A few days ago, I resumed development on the Smiley Puzzle Project. I am using LWJGL (Lightweight Java Game Library) for this game, an OpenGL and OpenAL binding for Java.

I was excited to learn that in the mean time, beta 3 of version 1.0 of LWJGL has been released, featuring some cool improvements:

• The DevIL library works again on MacOS X, making it possible to use it for my cross-platform projects. DevIL is an image library, that allows to load and convert images to OpenGL format natively. I changed my texture loading code to make use of DevIL, which made it 5 to 8 times faster! This code used to take about 26 seconds on my 4 year old PowerBook, and now it executes in about 4 seconds!
• But perhaps the coolest feature of all, is that LWJGL can now be used in a Java Applet! It can temporarily install the necessary native libraries in the users temp dir, giving you the power of OpenGL, OpenAL and DevIL in your applet! Converting an existing game to a webgame can thus be done with minimal effort, as you can see in the LWJGL tutorial.

After finding out about these, I’m confident I made the right choice by using Java and LWJGL for my game development. Maybe I’ll make a free online version of Bubblomania with this API. It could be a nice project to get up to speed with LWJGL, and start off my life as an independent game producer next week!

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on 2 websites: one for my mother and one for my girlfriend. It was also quite busy at my day job, so as a consequence, I hardly made any progress with the Smiley Puzzle Project…

My mother’s website is meant for her small business: she’s running a one-person beauty-parlour. This website can be visited at www.vivianetilley.be. It’s still under development: a lot of content should still be added. The look & feel of the site should be more or less final. The background is actually a scan of a painting my mother made! She’s very creative, the curtains you can see on the picture are also hand-made by her. In the future we might use this site to sell some of her work.

The other site is my girlfriend’s blog: Speeltijd. I’ve set up a WordPress blog for her, and she’s going to provide the content. For her job, she’s working a lot with kids aged between 4 and 12, and she has collected a large number of child game ideas to entertain these kids. These are not computer games, but games that can be played outside with a group of kids, or at parties. This site is thus meant both for children and people taking care of children or organising parties for children.

She’s just starting out with this site, but over time it should collect quite some useful content. And we hope it will also attract quite some visitors, as one of the long-term goals is to monetize this site. The content will always remain free of course.

Both sites are in dutch, so they’re meant for a local audience. They are also both located on my webspace with Canaca, since I have a huge amount of webspace and bandwidth there. More than enough to host a dozen more sites if I want to! It’s cheaper to just buy a domain name and a forwarding DNS entry, than to buy new hosting for each site. And this way I can experiment with some ideas…

My ultimate indie dream is of course to have a number of websites providing a basic stream of passive income for me, so I can work almost full time on designing and developing games!