work now.  Can you try this new build? http://www.blendogames.com/dev/airfortedemo_ub1.dmg

@K-Bal - Sorry, I don't understand - do you need the 32-bit or 64-bit executable? I believe I packaged in the 32-bit executable, which I thought would work on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

[Ceylo]

Now it crashes a few seconds after launching :/.
AirForte_crash.txt

[K-Bal]

To run your application one needs both the 32 bit build of the game AND a 32 bit build of libmono. However, in the ubuntu repositories there is only a 64 bit build of libmono.

[Brendon]

@Ceylo - It's showing something on the screen? That's promising!  Can you please give this new build a try - http://www.blendogames.com/dev/AirForteDemo_ub2.dmg

I was mixing some 1.6 and 1.5 sfml libraries together and I think that might have been causing some issues. I've reverted everything back to 1.5.

If it still crashes out, can you please run Console (applications > utilities > console), run the game again and send me the Console output?  There should be some good debug info in there.

@K-Bal - Ah, I understand now. Thanks for the explanation.  I'll hunt down the 32 and 64-bit libraries and package them in.

[Ceylo]

It's working fine now. But why did you choose SFML 1.5 instead of 1.6 ?

[Brendon]

Great! I'm so glad to hear the osx build is working now. Thanks for the help, Ceylo.

I reverted to v1.5 because the v1.6 graphics library has a bug where scaling a sprite affects the sprite position:
http://www.sfml-dev.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15652
http://www.sfml-dev.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2409

I attempted to mix and match the v1.6 and v1.5 libraries together, but apparently that doesn't really work.

[Ceylo]

Well... there are bugs in Mac OS X port too (v1.5), but it does look like it's working fine.

[Brendon]

That's true, and v1.6 certainly does fix a lot of v1.5's bugs.  But the v1.6 sprite shifting bug made my game practically unplayable.

[Ceylo]

And what about the sources from the SVN repository ?

[Brendon]

I grabbed the latest SVN source a couple weeks ago and the sprite issue still seemed to be there.  But at this point, I'm primarily aiming to stabilize the build and ship it, so I'm quite okay with v1.5