This is one of those games I got started on a while back, and figured I’d finish quickly but never really got around to it after the first day of hacking away at it. When I heard that the theme for december was going to be “art game” I knew this game would be a perfect fit.
The idea came to me when I was walking home with the game’s theme-to-be playing on my ipod, I saw leaves tumbling to the ground and uttered the words all game designers have come to hate “I should make a game about that”.
Once I got home I played the song and pitched the idea to my friend Jonas, mostly to get some feedback, but also to trick him into doing the graphics.
Things happened, pictures got drawn, days were spent on stupid, stupid scrolling bugs and this is what became of it.
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!
I present to you, In one piece, winner of the Audience award of Nordic Game Jam 2009. Read more about the game below.
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 involvedropes. 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.
This 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:
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!
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.
This is more of a tech demo than anything else. It’s something that’s in damn near every game they make nowadays, but i still haven’t seen in a 2D game, maybe because nearly no one makes those anymore.
I’ve made bloom. I’ve been wanting to make this ever since bitmap effects were introduced back in Flash player 8, but AS2 is far to slow to pull it of with performance to spare for an actual game.
The following is a bit actionscript focused, so if you just want the pretty pictures feel free to skip ahead.
The way it works is that it, instead of just adding the different sprites to the stage, i have a canvas (essentially a Bitmap) i draw them on. This canvas is then copied into a lower resolution bitmap. It could just aswell be the same size, but I’m running it at a half or a quarter of the original resolution for better performance. This copy is then transformed into a black and white image by lowering the saturation to zero, in this step i also crank up contrast way up to get nice big white fields. Then i apply a simple BlurFilter to get the fuzzy effect.
This is then drawn on top of the canvas with additive blending.
The effect works a lot better if you can do some pseudo (or actual) HDR, since what it does is that it takes the very brightest pixels and makes them glow. This is all fine and dandy, but having variable exposure really makes it pop.
As an added bonus a beta of the Flash Player 10 was released this week, this gives amongst other things, a nice speed boost for blitting. It also supports something called Pixel Bender, which basically is pixel shaders, they run on the graphics card and everything. This demo however, does not use them.
In other news; I attended the Nordic Game Conference this week. The conference itself was so-so, in my opinion a bit too many lectures/panels. I realize that you need the wide appeal for a conference like this, but that can’t be at the expense of quality. It is still nice to have something like that almost on your own doorstep though.
The real highlight of this was however that I got to meet a bunch of indie people. I mostly hung out with Petri Purho of Kloonigames and Erik Svedäng that is making the very interesting looking Blueberry garden. We also did some beer drinking with thewreck and jeb of Oxeye games. Pure gold.
I thought it would be easier to work all week and then be creative on nights/weekends, but as you’ve no doubt seen here it wasn’t all that easy. There’s a reason for “all” this posting all of a sudden, I am now a little bit less of a working man. I’ve taken Wednesdays off for the foreseeable future to try and make some more fun little apps and games for you to enjoy.
There’s also a little bit bigger project in the works, but that’s a bit too early to talk about now, it might not even make it into development if i jinx it by writing about it here.
But enough with the rants already.
In other news, I’ve spent the last two days failing miserably at growing some form of upper-lip facial hair.
Today I channeled this frustration into Flex and came up with the Super Moustache Generator 500. It’s a bit dodgy in almost every sense as I wrote it in about four hours. You get what you pay for, as they say. Play around with the sliders to make your very own ’stache, once you’re done I recommend saving the image, print it and then cut it out and play grown up for a while. That’s what I did.
You can send the patterns to your friends, isotope-style. The images stay on the server “permanently”, but if I see a lot of hotlinking going on I’ll change that in a jiffy.
Please do post any fun patterns you find in the comments, preferably with what you would call that particular type o’ stache!
So, this is yet another of those few and far between posts around here these days. But this time I’ve got something to show you. I bring you, the updated, super pimped-out, isotope3:
The game/app/toy itself is on another domain, mostly to keep the url’s shorter for sending them to friends. I put this up last night and fed it to the stumbleupon-tubes and figured i’d write about it here today. Somehow I’ve managed to get 17k visitors on it already. Cool stuff.
Argblargs is hard to describe without getting too talkative, but this quote from one of our many documents describes it rather well.
argblargs.com is a web based multiplayer game where you choose from hundreds of unique bodyparts and create your own character, play games to earn experience points and win tons of new cool stuff to put on your argblarg.
You can challenge friends (and foes) in the arena or explore the world embarking on the quests that you stumble upon.
Argblargs is about you and your character, challenge your friends, get odd pets, just play it and have fun, that’s what we do!
We’ve spent about 16 weeks full time making this game, and I think it shows. The first six weeks or so we’re spent getting an alpha version of the game up and running. Once that was reasonably playable we let our friends in on the server. The next four weeks we’re our pre-beta-phase. We spent these putting in the last few features we wanted and also fixing about a million bugs found by our beta testers.
Once we were in beta we moved the game to a proper server (away from my old trusty wardrobe computer) and, much to our testers disappointment, reset the characters.
The final five weeks we’re spent on QA and Post production. This is something I’m very glad we had time to do. The difference those weeks make for the overall impression of the game can’t be underestimated. During these last weeks we didn’t add in any new features, all we did was polish the game to a level we could be proud of.
Technology wise it’s not that advanced, tons of Flash (I should know, being the only Flash developer on the team) and the usual HTML on the client side and PHP/MySQL on the server. We’re using the insanely awesome amfphp for communication between the client side Flash and the server.
Argblargs features three brand new games from me (expect individual posts about these in a week or so), Wet dreams (by blast and terrordata) and also an old friend. Play them all on the page.
There’s not all that much more to say really. Please post any questions you might have about the game either here as a comment, or in the argblargs forum. And by the way, I’m awesomeman.
I couldn’t help but feeling my last version of isotope was a bit crippled. So here’s isotope2 for your fiddling pleasure. It’s backwards compatible with old patterns, features zoom, better loop detection, infinite play (shift click the play button) and most important of all ten times the values for rotation speed.
I did a minor update fixing a spelling error and also added a larger range for the speed/accuracy meter. Reload the page to get the new version.
Recent Comments
2.5:50:0.8:50
2.5:50:0.8:50 A BALL OF YARN. YES I CAPS LOCKED!
These are great, two thumbs up!
How does one exactly "toss" a tree?
When can we download it please mate