I’m writing this as I sit on a far too long flight to San Francisco. I’m going there to attend the yearly Game Developers Conference, especially the indie summit. I’m making this trip for several reasons.
Firstly, I learned so much from the summit last year. Hearing people successfull in making a living of their love for making games is absolutely delightful. It’s also very inspiring in a quit-your-job sort of way.
Another reason I go is the excellent indie community, just the thought of meeting everyone has me all giddy with excitement. It’s perhaps only a bit unfortunate that this happens at an event with a minimum pricetag of $500, but, being a part of a larger conference certainly has it’s benefits.
My third reason is to celebrate. I’m taking a year of from work to do freelancing work and make some games. Exactly how much I’ll be doing of each still remains to be seen, freelancing is quite attractive as it’s a much safer livelihood than games atleast from the outset. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I at least hope to get two or three games done during this year.
If you too are in town for GDC (or the Flash Games Summit) please do drop me an email so we can meet up somewhere!
This past sunday, or early monday for me I submitted my game for gamma iv.
The theme for gamma this time was one button game. That means one button, no joysticks, no mice no nothing. Just on and off. Very interesting. I ended up reworking the game I was currently making, originally ment to be something completely different, to fit the theme and I think it turned out quite nice.
I can’t publish it until I know if it’s selected, however there was 154 games so the competition is going to be just brutal. If it is selected I get to show it off on the expo floor of GDC.
This is what the game looks like:
Inspired by Petri’s timelapses I kept chronolapse running as soon as I worked on the game. It’s taken me 2836 screenshots (that’s one per minute) to make this. That works out to 47 hours of work. I put in the last 36 seconds or so of work (in video time) during the nordic game jam.
Now all there is to do is wait, and maybe fix a few bugs…
This is moonbow. A game I started working on on the flight to GDC this year. True to form I had no idea where I was going with it then and it has changed and morphed quite a few times since then. I’ve been saving the different versions throughout development, but those will be in a later blog post.
I’m going to try something new with this game, normally I’ve just put my games up here and been done with it. This time I figured I’d give Flash game license a try. I’ve been talking to a few flash game publishers before, and negotiating a price really is a huge hassle. I’m a bit hesitant to what sites like FGL will mean for flash games, it might be a good equalizer, also it might reduce them to become even more of a commodity than they already are. But there’s only one way to find out.
If you have an account on FGL you can play the game there. If not you’ll just have to wait (or hit me up on twitter).
Check out the competition results over at gamepoetry. There was tons of impressive entries, second place winner Dungeon Romp is really neat, it manages to tap into the latent rpg grinder inside of me. But I can’t help but feel the bytes spent on the 3D-walls might have been better spent on maybe items or something, since all I use to get around is the map. It’s nevertheless a great game!
Other entries I enjoyed are:
4kpillars. A very cool looking game, the flying on a sphere mechanic works great.
Falling with style a technically very impressive entry, I’ve always loved pilotwings.
Ghost4koin really makes me wonder how they managed to fit that in 4k
Pie is maybe the most complete of the entries, also great!
I had a bit of a falling out with my old hosting provider, they essentially asked me to leave. So I took the opportunity to make the move to a new domain at the same time. All old links should redirect here and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future, but do update your bookmarks just to make sure.
If you’re reading my blog through rss you don’t need to do anything, the feedburner-feed stays at the same url.
I also updated the design a bit, it still looks absolutely horrible in ie6 though, but that’s a work in progress.
And when I’m at it, I’ve been twittering for a while and I’d like some more fun people to follow, send me a message or even follow me and I might follow you back.
This weekend I attended the Nordic Game Jam, the flagship event of the Global Game Jam. A whole load of games were made, I’m not sure how many since I’m still waiting for the NGJ-site to get updated with the numbers.
The game we made will be up here shortly, we just need to fix some very minor stuff and get the size down a bit. It will also come with the complete source, although it was written in no-time-at-all so it might not be readable or even understandable.
The event was tons and tons of fun. Got to meet a whole bunch of new people and enjoy the wonderfully incomprehensible language of danish for a whole weekend!
I got my dirty hands on my copy of World of Goo just over two hours ago. Two hours well spent in aforementioned land of thick, viscous matter. It’s a great game, every level so lovingly crafted. Go Preorder itBuy it Give them money this instant or I will kick your ass!
Now I need to get some sleep, damn this worldly body of mine, it’s all about eating and sleeping and way too little about gaming (and possibly even less about getting a occasional game up on this here blog)
The other day I got an email from someone who wanted to know how the “infinite” drawing in isotope3 worked. I figured this would be a excellent time both to share some code and get a post done around here.
I’m using a technique I first started to use in my game Eater of Worlds, it has since appeared in a few other things I’ve made.
Just piling hundreds of objects in a single DisplayObject causes Flash to redraw all of them each frame. Drawing vectors in Flash is pretty fast, but having to redraw them each frame is a bit unnecessary if they aren’t really changing. Enter cacheAsBitmap, this does exactly what you would expect it to. And it’s great. Until the content changes, then you have to redraw everything again. Taking both the hit of the redraw with the added punishment of creating the cache (not sure how big that is though).
In isotope3 I redraw each and every frame, negating any boost cacheAsBitmap would give.
So what I do is i create a “cache” bitmap, basically the same as flash would do automatically, but this bitmap I’m controlling.
This makes stuff a tiny bit more complicated, since you will need to explicitly tell flash what to draw to the bitmap each frame (or whenever you feel like it really). Another drawback is that if you’re using it to pile in large amounts of objects and want to remove something it gets tricky. A good way to solve this would be to keep the DisplayObjects, but not attached to any visible clip, and updating them as needed.
Enough with the talking for now, here’s a demo (Click it to make it go!)
// initializing the canvas at 500x500, not using the // autoclear and with a full size back buffer.// if you're going to use blurring or some other "destructive" // effect, you can use a smaller back buffer that means // setting a bigger buffer divisor as the fourth argumentvar _canvas:Canvas = new Canvas(500, 500, false, 1);
addChild(_canvas);
// this color transform is applied each update(), // here i set the alpha multiplier to .5 making // whatever was in the buffer the last time around // gets faded by that amountvarcolorTransform:ColorTransform = newColorTransform(1, 1, 1, .5, 0, 0, 0, 0);
_canvas.colorTransform = colorTransform;
// a simple blur filter // (it's faster with multiples of two for the blur-setting btw)var blurfilter:BlurFilter = newBlurFilter(4, 4, 1);
// feed it in like this, this is too run on each update()
_canvas.addFilter(blurfilter);
This is what you do each frame to apply fades, blurs or whatever effects you put in there:
1
2
// if you don't apply any effects this isn't even needed.
_canvas.update();
To draw something on the canvas you do this:
1
2
3
4
5
// draws a white boxvar box:Shape = newShape();
box.graphics.beginFill(0xffffff);
box.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, 50, 50);
_canvas.draw(box);
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.
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.
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