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. 

Me and my friend Niklas (who also happens to be making the music for rymdkapsel) have built the thing pictured above. It’s a four player arcade machine, it’s been to a bunch of events so far, perhaps most notably at No More Sweden (the unpainted machine is on the stage that entire video).

Since people keep asking us where we got it and how we built it, we put up a big blog post about it, you can read more over on Niklas blog devsound.

I’m very excited to publish this, it’s a toolkit I’ve made under the last few months to be able to get graphics and animations made in flash exported to other formats so they can be used on other platforms. The code is pure AS3 so you can run it using either Flash authoring, Flash Builder or Flash Develop. However, it exports Flash assets, so it won’t do you much good without flash authoring.

It’s not perfect yet by any stretch, but I hope it’s useful enough for people to pick up and use. The code is licensed under a simplified BSD license, so you can pretty much do whatever you please with it, if you end up using it I value any and all feedback, send me an email and tell me what you think!

The project is at https://github.com/grapefrukt/grapefrukt-export

It’s with great pride that I can announce that we’ll be showing a special reworked edition of our global game jam game jesus versus dinosaurs at the killscreen vs. scandinavia party in San Francisco next week. sadly, if you don’t have a ticket it’s already too late, but fret not, the game will see a release soon.

This also means I’m in San Francisco for the GDC, I will also be attending the Flash Games Summit. If you’re around and want to meet up, drop me an email!

Today I discovered that my blog had been infected with some spammy-type junk, so things will be a bit dodgy as I move this over to my central wordpress installation. But, fret not, things will be back in order asap.

Update: Spent the better part of the day fixing things up, figured it was time for a new theme too, so that’s what’s been taking most of my time. It’s not quite done yet, but it’ll do for now.

One might say that I like t-shirts. Quite a bit, even. So, in an effort to dress the entire planet in these best of garments I join the long line of people selling them on the internet.

I put up a tiny store on my grapefrukt games site, unfortunately you will need to have  a paypal account to pay, but it’s the best I could arrange without making this a huge deal.

The first commit in my subversion repository for glorg was made the 19th of august last year. Back then it was little more than an experiment with random dungeon generation. In december when gamma announced it’s theme for this year I rejiggered the game to be played with one button. It’s come a long way since then, I’ve added more floors, more enemies and just made it plain better. All that stuff and still just one button.

Back when I was at GDC I met dannyB, he is the most amazing dude and as through some kind of spell he really liked the concept of the game. Deals were made, beers were consumed and thus glorg features four soothing melodies to bash enemies over the head to.

I also persuaded my good friend and partner in crime Jonas to do a cover for the game in the good old style of “cover unrelated to actual game”. I absolutely love this picture to bits.

Now begins the work of finding a sponsor, the game is up on Flash Game License or if  you so prefer, you can contact me directly by email.

Update Aug 27: It seems FGL’s approval queue is pretty backed up at the moment, this took me a bit by surprise,  sadly there’s not much more to do than wait. Sorry about that.

Update Aug 29: Added FGL link.

So, I didn't just talk at nomoresweden made a game too. A really bad one. It's called fast as a shark, and you can play it below.

The whole game, save for some code I had lying around since earlier for the water was made between 1:46 and 1:59 in the timelapse (i'm the guy in the pink t-shirt).

There's tons of more videos on youtube.

It's time for more silly toys! I recreated this from memory of a thing I saw someone demo a at some conference I watched a live stream of. Right now both the author and conference escape me, but if I recall correctly, he i his turn based this of some research thing at IBM or something. That's really not important. What is important is that this is cool.

In a way it's like my personal favorite Conway's Game of Life. But instead of a two dimensional grid, it's (almost) one dimensional and directional.

Click any node in the circle to make it go. Use the spacebar to pause, the arrow keys to step backwards or forwards in time (some information is lost when going backwards) and Z to clear.

This past week the nordic game conference took place in Malmö, I've attended the past two years but decided to skip it this year. However, having a conference in town has benefits even if you're not attending. I got to meet Petri, the boys from Rocket Pack, most of the Copenhagen Game Collective, Nifflas, Cactus, Mårten from Pieces Interactive, Daniel and Joel from Ludosity. And all it cost me was a whole week's worth of productivity down the drain

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…

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:

// 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:

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

To draw something on the canvas you do this:

// 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.

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 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.

So, when speeding through the Google reader the other day I saw that jayisgames is having a new competition. About ball physics. And not only that, Jay himself actually popped by to remind me. So I guess I’m entering.
Experience has taught me that promising things beforehand about stuff you’re coding is doomed to end in disaster, so I’ll stress the guess here.

Most importantly I’ve been working on my portfolio, check it out!

I’ve also had time to play around a little bit with ActionScript 3, it really is a veritable speed fest compared to AS2.

I made a little physics test yesterday: It has with 151 balls, all colliding with eachother, that amounts to almost 12 000 collision calcs each frame. Uncapped it cranks out around 90fps on my three year old laptop. Amazing stuff. Doing this in AS2 would have exploded my computer, Flashbombs has a similar thing going, it can do 20 balls max.

Check the little test out after the break!

In other news I just stumbled upon Kyle Gabler (of experimentalgameplay.com) and Ron Carmel’s game development blog 2D Boy. Aparently they’re making Tower of Goo into a full game. I wish I could get to do the same thing with one of my game. Anyway, the last post features a crazy association game called Human Brain Cloud which is pretty neat. Go check it out!

(Note that this version is capped at 60fps)

Try this: Click the mouse, scroll the mousewheel, hold the left or right arrows on your keyboard.