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. 

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.

It’s time for my quarterly blog post, this time I’ve got some neat news. rymdkapsel has found yet another platform, Playstation Mobile. This will be the platform the game premieres on once it’s ready for release, which I plan to be in early 2013.

If you’re not familiar with Playstation Mobile, or PSM for short, it’s basically the Sony equivalent to Apples App Store or Android Market Google Play.

This has been a bit of a secret for a while and it feels great to finally be able to talk about it freely. In other news I submitted the game to the Independent Games Festival, competition there is absolutely fierce so it remains to be seen how that goes!

If you want more info on me, rymdkapsel, or my other games, check out my presskit.

This is a game I’ve been working on for the past few months, it’s a game where you take command of a space station and its minions. You will have to plan your expansion and manage your resources to explore the galaxy.

It will launch on iOS, Android and Flash “soon”.

I am currently seeking a sponsorship for the Flash version, contact me for further information.

You can try the game here: http://grapefrukt.com/f/games/juicy-breakout/
Or look at the source code on github: https://github.com/grapefrukt/juicy-breakout

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.

This is a talk I did at No More Sweden, it’s kind of silly but I think it touches on some important issues.

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/

Petri and I were invited to do a talk at the Nordic Indie Game Night in Malmö this past week, we were supposed to talk about the super sexy Cobalt. Instead we went kind of overboard on an analysis of the physics in platformers. We got way more material than we could fit in the ten minutes (which we exceeded), so there may be another chance to catch an extended version of this talk at some point.

Update: Since I posted this in a bit of a hurry, I forgot to mention that the NGIN was conjured into existence by the fantastically wonderful Copenhagen Game Collective. Who, aside from making marvelous games are doing incredible things for the game making community in these parts of the world. They really are the best.

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!

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.

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…

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!

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).