Published at December 22, 2007
in Rant.
More 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.)
Published at August 24, 2007
in Rant and News.
The 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.
Published at March 18, 2007
in Rant and News.
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.
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.
More than three months the last post. That’s just plain embarrassing.
