prototyprally » Rant

The post of shame.

grapefrukt — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:50:29 +0000

More than three months the last post. That’s just plain embarrassing.
My excuse is that I both got a job and moved in with my girlfriend. I could never have expected how little time I have to spend on making games.
I haven’t made a single game since my entry into the jayisgames ball physics compo, and I didn’t even post about it here. Once again. The shame.

While I’ve been sitting on my ass both Petri of the often featured kloonigames has managed to get nominated in IGF. To use a slightly worn word, AWESOME.

And as if that wasn’t enough of the awesomeness, Ron and Kyle of 2Dboy and their World of goo got nominated too.

And while these boys have been hard at work I’ve been making quizzes (I make disturbing amount of those at work). I think i went wrong somewhere. Maybe I’ll feel better if I go to GDC in febuary and kick their asses. Too bad it’d cost a small fortune.

I’ll just make a game to mock them instead.

In the time I don’t have.
Dammit.

It seems I can’t beat you this time.

But you haven’t seen the last of me I assure you!

[INSERT DIABOLICAL LAUGHTER HERE]

(to help this post from not totally sucking, i’ve attached a picture of me dressed as a gameboy. enjoy.)

Finding the game.

grapefrukt — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:17:45 +0000

The way I make games is that first I make a prototype (this is prototyprally after all). Using that I try to find an amusing mechanic, something that makes you smile when you play with it. Normally this isn’t actually all that hard, especially when you’re doing something with physics as it tends to be reasonably emergent. With some fiddling you can find a few interesting mechanics without too much hassle.
The hard part is making it more than a toy.

This is where I’m at with this game now. It’s pretty fun as a toy, and it’s great fun to spawn in a hundred boats and just smash them, but it’s not quite a game yet. But it’ll get there.

My biggest problem right now is resisting the urge to add in even more complicated stuff, blooming and motion blur are two things I’m pretty confident I could put in there without completely killing performance. I’ve also had some problems with my constraint system (used for ropes and such) so that would need a slight rewrite too. But if I’m to complete this within the coming weeks I can’t do that stuff, I need to focus on the actual game.

And once the game’s done there’s menus, possibly high scores and that whole thing. And that takes alot of time, I learned that the hard way for Eater of Worlds, it was supposed to take five weeks, but the highscores and challenge system took two whole weeks on their own pushing the development time to seven weeks total.

Well. Enough with the whining. FlashDevelop, which I plugged in my last post is truly awesome. I hope to be able do a quick little tutorial for how to setup the whole thing for game development.

Time flies. Fast.

grapefrukt — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:27:47 +0000

Wow. I’ve been fiddling about with my latest game for what i thought was about a week, turns out it’s been more than a month since my last post. Oops.

Well, the time in between hasn’t been entirely uneventful. The main reason I don’t post here as much lately is my final project that takes up a good 9 hours a day, combine that with the potent distractions such as Castlevania and God of War 2, there’s not much time left for the poor blog. But enough with the excuses for now.

We’re about two weeks from a beta of the game, and it’s coming together very nicely. If you’re interested in being a beta tester once we get that far, please drop me an email. Somehow it never seizes to amaze what you can accomplish in a couple of weeks when you’re six people instead of just one.

I have another little game in the works, well, actually it’s all done. I’m struggling with getting my new highscore thingie working properly. The one I have for flashpipes is working out great, but it’s a bit of a bummer that the top fifty places or so are the three same people
So once I get that done (which should be within a few days) there’ll be a new game up here.

In other news, Petri got to go to the GDC. That gives me mixed feelings, partly I’m glad for him, partly I’m so jealous my arms are about to fall of.
Well, I’ll go next year, by then I should be rich and famous enough.

The game has a name.

grapefrukt — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 13:47:31 +0000

I decided on the name for my game today. Eater of worlds.
The release is drawing near, though I don’t dare to set an actual date just yet. I have a presentation for it in 47 hours (omg!), but I doubt it’ll hit the internets before that.
I have finished the first level, and only some level design is missing from the second one. The third level is still MIA.
I’d absolutely love to make a level editor for this game and let everyone add their own stuff to their own music. That would be awesome, but that’s another two weeks of development, at least. So no go for that.

In other news:
This whole Web 2.0 (and/or mod community) thing with user generated content is so exciting, I think my next project will be something that involves the players a bit more. I mean, procedural content is cool and all, but if you get actual people doing content that has to be better.
Lost garden has an article on this.

The wiimote for PC is making real progress, read more on Wii Hacks, watch the cool video on YouTube and wait for WiiLi to get back up.

And also, the wii-browser will support Flash. YES! I read it on a feed from opera.com somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.
Let’s just hope it’s proper flash and not Flash 5 or something.

And while I’m at it, Kloonigames has a new game up. Go check it out.

More work?

grapefrukt — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:48:24 +0000

As I’m into the third week of coding the game is getting a bit big. When trying to find stuff in the almost 700 lines of code, almost all of it in one single frame, it gets a bit frustrating. I remembered reading something about a Flash IDE, kinda like Visual Studio, but for flash.
I’ve used these types of software before, and the added organization really speeds up the workflow.

Turns out the program I had read about was FlashDevelop. It’s real awesome. I did a quick try to move my game to it, but it does need a bit more object oriented and strict code than I’ve been using. I will however use it for whatever I do next, and I’ve moved smaller projects into it already.

And the best part is that it’s all Open Source, I really like where this is going.

Flash. Slow as lightning?

grapefrukt — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:13:34 +0000

Flash is a weird beast. Things you expect to be fast are slow and vice versa. With this project I’m really pushing the limits performance wise. And also, running the game in a browser gives a good 10-30% decrease in fps.
It’s a real downer when you’ve got tons of ideas for cool effects you want to do, but there’s just not enough speed to do it.
But with AS3 right around the corner speed is coming, i mean, if you can do a C64 emulator you can do almost anything.

A really good resource for optimizing flash is http://flasm.sourceforge.net/

Back in black.

grapefrukt — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:31:26 +0000

Wow. It’s been almost a month since my last post, my internship took up most of my time for the last four weeks. But now I’m back home and hungry for making some games.
I decided to scrap the multiplayer Moonlumber project, multiplayer action games are damn tricky.
I will however make a bigger game this time, I have a bit of a head start since it’s a prototype I’ve been working on for some time. I don’t want to reveal too much about the game just yet, the release won’t be for a few weeks yet.

What I can reveal is that it will be most awesome.

And while we’re on the topic of awesome you really should check out Kloonigames recent post on rapid prototyping. Partly because it features stuff written by me, but there’s some actual relevant stuff in there too.

I’ve also managed to get my games on a few other sites, Playaholics and Mousebreaker. If you’re running a similar sites the games are still available for licensing.

Game 6, Oh happy night.

grapefrukt — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:17:21 +0000

Okay. My game just collapsed on itself, det “buggar som en dansskola” as you would say in swedish. It’s now 2:13am. That is a bad thing. These are the times when you curse the fact that ActionScript doesn’t have a regular compiler that whines when you do stupid stuff, it just ignores it and hopes it’ll work anyway.
Dammit.
I’ll give this ’til 3am and if it’s not done by then I’ll give up and finish it tomorrow.

4 minutes later or so:
It’s working again, found a retarded little error once I actually stopped to think. I still miss proper error handling though. Would make me a happier man.

Game 4, get on with it!

grapefrukt — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 16:05:03 +0000

Man. I just keep working and working on this game and it never gets done, it’s more than twice the amount of code compared to my last game (this has 300+ lines of code). I’m gonna go get something to drink now and do a final push to get this damn game done.

Game 4

grapefrukt — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:02:43 +0000

A new week and a new game. The start of game 4 wich should’ve been last friday was a bit delayed for personal reasons, but after working a few hours this weekend i’m back on track. The new words are pope and traffic jam. My plan was to make a “god game” where you help the pope in his neat car navigate through a mass of people, cars or something.
I did some reading up on flocking behaviour because I figured that’d be a nice emergent system much like the springs/IK stuff I’ve used in previous games. Pretty soon I found Boids. A very neat way of simulating flock/school behaviour, i also found some pseudocode wich greatly helped in implementing the technique in flash.

However there is a problem, it’s too slow for what I originally inteded to use it for. I barely get 25fps with pink box graphics and 20 boids flying around. I wanted alot more.
I did manage to push the fps a bit by using various optimizing techniques, but it’s still not fast enough. I think I might be able to get it a bit faster, but my original idea of a car traveling through tons of people won’t be doable anyways.

I might do a spin on angry muslims chasing the pope, a bit of politics in your games makes for interesting results.

Here we go.

grapefrukt — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 10:37:55 +0000

So. First of all I want to say sorry to the internet, I promised myself I’d never get a blog. Seems I was wrong, but let’s stop the blogginess here.

It all began a few days ago when I was to start a new 20 week course, at first I thought I’d learn shader programming, but that seemed pretty boring. But then I remebered the neat games they made over at Experimental Gameplay Project.

I wanted to focus a bit more on coming up with ideas, as I’m primarily a game designer, not a programmer, so I’m doing one game every three days for five weeks (give or take a few days).

The inspiration for each game is taken from two words wich i choose freely from the swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, I can only choose the words once I start making the game, this prohibits me from thinking about my next game whilst working on the current one.