rymdkapsel, released

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Martin

Today is a huge day for me, it marks the release of my first game ever to go up for sale directly to players. You can go to the rymdkapsel website and get the game, right now.

I started working on this just over a year ago, right after coming back from GDC. I was working on some other project at the time, but figured I’d take a week of to try and hash out this idea I had about a building a space station. The game quickly turned into something different than I had imagined, and I put another week into it to see where it would go. Those two weeks turned into three, and then into a month and then some.

I released a small teaser trailer in early july, and with that I somehow got in contact with Sony. I took a few weeks off for summer vacation and then got to work porting the game to C# and their platform. In the process I expanded and polished every little corner of the game quite a bit.

Then came the, Independent Games Festival which awarded me with an Honorable Mention in the design category. It’s still absolutely huge to me to get that kind of recognition from my peers.

Now, here we are, months of bug fixing and polishing later with a game that is out on its first platform of many to come. I’ve spent the past few days cleaning up the iOS and Android versions in preparation of testing, and those will be out in two months or so.

Posted in Games |

  1. Looking forward to the iOS-release, that game looks to be made for the iPad. Go for it!

    Starcruizah, May 11, 2013 at 15:52

  2. It looks and sounds great. Can’t wait to play on my iPhone Congrats

    Ash, May 11, 2013 at 14:50
'; what do you think?

humble bundle mojam 2 and tektonik

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Martin
tektonik-logo

Per usual this blog is woefully underposted, most of the action is over on twitter. But, I do have something to treat you to. I spent the past weekend camped out in the Mojang offices up in Stockholm, making a game for charity in the form of Humble Bundle in three days.

The whole thing was livestreamed and I ran my own channel for the entire time I was coding. So, should you have a few days to kill, I’ve got you covered!

The game I ended up making is called TEKTONIK, a sort of quick action based tower defense crossed with digging and platforming. It’s a bit crazy really.

There’s still time to get in on the action too, the bundle is pay what you want and open for donations for a few more days. 

tektonik-screenshot-00 tektonik-screenshot-02 tektonik-screenshot-01

Posted in Games, News |

  1. hey Martin, thanks for Tektonik! i really enjoyed watching you build it from scratch. would you consider releasing the source code of the project? it would be a very educational for me and I guess for a lot of people. cheers

    jvdm, March 5, 2013 at 16:35
'; what do you think?

crime city arcade

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Martin
2012-10-05 17.21.44

Me and my friend Niklas (who also happens to be making the music for rymdkapsel) have built the thing pictured above. It’s a four player arcade machine, it’s been to a bunch of events so far, perhaps most notably at No More Sweden (the unpainted machine is on the stage that entire video).

Since people keep asking us where we got it and how we built it, we put up a big blog post about it, you can read more over on Niklas blog devsound.

Posted in News |
'; be the first to comment

rymdkapsel for playstation mobile

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Martin

It’s time for my quarterly blog post, this time I’ve got some neat news. rymdkapsel has found yet another platform, Playstation Mobile. This will be the platform the game premieres on once it’s ready for release, which I plan to be in early 2013.

If you’re not familiar with Playstation Mobile, or PSM for short, it’s basically the Sony equivalent to Apples App Store or Android Market Google Play.

This has been a bit of a secret for a while and it feels great to finally be able to talk about it freely. In other news I submitted the game to the Independent Games Festival, competition there is absolutely fierce so it remains to be seen how that goes!

If you want more info on me, rymdkapsel, or my other games, check out my presskit.

Posted in rymdkapsel |
'; see 1 more comments

rymdkapsel – teaser trailer

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Martin

This is a game I’ve been working on for the past few months, it’s a game where you take command of a space station and its minions. You will have to plan your expansion and manage your resources to explore the galaxy.

It will launch on iOS, Android and Flash “soon”.

I am currently seeking a sponsorship for the Flash version, contact me for further information.

Posted in rymdkapsel |
'; be the first to comment

juice it or loose it.

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Martin

You can try the game here: http://grapefrukt.com/f/games/juicy-breakout/
Or look at the source code on github: https://github.com/grapefrukt/juicy-breakout

Posted in Talks |
'; see 3 more comments

prototype tour: timewarp

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Martin

I’m trying out a new thing for posting prototypes, a quick video instead of a long talky blog post. Let’s see how that feels. You can try the game below while watching the video.

This is where the game would be had your browser supported Flash!
Posted in Games, prototype tours |

  1. Interesting. Lowest I could get w/ 4 towers was 8. Don’t think 3 is possible.

    TW015ANUMB3R, October 26, 2012 at 23:07

  2. What a cool game! It turns tower defense into an optimization problem, almost like math. The intuitively best setups don’t necessarily work well. I like not having to wait.

    MHW, October 6, 2012 at 19:46

  3. That’s interesting! The towers are set to “stick” with their current target as long as it’s in range. One interesting thing that happens when you’re trying to optimize your placements is that since all shooting is resolved simultaneously, you will “loose” shots if you place two towers so that they’re firing in sync at the same enemy. The first tower will shoot and kill the enemy so the second tower will be firing at an enemy that is already dead. There are so many tiny little choices like this, it wouldn’t be a huge deal to “fix” but I kind of like that there are little micro optimizations like that to make.

    Martin, December 7, 2011 at 13:41

  4. Timing and “tower AI” must be very important for success. As an illustration, I can get the escapee UP by placing a third tower. That doesn’t make much sense until you start looking at which creeper the tower decides to shoot at. A smart tower would probably always go for the kill. ..Or.. not go for the kill and always strive to “use” its entire firepower. Then you add another tower type and my eyes will go cross.

    Joel, December 7, 2011 at 09:41
'; what do you think?

hats in videogames.

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Martin

This is a talk I did at No More Sweden, it’s kind of silly but I think it touches on some important issues.

Posted in Talks |

  1. There is one very interesting game, that confirms your theory :) Physical puzzle “Pursuit of Hat”, where the hat becomes almost the main actor of the game. Hats should come back, at least in games :)

    BaGa, June 7, 2012 at 10:18
'; what do you think?

!Muchacho! !Muchacho! !Muchacho!

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Martin
muchacho

Play the game: http://grapefrukt.com/f/games/muchacho/

A little while ago I attended (and co-arranged) the “most swedish” game jam called No More Sweden. I was sick during the entire previous game jam I attended and spent most of my time asleep, so I really felt like getting my revenge and making a proper game this time around.

I also managed to convince my friends Jonas and Per to attend. Jonas and I went to the Nordic Game Jam way back when and we’ve worked on a bunch of games together before. This was however, Per’s first game jam.

Just a few days before I had seen this amazing video of a mariachi-band serenading a beluga whale and was determined to make a game featuring one of these bands. Somehow I managed to convince my team mates that this would be a good idea and we decided on an idea after something like half an hour of discussion. Coming to a decision that fast is a first for me.

The division of work ended up in the most predictable way. I did code, Jonas did graphics and Per did the rest. We scrambled to get atleast a playable mockup and some concepts done before going home to sleep and Per scrounged the web for inspiration, reference materials and other useful things.

We also hijacked Mattias and forced him to compose some silly music for us.

Once we got the basic gameplay up and running we were confident that this would turn out nice. Then we went home and slept.

We got back around noon on Saturday and kept working well into Sunday. At 6 in the morning we decided that we were pretty much done, either way, as tired as we were no more work was going to be done. Sadly this meant that the time it would take us to go home and then back again would mean almost no sleep before the presentations, so we decided to just stay the night.

Skip ahead to 46 minutes in to see our presentation.

Play the game: http://grapefrukt.com/f/games/muchacho/

Posted in Games |
'; be the first to comment

platformer physics – it’s complicated

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Martin

Petri and I were invited to do a talk at the Nordic Indie Game Night in Malmö this past week, we were supposed to talk about the super sexy Cobalt. Instead we went kind of overboard on an analysis of the physics in platformers. We got way more material than we could fit in the ten minutes (which we exceeded), so there may be another chance to catch an extended version of this talk at some point.

Update: Since I posted this in a bit of a hurry, I forgot to mention that the NGIN was conjured into existence by the fantastically wonderful Copenhagen Game Collective. Who, aside from making marvelous games are doing incredible things for the game making community in these parts of the world. They really are the best.

Posted in Talks |
'; be the first to comment