prototyprally

glorg is still progressing nicely, this is a quick little timelapse i did this morning of me making an enemy.

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

I’m easily distracted, or if I can elaborate, I’d rather say that I can get bored of stuff pretty quickly. This isn’t the best personality trait to have when you’re sitting in your office all by your lonesome with yourself as your boss.

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.

I’m writing this as I sit on a far too long flight to San Francisco. I’m going there to attend the yearly Game Developers Conference, especially the indie summit. I’m making this trip for several reasons.

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!

This past sunday, or early monday for me I submitted my game for gamma iv.

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…

(Quick link to the game on FGL)

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).