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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.