Archive for the 'Games' Category

a-steroids4k

Published on March 10, 2009 in 4k, Games and code. 7 Comments

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So, here it is, the full 4089 bytes of it, a-steroids4k for the gamepoetry 4k flash game compo.

I’ve been wanting to remake an old retro game with new mechanics for some time now but I’ve never had an idea I though worthwhile, there’s way too many half assed remakes out there and it’s hard to beat really innovative ones like 1D tetris or some crazy space invaders version. This is my take on asteroids. I played the original on the proper hardware a few weeks ago and was amazed by two things; The XY-vector screen is *really* bright and it’s hard. Very hard.

So I wanted to juxtapose the underpowered feel and make the player way more powerful, this is a bit tricky without making the game far too easy. The easyness wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but to feel really powerful you need to have a baseline of “weakness” to contrast against.

The basic mechanics came to me on a train ride, luckily I had my trusty laptop near and could churn out some quick proof of concept code then and there. It was only later the 4k competition was announced. I’ve done a game for a 5k compo in the past and enjoyed it immensely, the result of this was lost in a hdd crash and is unfortunately not available anymore. When I started slimming down the game was at about 29k. I ripped out all the sound and got down to 18k (yes, the sounds were tiny). I’d love to post screenshots, but, honestly the game has looked more or less the same ever since it’s conception. Ever since then it’s been a lot of aggressive cutting and small amounts of putting back in.

The full source code is under the  MIT License, but a word of warning is in place, this is essentially obfuscated code seeing that I needed to shave of some extra bytes to get the text in there.  I also put it up on wonderfl for your fiddling pleasure. I bet there’s a good 20% of savings in there that I just missed, I’ll be thrilled by any modifications to it!

in one piece

Published on February 4, 2009 in Games. 6 Comments

I present to you, In one piece, winner of the Audience award of Nordic Game Jam 2009. Read more about the game below.

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As you’ve likely noticed I attended the Nordic Game Jam this past weekend.
I ended up in a group together with Jonas and Joel.
The theme for the whole global event was As long as we have each other we will never run out of problems. We also had a few additional constraints:

  • A complete play session must always last 5 min or less
  • The game must be language independent
  • Choose one of the following adjectives:
    • Developing
    • Falsifying
    • Trapped

All three of us came up with a couple of ideas each, mine naturally involved ropes. Jonas had an idea about escaping from a shrinking chamber (pictured below). Joels idea was about a guy walking around the Roskilde festival (we were in Denmark, mind you) playing bongos. Attracting a ever increasing line of followers behind him.

iop-sketch2

iop-sketch3This is the idea we went with. It morphed and changed around quite a bit. Early on we decided to change the setting of it, a festival didn’t feel artsy enough. We also realized that a long line would be pretty hard to control regardless of input method, so we wanted to tweak the gameplay towards a different main mechanic.

That’s when we came up with the whole fitting into shapes idea (pictured right).

As you’ve likely noticed this blogpost has about a gazillion more images than usual. This is because of Jonas. He’s one of those pen and paper guys. It’s been a while since we worked together. And I had almost forgot how awesome it is to have a whole person dedicated to the art when making a game.

We called it a night pretty early on friday, just to get an early start on saturday. It was all downhill from there.

Joel got to work on the sounds. Also, most excellent to have someone being able to do that properly for once.

I took some screenshots during the saturday:

iop-progress1

iop-progress2

iop-progress3

iop-progress4


Most of the sunday was spent in a complete frenzy. The deadline was set at 1500, and that is also the exact time we started our upload to the server.

The game posted here has seen some additional improvements compared to the one we presented at the jam. All the changes made are cosmetical and the gameplay is 100% intact from the original. The code has also had a major refactoring, there’s not very much time to make things pretty when you find new bugs minutes before the deadline.

Speaking of code, I will post the complete sources with all you need to build the game yourself in a few days. It’s gonna be under the MIT license so you can do almost whatever you please with it.

Comments, questions and profanities are very much appreciated!

readspeeder

Published on August 17, 2008 in Games. 1 Comment

This is yet another entry in line with my recent non-game posts. I’ve always been a reasonably fast reader, both in English and my native language Swedish. However, it’s always nice to have some numbers to back up that general feeling. Thus I created readspeeder. It uses the complete book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, which he has graciously made available under a Creative Commons license.

You control the speed with your mouse, move it to the right to go faster and towards the center to go slower. If you move to the left you will go in reverse, farther to the left will move faster in reverse.

You can click the progress bar at the bottom to skip ahead. The Words per minute counter is an average of your last 50 words. I’ve made it so that it makes slightly longer pauses for words with more syllables. It also makes a small pause between sentences, I’ve found that really helps with reading comprehension. I guess it gives your brain a chance to process the actual meaning of the sentence before getting on with the next one.

According to Wikipedias entry on speedreading anything above 600 wpm can be considered quite good. 1000-2000 wpm is on a World Championship level. The very fastest readers claim speeds of 10 000 wpm or more. But I find that somewhat hard to believe.

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