While work continues getting all my content migrated into the website, my thoughts have turned back towards the game projects I had wanted to actually tackle and accomplish.

I’m at the design-point now where I’ve scrapped all of my previous commercial game projects, and am starting with a fresh blank slate. My only goal is to start working on “fun” games as opposed to spending too much time worrying about “market influence”. In the past, I had spent too much time analyzing market trends in terms of game genres, platforms, languages, etc., that I let these things guide my hand much more than they should have. In the end, all it did result in was Analysis Paralysis. Basically from a marketing perspective, “every” avenue was the “right” choice.

As a smaller Independent game developer, our real power IS this ability to chuck the norms that bind and strangle the bigger game houses who are strong-armed by investors into churning out products based solely on the current market trends.

I don’t at all intend to throw away everything I know (that would be plain silly), but I do intend on placing much less of an importance on that type of research and just go for it.

Purpose

No matter what the game you’re making, the use of sound is essential. A popular sound library for the SDL family is SDL_Mixer. It’s an easy-to-use sound package which can handle many audio file formats. A popular one is the “WAVE” format introduced by Windows. Here’s how to play them with SDL_Mixer and the PeonSDK.

Downloads

The project files are available here: PeonSDK-BasicSoundFx

Purpose

Before the MPEG3 or OGG music formats took off, most music data was rather large and expensive to distribute. As such, one popular music format was the MIDI format and wasn’t really audio binary data per se, but a sequence of instructions for the audio hardware to play/emulate. Massive songs could only take a few k of disk space, so this format was/is extremely popular.

Downloads

The project files are available here: PeonSDK-BasicMusic

Purpose

This sample is all about reading/querying the joystick for your games. Demonstrates how to poll the joystick using SDL.

Downloads

The project files are available here: PeonSDK-BasicJoystick

Purpose

This sample is all about how to read the position and button information from your mouse. Displays the current mouse coordinates along with an “RMB” or “LMB” if the mouse button is pressed.

Downloads

The project files are available here: PeonSDK-BasicMouse