StepWood Games Development

Another night of coding.  I’m working on a small tool that will decompose images into various color regions.  It’s actually an interesting problem.  I tried two different methods, both of which resulted in “not quite what I wanted”.

One approach was to use a DisjointSetForest to split the image into adjoining regions of similar color using a simple Euclidean distance formula (considering R, G, B to be “coordinates” in 3-space).  While it works pretty well, it generates far too many disjoint areas to be useful given our typical input to the tool.

The other approach was to sepeate the image using Hues (from the HSB color space).  While this did an adequate job, it still generated far too many sub-images to be of use for the problem we are trying to solve.

I ended up with a simple breakdown of the image based on Hue and then an additional pass to recombine various “detail” areas back together assuming their Hues were close enough.  It actually results in a reasonable output from the tool, so I’m happy for tonight.  There is plenty more to do with it (and since we haven’t described WHY we want such a tool, I’ll leave that to your imagination).

And the project advances one small step in the positive direction…

Well, my partner in crime development has managed to inspire me to start writing my impressions of our new project.

Like Dave, I’m not yet willing to disucss the idea too much, but those people that know me well will have heard the idea in various incarnations in the past.  Other than being a vast simplification of my original ideas, it won’t be a big surprise to anyone when it’s announced.

I’ve laid the foundation for screen management, input, audio and started on the graphical viewport layer for “in-game”.  We are still quite a ways from anything to show, but at least some progress has been made.

Of course, like all good things, too much of something causes issues.  In my case, I broke the build.  *sigh*  Tonight that gets fixed and more foundation work is laid before I start into one of the major subsystems of the new game.

Till next time!

After many months of being too busy to do anything, things have settled down a little with our real jobs.  The side effect of this is of course that we started looking at our current projects for things we should be working on instead of doing nothing.  Well, that in turn made us realize that neither of us was feeling especially motivated to work on any of our previous ideas.  It’s a bad place to be thanks to ideas such as wasted work and lost hours, but it’s an excellent place to be for concepts like inspiration and inovation.

Many weeks of discussions and planning and spitballing and brainstorming and that type of thing has landed us with an idea that we like.  Development has finally begun now that the basics are sketched out and we are already making some pretty cool progress.  Until we are farther along it doesn’t make a lot of sense to expound the awesomness of our creativity and how much fun this game is likely to be, but I will say I personally like this idea better than card games.