Last week I tried to make a game for the 10-second theme on experimentalgameplay.com.

This is what became of it.

The first few lines of code on this were written during my short stint at the indie art jam during gdc, back then it just drew colorful triangles all over the screen. However, the actual game I tried to make didn’t work at all, and I just ended up sitting and toying with it as a stupid drawing application for a good thirty minutes (incidentally about a quarter of this thing’s total development time).

So, I declared it a failure as a game (even though I still want to explore the, uh, spatial relations of triangles a bit more) and made it into a drawing app.

To draw you click a triangle and drag to one of it’s three neighbours, that will copy the color from the first one onto the second. Repeat as needed.

As an added feature it serializes the whole image into a string with every move you make and puts that in the url. This has two benefits, the bigger one being that you can easily send what your stuff to your friends, but it also makes your browsers back and forward buttons act as undo/redo. Here’s one I made.

It has two twitter buttons in the lower left, one to tweet your creation, the other one searches for other people’s posts tagged with the #triangles hashtag, making sharing a bit easier that it ever was with isotope3.

Here are some more amazing pieces of art:

• Blank slate
• Big plaid
• The V

So I decided to try and keep track of what I spend my time on, because I do have a conscience and I will undoubtedly feel bad about wasting my own time.

Keeping a time sheet quite possibly the most boring thing you can do, but fear not, there’s a program called Procrastitracker that does this exact thing for you (PC only). I first got to know about this sweet little app through hello games talk at the gdc.

It’s really simple and there’s virtually no setup, just keep it running in your taskbar and it’ll spy away on you.

This is my last five and a half days of work, yellow is surfing, blue is communication (im/email) and green is work. I’d say I spend roughly half my day surfing, and about a quarter of that is spent in small five minute increments on facebook. Embarrasing to say the least.

Hopefully this can shame me into hanging around facebook less and doing more actual work.

In other news, glorg is coming along nicely, albeit a bit slower than I’d hoped. I’ve been expanding the way of handling states I started with my last post and hooking that up to an animation system to visualize the states, now I can map animations to different states and do transitions and all kinds of sweet stuff.

I’ve spent the day toying with a new way to do the battles in glorg. I wasn’t really happy with the way they worked in the version I submitted to gamma, but nor could I figure out a good way to make it more interesting.

So, somewhat inspired by Ben’s writeup on his devblog for Aztez I decided to figure out the different states the combatants could be in. This graph illustrates the original battle system:

States with an asterisk mean that the player can exit them when he wants to. So the only choice the player has here is  when to exit the idle state, leading into the attack. Then he has to wait for the post attack to finish before getting to the idle state again.

This means that any time spent in the idle state is time you could be making damage, so the best strategy is to bash the button like an idiot. While that is good fun for a minute or so, it quickly becomes pretty tedious, especially since there was no real way to be good at it.

Today I made this graph (along with a small test application) :

As you can see this is considerably more complicated. The player starts out as idle, being idle now also means blocking, something that wasn’t possible using the old system. So if you do nothing, you’re still reasonably safe.

Once the player presses the button we move into the charging state, this makes the character lower his guard, opening up for damage, but the longer he holds the button the more powerful his attack will be. Once he releases he goes into the pre-attack followed by the actual attack and then the post-attack. These phases are primarily for animation purposes, but they also affect how much damage you will take if hit during them.

If the player charges for too long or is hit during any of the non-blocking phases he will be dazed for a short time, leaving him open to attack.

The problem I am facing now is to illustrate all these states using animations. My battle prototype uses simple colors and it’s quite confusing at times, but hopefully it will all make sense once there’s a little monster flailing around a rabbit on a stick instead of a stupid box changing colors. As always.

The GDC is over and I’m taking a new step in life. I am taking a year of from work to do my own thing, and today is the first day. This feels both fantastic and terrifying all at once. Doing this I really do hope I can get some real work done on my games, I’ve got a bunch of ideas lined up I want to try out, but first I intend to try and finish up glorg.

GDC was just as amazing this year as last. I sort of want to make a long list of all the fantastic people I met, but I worry I will forget someone and it’ll look a bit too much like namedropping, so I’ll just stick to a “best-of”:

• Cactus acceptance speech, I have rarely been so worried what he’d do, luckily it turned out pretty damn hilarious in the end.
• Hearing Alexander Bruce repeatedly yell “Faabs” out the hostel window.
• The Gamma IV party
• The improvised party at Erik’s place
• Being drunk at a place like the Exploratorium
• Petri being a Garth lookalike.

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!

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…

(Quick link to the game on FGL)

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).

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!

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.

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!

All my pictures are available in my Nordic Game Jam 2009 set on flickr.

From the left: Jonas, Kian, Joel, Bernie (behind), Cactus, Erik and Petri

From the left: Petri, Joel, Cactus and Jonas.

Heather did the keynote.

Kian and Bernie

Erik pretending to work

Heather and Cactus making their game

Cactus again.

It’s me!

Jonas and Joel hard at work, while I’m messing about taking pictures.

LOLPETRI

The IT-university was a pretty fancy place

66.7% of us won a prize!

That’s the whole weekend summed up in pictures. Sadly none from the presentations or award ceremony but I’m hoping someone else got pictures of that.

More about the game we made in my next post.

The source code for this is available under the MIT license

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!)

This is how you set it up:

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// 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 argument
var _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 amount
var colorTransform:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform(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 = new BlurFilter(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:

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// if you don't apply any effects this isn't even needed.
_canvas.update();

To draw something on the canvas you do this:

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// draws a white box
var box:Shape = new Shape();
box.graphics.beginFill(0xffffff);
box.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, 50, 50);
_canvas.draw(box);

Get the source, example and flashdevelop project here and try it yourself!

Big thanks to my friend Richard who gave me some feedback on the code making it possible to read for people that are not me.

Comments are very much appreciated!

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.