Freegemas - Open source Bejeweled clone

By TheOm3ga Date 2010-07-16 22:32

Hey.

I was bored last week and created Freegemas, an open source clone of the classic Bejeweled. It's written on C++ and obviously uses Gosu. It's a really small project, it's more like a rapid development exercise for me, because the main functionality and all of the graphics were built in pretty much one night.

This has also helped me to try Visual Studio (ver. 2005) for the first time, because I had never programmed on Windows before. I may say it has pleasantly suprised me, the auto-completion system is effing amazing, all the reference just a ctrl + space away. Also, forgetting about Makefiles for a couple of hours has been a great relief. However, the amount of configuration options is overwhelming, and sometimes there are weird errors only solvable by recreating the msvc project file from scratch..

In the googlecode repository you will find some videos and information about the project. I'm running out of ideas, so any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

P.S.: I used Visual Studio 2005 because, the first time, I tried with Visual Studio 2010 and I was not able to link the library. The error I was getting was the same one they explained here.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2010-07-17 11:49

Wow, website and video look really polished. I think if you find a way to fill the void in the lower left corner, it'll look even more cheerful. Will try it out on Windows when I reboot.

> I tried with Visual Studio 2010 and I was not able to link the library

I moved to VS2008/VS2010 here, both have the ability to use the VS2008 libs ("vc90 toolset"). With the next released version of Gosu, you should be able to use either of those two versions. Mmmmhhh partial C++0x draft support!! Can't wait for other platforms to get better at that.

BTW: not many people have released/developed a C++ game on Linux. Did anything in Gosu get in your way? I guess my makefile is hopelessly buggy and inflexible? ;)

By TheOm3ga Date 2010-07-17 12:17

Thanks. Right now I'm filling the left part with a timer, a "get hint" button and a "restart" button. Classic stuff :D

> BTW: not many people have released/developed a C++ game on Linux. Did anything in Gosu get in your way? I guess my makefile is hopelessly buggy and inflexible? ;)

Not at all! The only thing that got in my way was not being able to load ttf files and hey, we made it work ;)

About the makefiles, many people (me included) find autotools really hard to use and you used it flawlessly. The ./configure && make then link libgosu.a has always worked for me very well. No problem here.

By TheOm3ga Date 2010-07-17 23:24

Freegemas v0.3 is now available on Windows and Linux (and guess it works in Mac OS X as well), featuring time trial mode, ingame music and sound effects and more. Check it out at https://code.google.com/p/freegemas/

By Dahrkael Date 2010-07-18 10:04

looks really nice to be made in one night, but its hard t.t

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-03-23 08:01

Found the site again while I was developing stuff on Windows and it still looks very sweetly polished, and absolutely iPad compatible with these controls & screen size. Have you ever thought about compiling for iOS? (Not to make money, the concept is too common I guess, just because it is an obvious match)

I'd love to help because having more OSS iOS games is always cool. But I also just realized that this would require relicensing.

By TheOm3ga Date 2011-03-24 23:46

Hey. I had thought about it, but the only apple-related gear I've got is an iPod touch 2G I won in a xhtml competition, so I have no way of compiling it for iOS.

However, I'm still interested. Also, I didn't know anything about it needing be relicensed. Why is that?

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-03-25 01:48

Hmm, maybe I'll try to compile myself it when I have a couple hours and see if it is troublesome or not, I have already set up the iOS toolchain here. The problem with the App Store is that it enforces some DRM, even on free apps, and that this is contradictory to the GPL (http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement). I think another problem was that it doesn't allow customers to request the source or something, but that sounded more like speculation.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-11-22 22:04

I am quietly working on a Mac/iOS port and cleaning up the source while I am at it. If anyone wants to try it on OS X, the Xcode project in /mac is pretty standard, just needs path fixing for Gosu.framework I guess.

https://github.com/jlnr/freegemas