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/

As I keep mentioning every time I talk about this game, it has music. This music is made by all round awesome dude dannyB. He’s put the soundtrack up on his bandcamp page, as a pay what you want download. Go get it!

As a bonus, this is a small screenshot of how the game looked back in September last year. A long way indeed.

I made a game for the experimental gameplay project, it’s called leaf.

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.

Play it and tell me what you think!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

See the demo after the break.

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.

This demo requires the Flash Player 10 Prerelease player. Get it here.

Press the mouse buttonto fly around, if you get stuck in the planet you’ll have to reload the page.
The physics are motor2.

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!

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.

Improvements over the old version include:

• Massive epic speed improvement, more than 1000x faster
• Customizable colors, both for isotope and background
• Better, live pattern recognition (updates as you type)
• You can now export settings, not just the pattern
• And, as always, heated seats and cupholders

If you want to put this little thingie on your own little part of the interblags, here’s what you’ll need:

<object width="620" height="600" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.isotope3.net/isotope3.swf"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.isotope3.net/isotope3.swf" /> <img width="620" height="600" alt="no flash" src="" /> </object>


And oh, if you’ve missed it somehow, play with it here: isotope3