Today is a huge day for me, it marks the release of my first game ever to go up for sale directly to players. You can go to the rymdkapsel website and get the game, right now.

I started working on this just over a year ago, right after coming back from GDC. I was working on some other project at the time, but figured I’d take a week of to try and hash out this idea I had about a building a space station. The game quickly turned into something different than I had imagined, and I put another week into it to see where it would go. Those two weeks turned into three, and then into a month and then some.

I released a small teaser trailer in early july, and with that I somehow got in contact with Sony. I took a few weeks off for summer vacation and then got to work porting the game to C# and their platform. In the process I expanded and polished every little corner of the game quite a bit.

Then came the, Independent Games Festival which awarded me with an Honorable Mention in the design category. It’s still absolutely huge to me to get that kind of recognition from my peers.

Now, here we are, months of bug fixing and polishing later with a game that is out on its first platform of many to come. I’ve spent the past few days cleaning up the iOS and Android versions in preparation of testing, and those will be out in two months or so.

Per usual this blog is woefully underposted, most of the action is over on twitter. But, I do have something to treat you to. I spent the past weekend camped out in the Mojang offices up in Stockholm, making a game for charity in the form of Humble Bundle in three days.

The whole thing was livestreamed and I ran my own channel for the entire time I was coding. So, should you have a few days to kill, I’ve got you covered!

The game I ended up making is called TEKTONIK, a sort of quick action based tower defense crossed with digging and platforming. It’s a bit crazy really.

There’s still time to get in on the action too, the bundle is pay what you want and open for donations for a few more days. 

I’m trying out a new thing for posting prototypes, a quick video instead of a long talky blog post. Let’s see how that feels. You can try the game below while watching the video.

Play the game: http://grapefrukt.com/f/games/muchacho/

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/

We’ve come a long way together. As of last night glorg is up for all to play on Armor Games. There’s also a review to read by the nice people over at Jay is games.

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

This will be the biggest post I’ve ever made here, atleast content wise. Argblargs.com is my (and five other happy fellows) final project on our current education.

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.

Loads of patterns are already in the comments for the old isotope.

PS. 13'000 visitors and counting. I love you all.

The words for this game are by the way birds and pendulum.

Vote for this game on Experimental Gameplay Project

You can however toy around with the parameters for the flocking. The pope and the cardinals can be moved around with your mouse.

Now I’m gonna go lie down or possibly play some Ico. Maybe both.

Post your own patterns in the comments!

Vote for this game on Experimental Game Design Project

My best score is 1400, but that should be easy to beat. Write a comment if you do!

Vote for this game on Experimental Game Design Project

The point of the game is to clear both sides from markers and passing the center bass-string in time with the beat.