Piero’s Wiicross for Wii and Gamecube is out!

•Dicembre 2, 2008 • 11 Commenti
Wiicross Cover

Wiicross Cover

The most developed, anticipated, awaited, desidered, hated, …ed homebrew I coded is finally here!
Started in June just for test, it became time to time more oriented to be an officially released game.
But exactly, what Wiicross is?

The origin of the game

Wiicross is game based on a popular puzzle game I played on Nintendo DS. It is an electronic version of a puzzle born in 1987, called “Nonogram” whose Wikipedia definition says:

Nonograms or Paint by Numbers are picture logic puzzles in which cells in a grid have to be colored or left blank according to numbers given at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. In this puzzle type, the numbers measure how many unbroken lines of filled-in squares there are in any given row or column. For example, a clue of “4 8 3″ would mean there are sets of four, eight, and three filled squares, in that order, with at least one blank square between successive groups.

It’s easier playing with game directly than understand the rules at first :)

Why now?

I admit, I’m not a skilled coder, but before everything I’m lazy. Coding Wiicross didn’t took 6 months, but if I could count the effective days of coding it would reach about 2 months. It was abandonded for a period of time, then I October I decided to finish it.

How to play?

You can move the cursor pointing the wiiremote on screen, or using the d-pad usint it “NES” position, or with the gamecube controller.

Every controller option has his button schemas.

You can color a cell with the DRAW button, or mark it (with the MARK one) for helping in remembering that that square shouldn’t be drawn.

There are two game modes:

  • Normal mode: If you try to colour a cell that can’t be coloured, an error penalty is shown. Puzzle is solved when the image is correctly drawn.
  • Free mode: there is no error reporting when you colour a wrong cell. Puzzle is solved when you hit the check button and the image is correctly drawn, otherwise an error penalty is shown.

Every error make the timer increase of a certain amout of time.

What Wiicross offer?

Let’s start saying what Wiicross does not offer:
the main difference beetween Wiicross and the original Picross is that in Wiicross you only have grids of the same size (15×15).
This because originally this game was just a test with only a grid in mind; also a bigger grid requires zooming, feature not present in my image library :P

Excetpt that, the game includes:

  • Different controller type for the main game
  • 59 levels (not so much but it’s an homebrew afterall :P )
  • Levels, scores and options are saved in the sd card
  • Multiple graphics themes
  • Custom music: you can add your own music in the game if you don’t like the default ones (not supported on GC version)
  • Custom themes: you can create your own themes and share them with friends

How I add my custom music / themes?

Music

Put your favourite songs in the “res/music” directory (for example if you use the homebrew channel it is apps/wiicross/res/music), then select “Custom” from the options menu.

Note: Music must be in ogg format! No, I’m not an opensource devote: simply sndlib does not support MP3, and libogc support for them is screwed. Also res directory on GameCube must be put on the root of the SD!

Themes

A theme is composed by the following images

  • background.png (640 x 480 pixels)
  • filled.png (image to show when a cell is drawn)
  • marked.png  (image to show when a cell is marked)
  • title.png (the title to show in the option screen for selecting your theme)

All themes must be put in a directory called with the name of your theme, and this directory must be put in “res/themes” . If you follow these rules, you’ll find you theme in the options screen.

For helping in drawing a theme, there is a template on the project page. It also contains a psd (photoshop) and a xcf (gimp) containing layers, helpful for drawing the background, since some part of it are used for painting the timer and the preview.

Thanks

  • Spriteattack for stunning graphics (and for patience to work with me)
  • Cyan & Liz from gbatemp.net: for impressive work on bug testing, fixing bugged levels and sorting by difficulty: the game couldn’t be here without them
  • MrNick for massive testing on the Gamecube version
  • Aaron Williams for the nice “level cleared” jingle
  • All the users who sent their level (using the online level editor)

Yes, this game is also different than others because ALL levels were made by users submitting their images.
I received about 500 levels, but a very minimal part of them was usable (and still needed some fix).
This because each level must have a unique solution, and I didn’t added any type of check, sorry.
There is also a funny list of categories I discarded for obvious reasons, thanks anyway to authors! :P

  • X
  • “Test”
  • Various random cells
  • Svastikas
  • Various messages (”U R the best”, my favourite)
  • Alien / Robots
  • Every sort of dick you can imagine (20+)
  • Faces
  • Mazes

Mandatory screenshots!

Wiicross - title screen

Wiicross - title screen

Wiicross - default theme

Wiicross - default theme

Wiicross - Woody theme

Wiicross - Woody theme

Wiicross - space theme

Wiicross - space theme

Wiicross - candy theme

Wiicross - candy theme

Wiicross - blue theme

Wiicross - blue theme

Wiicross - spooky theme

Wiicross - spooky theme

Wiicross - paper theme (custom theme by Scognito)

Wiicross - paper theme (custom theme by Scognito)

Wiicross - options screen

Wiicross - options screen

Wiicross - level select

Wiicross - level select

Wiicross - pause screen

Wiicross - pause screen

Ok ok but where can I get the game?

The project page is hosted on drunkencoders.
Wii version available here.
GameCube version here.

What’s next?

After some year in developing simple games for consoles, I decided to take a break.
Lot of things are happened (and stil happening) in my personal life, and I don’t know if I am still motivated in coding games just for fun.

Is it a chance to finally doing something else?

Thanks all for support and helping in making what I wanted to do since I was kid (no, not the pornstar): being a game developer was a dream since I’m a videogame addicted!

Ricoh webcam driver for HP Pavillon 6299ea on Windows XP

•Novembre 30, 2008 • 2 Commenti

After downgrading Windows Vista to XP the only driver I didn’t have success to install was the webcam one.
On my dv6299 ea (dv6000 series) the webcam is identified by the 05CA&PID_1810&MI_00\6&1F6A7C80&0&0000 string.

There is no webcam driver for XP looking on HP site, so I made many tries before gettings the device work.

The solution is pretty simple:

  • download the drivers for Vista from HP site
  • unpack with WinRAR or other compression tools
  • go to the sp34746\WCAMR\driver\ directory
  • doubleclick on DPInst32.exe and install the drivers
  • reboot

It worked on my pc, hope it will be useful for you too :)

Scogger 0.2 for Mobile Phone is out!

•Settembre 26, 2008 • 1 Commento

Despite the actual release date, this game was actually finished in april, months before the wii/gc release.

It was coded in few days, without knowing much about j2me.
Since I lost interest too early I didn’t added support for sounds and music so it is just a “mute” game.

Actually, the real challenge wasn’t coding for a mobile platform, but configuring Eclipse and Netbeans in conjunction with the S60 sdk! If I remember correctly i switched off and compiled it for standard j2me platform.

It shouldn’t have been coded for the public, but just for my cellphone (Nokia 6120 Classic, MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1 profile), so resolution is hardcoded for this type of device (320×240).

Thanks Kenney (www.kenney.nl) for graphics!

How to Play

The goal of the game is to make the frog jump over all the tree trunks using the arrow/menu keys of your mobile phone.

The only avaiable direction the frog can move are forward, left and right (no diagonals), with no jump distance limit!

Remember that the frog cannot jump backward, and pressing Fire/Center button restart the level!

Download & Installing

Download the package from here, and unpack it then install jar + jad your usual method for installing applications on the phone.
For Nokia devices I suggest to install through the Nokia PC Suite, that once configured for your mobile, will install application just doubleclicking on the jar file.

Please note I’ll do not provide any installation help nor support as I have removed the toolkit and don’t know how install jar/jad other than using the PC Suite!

Screenshots

Compatibility List

Currently reported working devices:

  • Nokia 6120 Classic
  • Nokia N95

If you succesfully installed on your device please add a comment, and I’ll add to the list.

New Wii/Gamecube Homebrew is coming! Piero’s Wiicross :)

•Settembre 4, 2008 • 15 Commenti
wiicross editor

wiicross editor

Finally today I decided to write a post for my next upcoming homebrew game for the Nintendo Wii and Gamecube: it is called Piero’s Wicross.

As the name suggest it is based on a popular puzzle game Mario’s Picross, a game based on an existing puzzle game called Nonogram.

For those who don’t know what game I’m talking about, here it is a brief description of the original game, from wikipedia :

Nonograms or Paint by Numbers are picture logic puzzles in which cells in a grid have to be colored or left blank according to numbers given at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. In this puzzle type, the numbers measure how many unbroken lines of filled-in squares there are in any given row or column. For example, a clue of “4 8 3″ would mean there are sets of four, eight, and three filled squares, in that order, with at least one blank square between successive groups.

I swear it is simpler than expected! :)

The development of the game is nearly done for both platforms, so what the game really needs are the levels.

Since I’m too lazy to create them, I decided that levels will made by YOU!

Yes, I wrote also an online level editor for the purpouse, where is possible to easily create puzzles throught a simple interface, so what expect to write your own one?

The best 50 levels will be put in the game as official ones, so head over and write yours!

Go to Wiicross Level Editor!

Using different server for Mozilla Weave

•Agosto 30, 2008 • Lascia un Commento
mozilla weave logo

mozilla weave logo

Mozilla Weave is an experimental project from Mozilla Labs aiming to synchronize information of Firefox browser (like bookmarks, saved passwords, tabs, history…) across different computers using a simple extension.

Once installed and configured on each browser it automatically synchronizes these metadata offering the same personal data among different computers.

Since it is still experimental it suffers of some issues, like the most popular at the moment: the authentication problem. I don’t know if it is a server issue, but I can’t authenticate myself using the default settings.

Searching on forums I found a solution provided by some users: use a different server for storing metadata information. The fix suggested explain how to setup a weave server on myDisk.se (a very useful free webdisk).

Simply create an account on myDisk.se, create this directory structure: “user/youruser“, where youruser is your login name, then update the server URL on the advanced tab of the weave options (https://mydisk.se/youruser).

Sign in, synchronize et voilà, you can login again!

An extra advantage of this solution is that synchronizing is a lot faster than the overloaded (for now?) Mozilla default server.

Give it a try!