Log – prototyprally

The game has a name.

Martin — 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.

One week call and a new look.

Martin — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:30:12 +0000

Hello all. After having a less than productive week last week I’ve got my act together and actually made some progress.
I’ve got all the songs back from my friends by now and they’re most awesome all of them. It seems the game will only have three levels instead of the four intended, the graphics are taking a long time to make, and I haven’t completely finished a single level yet.
This game has a lot of cool technical features, which I entirely for my own amusement will list now.

Advanced bitmap-caching for the objects in the ball
Custom music loader that supports multiple servers with fallback
Logging of gameplay statistics (to see how people play the game)
Neat level format that supports animating the entire level
Heated seats and cup holders

All of these are already in the game and if I get my way there’ll be a few more before next Friday, which is when the game’s due. This also happens to be the release date for the Wii in Europe so I’d like it to be done by Thursday night so I can spend the weekend in Hyrule. Though I fear that is a bit optimistic, after all, it’s not real game development without the crunch.

As the attentive may have noticed I’ve also changed the theme for the blog, I felt the old one was a bit murky and I just couldn’t resist the tasty ajax-ness of K2.

Finally I’d like to plug Kongregate, a startup game site with a fresh new community way of doing things. It’s in closed alpha right now, but I suspect that if you request an invite you’ll get one.
They give away weekly prices for the best games, and has a big competition running until the 15th of December with a first prize of $1500. Nice!

More work?

Martin — 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?

Martin — 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/

Planning. It sucks and rocks. I will call it srucks.

Martin — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:07:14 +0000

I finally got round to planning my current project, while it’s not in any way amusing it’s necessary. It’s easy to forget that coming from prototyping, there you get to make stuff for three days (or whatever timeframe you choose) and not have to spend time on all that peripheral stuff.
For this game I have five weeks, in which I need to do not only the game code but also highscores and challenge systems, get the songs from my friends that are making music for me, do graphics for the game and it’s four levels.
Damn. I just realized I forgot time for sound effects in my planning. Guess I’ll have to rethink it a bit.

If anyone should be interested my planning is on Google Calendar.

The new Project

Martin — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 12:13:49 +0000

First of all, I’ve had a real storm of visitors here the last day, 3500 happy players yesterday and I expect about as many today. Super awesome.

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about my new project. After much consideration I decided to go for making a multiplayer game out of Moonlumber. I’m not exactly how the game will turn out, wheter it will be cooperative or competative, one on one or multiplayer. Only time will tell

I’m going to use SmartFox server, because why do work yourself when someone else’s already done it. The free version is limited to 20 players, but it can be upgraded to commercial versions that can handle more players. Doing multiplayer games is alot more demanding than you’d think, there is so much stuff you need to keep track of.

Well, I need to get back to work. My research is to be done by today so I can start working first thing tomorrow. Two weeks from tomorrow I should have a working beta-version, and two weeks from that it should be all done. Plenty of time to screw up…

Game 6, Oh happy night.

Martin — 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 6, What is the capital of Assyria?

Martin — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:28:25 +0000

It’s another one of those games that just won’t get done again, but this has alot more potential than Popeatron so I’m not that bummed out this time around. Most of the elements are complete, it does lack gameplay and is a bit unforgiving still, but it is a pretty fun toy nonetheless.

I’m gonna have to be at it all night if I want to get this done, but with a bigass bottle of water and Judas Priest in my ears it’ll be a breeze.

Game 6, European or African?

Martin — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 18:59:53 +0000

The words for this game are bird and pendulum. I spent most part of the day working on a first version, it collapsed on itself somehow and I just couldn’t find what was wrong with the IK-stuff, so I had to start over. Annoying, but I did manage to get it working way faster the second time around, it also works this time. Whilst doing some research i found this very awesome site about swallows. This game will be done by tomorrow night, and for friday you can expect post-mortems for all games and the project as a whole.

Game 4, get on with it!

Martin — 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, better framerates for the people

Martin — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 12:41:45 +0000

I managed to get a slight framerate boost from the game, mostly by disabling the calculation of rules when they’re not needed. The game is coming along nicely, as usual it won’t really be the game I invisioned at first, but I think it might be fun. Next up is adding bodyguards, or cardinals, that guard the pope (the pink dot). The game will be done by tonight, and i’m really looking forward to getting to do the graphics.

Game 4

Martin — 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.

Game 3, a slight delay

Martin — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:31:27 +0000

Whew. It’s late and i’ve spent way too long fiddling with this game. The words I chose this time were radiation therapy and trespass. A bit of a wierd combination, and I had some trouble coming up with a good idea for it. Eventually I decided to go for a surgery-style game, where you build and control a robotic arm to “tresspass” into a tumour and radiate it.
However, earlier today I realized it wasn’t going to be fun, atleast not in the timeframe I had. So a i started a major revamp of the idea, reusing the robot arm, but this time for mimicing radiation patterns. I’ll finish of the game tomorrow morning (although it’s really too late).
The screenshot is of the surgery version.

Game 2

Martin — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:48:05 +0000

A new day and a new game. Yesterday I started working on a new game, the words I chose this time around were swamp and secret. The idea I had from that was to drive one of those swamp boats around and be generally secret. But that seemed like too much of a racing game and not very interesting.
So I decided the steering of the boat would be broken, and the player needs to use a rope to latch on to nearby poles and trees to steer the boat.
This game, just like the last one will use techniques from this tutorial, as implemented most excellently here.

Game 1, continued

Martin — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:21:03 +0000

The first game is coming along nicely, though I had to take most of the day off for a pleasant visit to the dentists, I feel I’ve made up for lost time (it’s 2am now) by now. I changed the inverse kinematics thing i found for another one, this time with gravity implemented, the inertia still doesn’t affect the ship, but atleast the gravity works properly.
Tomorrow i’ll do the actual gameplay, and will hopefully have a somewhat finished game by the end of the day.

Game 1

Martin — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 08:32:11 +0000

Today I started working on my first proper game, the last one was more of a practice run. The keywords I’ve chosen are forest and moonlanding I’ve spent the morning looking into some inverse kinematic demos, and pretty much decided that they’re super awesome and are going into the game. But, a rather advanced physics simulation thingie as they are, thery’re a bit hard for my mere human brain to understand so the implementation’s a bit dodgy still.
Tomorrow I’ll flesh out the concept further, maybe decide on a control-scheme and add some purty graphics.