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31st October, 2011 - ZhongWen is now "Ant-O-Logy"

Just in case you were wondering about the "ZhongWen" game project: it is still alive, it's just that I don't have as much time to work on private projects as I used to. Anyway, there is some news about it.
"ZhongWen" is now called "Ant-O-Logy". In order to avoid the obstacles and mistakes I made in the past when developing games, I have written a game design/concept document outlining what the game will finally look like. This document includes some concept screen designs, screen flow diagrams, game mechanics and rules and a background story to spice it all up a little. Here's the story:

"You, Perdix, are the neighbour kid of Dr. Daidalos, who is a genius scientist experimenting with mutant ants. One morning, Dr. Daidalos wakes up finding his house and garden being conquered by his mutant ants – they are just everywhere! Fortunately, these ants, mutated as they are, can only eat six different kinds of specially designed food. These food pieces can be told apart by their color and have one drawback: They explode when three or more of the same kind come together.
That is where you, Perdix the neighbour kid, come into play. Since Dr. Daidalus knows about your passion of playing with marbles, he asks you to disturb the food supply trails to the ants' nests by shooting food pieces into these trails, causing the existing pieces to explode. Can you help Dr. Daidalus rid his house of these dreadful mutant ants?"
As an example, here is a screen flow diagram:

Ant-O-Logy Screen Flow Diagram

Another example, here is the "game explanation screen" concept:

Ant-O-Logy Explanation Screen Concept

All in all, the game design document encompasses 15 pages - which will of course increase during development. Programming-wise, I have refactored the code to make it more maintainable. The core game mechanics itself is almost finished, and with the game design document at hand, programming will be more focused in the future.
The targeted platforms are PC and Sega Dreamcast. Possible targets in the future are the Pandora and Android based phones and tablets.
Music and sound effects are all made by myself, but at one point or another during game development, most probably towards the end of the programming job, I will be in need of a graphics artist and level designer. This involves creating 2D and pseudo-3D pixel artwork. If you are a graphics artist/level designer and have some references to show me, please contact me at chnowak@web.de. Thank you!

5th February, 2011 - PBSynth for GP2X

Thanks to Grz, there has been a GP2X port of PBSynth for quite some time now. Finally, I came around to uploading it to this website.

19th June, 2009 - ZhongWen

The little "pet" project I'm working on every now and then is "ZhongWen". This is a puzzle game which, when finished, will be released for the PC and the Sega Dreamcast, but I'd go as far as to say that it should be portable to any platform with some kind of OpenGL support.
Here is an in-game video:

zhongwen.avi (320x240 XviD/MP3, 2.32MB)
The graphics are naturally not that advanced since I'm not that much of a designer, really. But you should get the game mechanics idea.
There are several extras, you can create chain reactions. There can be more that one path in one level, and each path is defined as a bezier curve.

30th May, 2009 - MODPlay v0.66

The MODPlay library was used in many GP32 projects, and even today, it is still part of many independent games and of the libogc

library which in turn is part of devkitpro

. In the meantime, I have rewritten MODPlay. It supports the MOD, S3M and XM formats now and is expandable.

30th May, 2009 - Back Online

I hope some people will still remember me :-) After a couple of years, I decided to put up a small website again. For now, it contains the projects I have been working on. I'd like to improve them and to work on new, interesting ones in the future.
My special interest lies in signal processing, so I'm planning to work further on PBSynth such that it can handle sound samples and has a built-in sequencer. Of course, there would be a C++ player library for use in own applications.
If you have questions or comments, contact me at chnowak@web.de.