The post of shame.

Posted on December 22, 2007 by Martin

portraitsml.jpgMore than three months the last post. That’s just plain embarrassing.
My excuse is that I both got a job and moved in with my girlfriend. I could never have expected how little time I have to spend on making games.
I haven’t made a single game since my entry into the jayisgames ball physics compo, and I didn’t even post about it here. Once again. The shame.

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.)

Posted in Rant |

  1. Here yee, here yee. I too support extreme and hard work for us pretty consumers to enjoy afterwards. and while you’re at it go ahead and win some prizes. And talking about lazyness, what happened to this blog? More posts of shame is due i guess….

    Perlingon, April 4, 2008 at 14:14

  2. I second the first, and the last part of the last sentance! I dissaprove of the middle one. Keep the girl, she’s not to harmfull.

    Simon Gustafsson, March 7, 2008 at 17:01

  3. One week prototypes FTW! 3 of 5 finalists in Seumas McNally grand prize category are based on one week prototypes (Audiosurf is the third). And while Clean Asia isn’t based on one week prorotype, Cactus also makes games in very similar fashion (usually in under a week). So the question is why isn’t there a game from you in the finals??? You lazy bastard you! Quit your job and dump your girlfriend and start working on some games 🙂

    Petri Purho, December 22, 2007 at 16:56
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The games that didn't make it: Part 3 – "Sort"

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Martin

This is the third, and for now final part of my series on games that didn’t make it. This game is also one I made while working on argblargs. This was abandoned more because of lack of time than anything else. I started work on this on the odd spare hours in the final stages of the project, but I ended up having to spend my time fixing bugs instead of finishing it.
This game is “pre-idea”, it’s more of a test of a vague inspiration than anything else. A real proper prototype. It uses the ball physics from flashbombs but is a bit more action oriented.
You can shoot the big balls, making them grow, if they grow big enough they’ll explode. The stars from the explosion will ignite other balls, making them too explode.
It suffers a bit from performance issues (especially running in a browser), but it’s like 60 particles with inter particle collisions in AS2, so don’t expect a thousand fps.

I think this could work as a game, add some sound and a sweet combo system and you’d be in business. But I doubt I’ll ever finish it, if I do I’ll probably do it in AS3 instead, that way I could make it a real particle extravaganza.

This will be the last game now for a while, but I still have a few potential failures in the pipeline (keeping a positive attitude is key in game development).
If you liked these articles there’s more of that flavour around here. Check out the postmortem category. If that’s not enough check out Petri’s postmortems over at Kloonigames aswell.

The game is after the break.
Continue reading →

Posted in The games that didn't make it |

  1. hehe, i like it ;D U use extreme cool codes .

    MaleXx, October 7, 2008 at 23:55
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The games that didn't make it: Part 2 – "Flu Fighters"

Posted on September 9, 2007 by Martin

flu fightersThis is the second part of my little series of the games that didn’t make it.
This time it’s a game I made for argblargs, this game, as many other started as a quick little hack over the weekend. The whole thing started as a test of an idea I had for a long time. Flash has this nifty little function called hitTest(), it’s pretty crap for testing object to object. But it can do per-pixel collision of points against abstract shapes. There’s a bunch of games out there that use this, it’s good because you can paint your levels using the regular brush in Flash. But as with all collision detection, it’s not really the detection that’s the hard part, it’s the resolving.
This tests points for collision against the level and then backs them up the way they came until they’re not colliding anymore.
This was all working reasonably well.
I showed it to the other guys and they quite liked it, so we decided to go ahead and make a full game out of it. I had been using my trademark ropes to try it so after some fiddling about it turned into a game inside the body, you’re this weird little creature with a long tongue that eats bacteria.

I tried something like a gazillion different ways to do the gameplay but I never really got it right, foolishly enough I put some more bells and whistles in there hoping that they might save it.
They didn’t. So after about a week’s work (spread out over two actual weeks) we decided that it wasn’t going to work. We had to cut it.

So here’s the game as far as it got done, in this iteration you’re supposed to defend the four organs that are spread out in the body by eating the bacteria attacking them. The bacteria stick to your tounge, and then you can eat them by moving the tounges tip to your mouth. If you get stuck inside a wall, just try to pull yourself further into the wall using your tounge, this should get you out.
It’s not very fun but atleast it looks pretty.

The game is after the break.
Continue reading →

Posted in The games that didn't make it |

  1. 350

    nicky, September 16, 2007 at 11:50
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The games that didn't make it Part 1: Rain

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Martin

rain game screenshotWhen you make games the way I do, using quick prototypes to test out ideas, it a natural consequence that not all of them work out. Some turn out great (Hovercrafty, dingding and even isotope2) some do become games, original, but maybe not all that good in the long run (Moonlumber and to some extent flashbombs). Then there’s the rest, the ones that don’t even make it into a complete game. It may be for a multitude of reasons, but most often it’s because they’re not fun enough.

I have a couple of these lying around, and I figured I might aswell write a bit about them. The first one is “rain”. Most my games get a short name like that while I make them, Eater of Worlds was called slingshot, flashbombs was called bounce and dingding was called grid.

This uses the Boids style simulation from Popeatron to make a cloud, it looks really nice, but with one drawback. It’s horribly slow.I could probably speed it up quite a lot using stuff I’ve learned since then, but would still be a waste of processing power to do the cloud like that.

It does controls quite nice, the cloudlike feel is there when you’re moving it about. This is one of those things that worked as a toy, but where I had real trouble finding the gameplay.

I tried playing around with mouse gestures since I didn’t want to get keyboard controls in there, the mouse is so much nicer. So, by “massaging” the cloud you can make it rain, and if you move the mouse a bit faster in one direction you’ll make a lightning bolt.

And that’s about it. I never found a way to make it into a game without making it overly complicated. Instead I moved on to make Eater of Worlds.

The game is after the break.
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Posted in Postmortems, The games that didn't make it |
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    Finding the game.

    Posted on August 24, 2007 by Martin

    Whale game development thumbnailThe way I make games is that first I make a prototype (this is prototyprally after all). Using that I try to find an amusing mechanic, something that makes you smile when you play with it. Normally this isn’t actually all that hard, especially when you’re doing something with physics as it tends to be reasonably emergent. With some fiddling you can find a few interesting mechanics without too much hassle.
    The hard part is making it more than a toy.

    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.

    Posted in News, Rant |
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      More balls.

      Posted on August 14, 2007 by Martin

      Whalegame I’ve been fiddling around with a new game in past few weeks. It’s built of that ball physics prototype I posted, but with tons of improvements.
      I’ve been making this game as a little AS3 playground, there’s been no real “push” to finish it, allowing me to do whatever I feel like.
      So, I’ve managed to cram in framerate independent physics (within reason of course), a nice object oriented structure, linked lists for keeping track of the balls and I’ve also moved the project from Flash CS3 to the much more pleasant FlashDevelop.
      I’m not sure what Adobe did to the CS3 gui, but it’s horribly slow. Especially on my three year old laptop. In principle CS3 is better for editing code, but for some reason Adobe didn’t go that extra mile making it usable for larger projects.

      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.

      Posted in News |
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      Tiny update.

      Posted on July 4, 2007 by Martin

      portfolio thumbI’ve been taking a little break from argblargs the last few weeks. In this time I’ve done lot’s of stuff.

      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!

      Continue reading →

      Posted in News |

      1. Hi Martin! I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but we just announced our 4th Competition theme: Ball physics, and this looks like the beginnings of an ideal prototype for a game based on that theme. I was just stopping by to see if you had been working on anything else since Argblargs, and found this demo of yours. Please check out the competition details, and consider entering. Deadline isn’t until October, 1st… http://jayisgames.com/archives/2007/08/game_design_competition_4.php Keep up the good work! =)

        Jay, August 10, 2007 at 17:10

      2. My gosh! the possibilities with AS3 is slowly getting to me

        Perke, July 20, 2007 at 10:51
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      argblargs.com

      Posted on May 8, 2007 by Martin

      argblargs logo

      This will be the biggest post I’ve ever made here, atleast content wise. Argblargs.com is my (and five other happy fellows) final project on our current education.

      Argblargs is hard to describe without getting too talkative, but this quote from one of our many documents describes it rather well.

      argblargs.com is a web based multiplayer game where you choose from hundreds of unique bodyparts and create your own character, play games to earn experience points and win tons of new cool stuff to put on your argblarg.

      You can challenge friends (and foes) in the arena or explore the world embarking on the quests that you stumble upon.

      Argblargs is about you and your character, challenge your friends, get odd pets, just play it and have fun, that’s what we do!

      argblargs screen 1We’ve spent about 16 weeks full time making this game, and I think it shows. The first six weeks or so we’re spent getting an alpha version of the game up and running. Once that was reasonably playable we let our friends in on the server. The next four weeks we’re our pre-beta-phase. We spent these putting in the last few features we wanted and also fixing about a million bugs found by our beta testers.

      argblargs screen 3 Once we were in beta we moved the game to a proper server (away from my old trusty wardrobe computer) and, much to our testers disappointment, reset the characters.
      The final five weeks we’re spent on QA and Post production. This is something I’m very glad we had time to do. The difference those weeks make for the overall impression of the game can’t be underestimated. During these last weeks we didn’t add in any new features, all we did was polish the game to a level we could be proud of.

      argblargs screen 2Technology wise it’s not that advanced, tons of Flash (I should know, being the only Flash developer on the team) and the usual HTML on the client side and PHP/MySQL on the server. We’re using the insanely awesome amfphp for communication between the client side Flash and the server.

      argblargs screen 4Argblargs features three brand new games from me (expect individual posts about these in a week or so), Wet dreams (by blast and terrordata) and also an old friend. Play them all on the page.

      There’s not all that much more to say really. Please post any questions you might have about the game either here as a comment, or in the argblargs forum. And by the way, I’m awesomeman.


      Posted in Games |

      1. Wow. Amazing stuff. I lovwe the graphics, the game design, the characters. blast: I will soon rule Arglia, lowly one…

        maxro, August 28, 2007 at 19:40

      2. I rule Arglia. Anyone beg to differ? Then show yourselves puny mortals. http://www.argblargs.com/blast

        Blast, May 16, 2007 at 16:25
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      Time flies. Fast.

      Posted on March 18, 2007 by Martin

      Wow. I’ve been fiddling about with my latest game for what i thought was about a week, turns out it’s been more than a month since my last post. Oops.

      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.

      ScreenshotWe’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.

      bombsI 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.

      Posted in News, Rant |
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      Flashpipes gets an update

      Posted on February 13, 2007 by Martin

      Wow, loads and loads of visitors lately. That makes me really happy, but it sucks a bit that I don’t have much new stuff to give you. I’m silly hard at work with my degree project and all the flash magic I work (whoa!) go into that.
      I can’t reveal exactly what It’ll be yet, but I guarantee it will be most awesome. It’ll be a bit more interactive and community styled closely intertwined with minigames and some other cool stuff.
      We’ll be in early alpha in a bit more than two weeks, and by then there should be a bit more to show for it. Once we go into beta, in yet another four weeks, there’ll be even more neat things to show off.

      Once that game’s done, I’m done with school. And that means I need a job. All suggestions are welcome. Wink, wink. Nudge, nugde. My email.

      A few weeks ago I was contacted by a site called mochiads (click here for non-refered link), they run an ad-network for ads inside flash games. This was exactly what I had been looking for for some time. This allows me to spread my games beyond my site without having to worry about bandwidth expenses.

      So if you happend to like flashpipes, my most recent game and guineapig for these ads, and would like to post it on your site/blog/myspace/forum or even your grandmother. Now you can!
      Copy ‘n paste this html into any page of your liking and have your visitors playing in notime.



      no flash

      I have a few more features I’d like to put in the game to make it even better for pasting on your own page, but I need to find some time to implement those first.

      Per usual, the plug for kloonigames, I wasn’t expecting Petri to hang in there as long as he has, but boy he’s been busy! He also managed to get his games on 1up’s list of the 101 best free games on the intertubes. I’m a bit envious of that.

      Posted in News |

      1. Nice games, I wish you well for the future. 😉

        Gigs, July 24, 2007 at 00:30
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