@INCD021 We wrote a poem about your game Don't Stub Your Big Toe! http://t.co/9NPdGVe8Q1

— Poems About Games (@PoemsAboutGames) October 20, 2014

The #30daydev have already given me so much, and I’m only halfway there. I’ll keep learning..

Now, go make games!

– Henning

It’s an old turn based racing game we used to play on paper when I was a kid.
You have to select one of 8 possible moves, the next move will start by moving the same amount as you did last move.

So if you moved 1 step forward as your first move, the next 8 possible moves will be around 1 step forward from your current position.

The hard part is trying to gain maximum speed and to remember to brake in do time. 70% of the time you gain to much speed and won’t be able to turn in time. BOOM!

Again it took waaay to long to develop. This time caused by a small oversight on my part that took hours to find I missed some coliders/layer in my raycast

Now it’s time for ZZzzzzzzzz………

Now, go make games!

– Henning

I had to think of something? Sleeping until 7 and didn’t help, food and a shower.. Now an idea started to form. The void ship from the Dr. Who series and the hunt for the Maquis from Star Trek, void ship = between worlds,  hunt for the Maquis = turbulent and violent space.. hmmm. To the blackboard, and draw 3D, draw 2.5D, ok then 2d.. Couldn’t figure out how I wanted the game to look, as I would like to do it in 2d (haven’t done 3d since unity came out with their 2d support), I just couldn’t squash the 3D into 2D.

Remembering that I only had 48 hours and 5 was gone sleeping, eating and showering already. I had to keep it simple. So why not having two universes, one on top of the screen and one on the bottom, and having to fight invaders from the other universe. So I set out to do so.

What I have ended up with is almost that. Only change is that the enemy ships are wormhole generators that you have to shoot down before they can open a wormhole, and there by destroying the other universe (I have allowed myself some freedoms as I do not know how wormhole from a universe with other lawn of nature would impact our universe or it’s even possible).

You can play the game Join Us! online, or download the PC version here.

Learned a lot, especially not to optimize as much as I do. I have done some things where I thought, this will be slow, but it’s micro seconds, so doesn’t matter. Ended up with at most 10 draw calls which is nothing. Now I have uploaded the PC version and the web version to Ludum Dare I don’t really wan’t to work on it any more, I’m mentally tired and just want to relax and not think about “Join Us!” anymore,  for now…

It’s been fun and amazing to see how much you can do, when you don’t focus on having to deliver something amazing and super polished, but just a game someone would enjoy So hope you will play it, enjoy it, and rate it on Ludum Dare.

Now, go make games

– Henning

Since the last blog post, I have published my small racing game Strazer to Google Play store. 

After updating the graphics, I’m pretty happy with it. It wasn’t meant to be a AAA game

After that I worked for a few weeks on a game about depression, but there was a bug in Unity (OnTriggerEnter2D) that kept giving me problems, so I put it on hold. The bug was fixed in the Unity 4.5 release, so maybe I’ll go back to that again… Later.

And the there are a lot of small POC as always

Save ’em all:

GauntletX:

Forever: 

DefendYourself:

Defend4x8:

All small POC that I might go back and work on in the future.

At the moment I’m working on a game for two friends, one want me to make a zombie game, and the other a platformer, so it is going to be a zombie platformer game

Right now I trying to get some graphics done for the game, it’s coming along but not as fast as I would like, and not as good either.  

This is the melee attack of the zombie. It still is missing shadows and highlights.

So have done a lot, just haven’t blogged about it. I’ve started using twitter a lot more, I like the positive atmosphere and the nice people always there to help.

Have a great day, now go make games!

– Henning

A couble of pointers:

• Make one keystore and make sure that you have a backup somewhere safe. You can’t update your app if don’t sign it with the same key.
• Supporting different aspect ratios on different devices suck! Learn to live with it. Compromise is essential!

Download “Beach Fun Seagull Hunt” at Google Play.

Now! Go make games

– Henning

I’ve changed a few things, and some things I really don’t get why is happening.

1. First thing that was noticed was that the game doesn’t fill the entire screen.
   This is as designed All players are to have the same playing area, same height and same width. If this wasn’t the case, some resolutions could have an advantage, for instance; a high narrow screen would be a lot better than a wide screen, as the ball has a lot less chance of hitting a seagull. There are probably a lot more scenarios where aspect ratio matters, but to make sure every player sees the same, the aspect ration is fixed. I did add a frame to the game area, to make it visible that the size is as intended. So no big change here.
2. The game runs very fast on low-end devices.
   Ok, this one I don’t get? Everything that moves in the game is either controlled by the physics engine or is moved by scripts, and yes I have checked, every movement is done using Time.deltaTime. So?
   I did some digging, and found a possible solution, not that I can see why it should work? Time.deltaTime should still make everything move with the correct speed? But it’s worth a try.
   Under quality setting I found that the setting for VSync Count was set to “Don’t Sync” for the Fastest and Fast levels. So I have changed them to do VSync, to see if this solves the problem on the low-end devices.
   

Well that’s about it for a couple of days testing Thanks again to all the testers and the people helping to spread the game.

The newest version of the game can always be found in the bottom of the post Seagull Hunt.

Now go make games!

– Henning

Here is what I started out with, and what I ended up with so far.

Started out with a ball on a screen. Had no idea what the game should be about.. Didn’t even know it would become a game.

Then made the ball fall under the influence of gravity, and added a small static cannon capable of shooting small red balls.

Added colliders to the balls, so the red balls could hit the red ball and then, to make a bit of a game out of it, I added some spikes, that killed the yellow ball on impact.

Added some graphics, and changed the mail ball to a beach ball.

At this time I did my small crap animation project, so of cause that was added to the project. I also did the super soaker graphics while trying out different vector based drawing programs and that was added as well.

The red balls was replaced by a water ball/splash texture.

Added a basic score, so each time you hit the beach ball with a ball of water you got a point, and game when the beach ball hit the sand.

I got the idea to add something to hit instead of just having to hit the beach ball, which was to easy.

I wanted to have a really fast game over to new game cycle, so all I wanted was a single start button in the middle of the screen. At first I would have liked to be able to share scores on Facebook, but as I haven’t gotten it to work 100% I discarded it for now. Maybe in a later version.

Just changed some of the background graphics, and added best score to the score display.

Added sand to the beach.

Completely new graphics, made by a nice fellow that I’m teaching to program, and in exchange his making me some pleasant graphics

New button and font added, that matches the rest of the theme better. The basic font is called Floraless and is made by Daniel Gauthier.

Small but very visual change, I made the score use the new font, by having a bitmap for each number and one for the slash, and then added code to convert the string into an array of the correct sprites.

The last change was the graphics for the crab that now looks a lot more organic and less flat.

The two thing keeping me from uploading it to the android store is the seagull- and the crap-animation. I will work on the crap animation as soon as everything thats happening in my life right now, settles down a bit.

If you want to try the current (Android only) version of “Beach Fun Seagull Hunt” just click the link below.
Old version April 9th : md5 : aad8aee9879d29ad0e8bf32cc451b097 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk
New version April 12th : md5 : 5f145660cae4dab6d5c4fea869403f36 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk

Now go make games!

– Henning

hmm, pixel art animation and me, not so good. So what was the alternative. I searched the great big internet, and found an article telling me that Inkscape was the tool to use. I had tried it before and liked the idea of being able to tweak the image without having to repaint it, just move the vector elements. So I found an image on Google that I could use as a reference image, and started painting.

Ok, maybe, just maybe I should have read some more about how, Inkscape was used to animate.. Ok so you make all the frames in Inkscape, export them one by one and then use Gimp (wonderful tool) to make the spritesheet.. Eeerrr, that was kind of what I didn’t want to do. So back to searching the net.

Success, Synfig! Ok, here was a tool that was vector based and could animate like hell Yay! So tried to import my Inkscape crab, as it was in svg format, but no success Not a great start, but ok, I could start over. So a new crab was born.. But hell to do, compared to Inkscape. Everything was drawn with the origin at the center of the screen, not the object, and worse, you can’t move the origin! What the ….? Ok, painting the first eye and made a group, everything is to be in groups in Synfig, and wanted to copy and mirror the group. Copy, ok. Mirror…. mirror… hmmm.. No? You can only mirror individual objects, and as the origin was fubar the first place I had to do this via scaling (x=-1.0) and the try to move the new mirrored legs to the right location, and by using the scale function something was off, and the moment was weird. I’t might have been me, but I didn’t have ANY problems in Inkscape. So the thought of having to do animation and rotating (around the center of the selected points only) and moving objects around, just told me to, not go there.

And the crab looked worse in Synfig, as every change was a pain compared to Inkscape.

So what to do… I was thing of using Unity and the new 2d animation support, but I used it before, with success but it felt off, and not completely thought through. So I hit the new for the third and final time. If I didn’t find anything I would just make 3-5 crappy crab frames in Gimp or PyxelEdit (another GREAT tool). But by luck I found what I was looking for, I hope. It’s called Spriter, and if it’s half as good as it looks I’m going to be a very happy guy. You can download the free version at the BrashMonkey site, and try it out for your self. I have played with the free version and the demo project last night, and it just feels right in every way. So I just spend the 25$ for the full version, and is now going to take the parts from the Inkscape crab, I know I have to export all the pieces into separate files (that might be something they will change in time, I have to investigate), and than use the skeleton system will be so easy to use, to do the animation. It might even have some inverse kinematics

I really believe the Spriter is going to be the solution to a lot of my animation challenges. I will return with my experience with Spriter soon

Now, go make games

– Henning

So I’ve use a few weeks making this small puzzle idea into a working mini-game. It popped into my mind over the Christmas holiday. I thought that it would be a fun little game, and I was sure that I would learn a thing or two. So here is what I did, and learned

The basic idea:
A top-down game where you have to build a bridge to save some small cute creatures. But as always the idea changed over time and turned into something else.

The different planks used to build the bridge would be rotating and changing length at different speeds and amount. I figured that 5 different planks would be a fine.

Getting started:
So I started out by looking at the plank dynamics, I wanted to add planks at the end of the previous plank and in the same angle. But first, ONE, plank Keep it simple, right?

First run of Left

Ok, that worked So now, adding more planks.

Getting planks to align, and stay there:

Getting the planks to appear at the end of the previous plank wasn’t  a problem, except for one out of about 10 planks, so it was very hard to debug.

But after recording a video of the game, I could see the planks was placed at the correct position, but was then pushed in the first frame.. Ah, the physics engine! Problem identified
All the planks have a collider and a rigid body to be able to collide with the walls, the goal and to be able to be use the it for the death sequence, where all the planks fall to the ground. So I couldn’t just remove the rigid body from the planks.

The solution:

I simply chose to lock the position and rotation every frame. Well, simple but wasn’t easy to implement because of the way I had implemented the plank control, but it worked. And then every thing was locked into the right place

What did I learn:

• 2d and 3d physics engine doesn’t act the same. Colliding rules are different, follow link and see section “Collision action matrix” which works for 3d, but (and now I can’t remember the other link, sorry) this isn’t true for 2d.
• Dynamic loading of levels
• Got better at using animations instead of moving logos in code
• Deploy to OUYA and very basic OUYA input control (one button).

Things to do better:

• If I want my POCs to be playable, make some simple object relation layout BEFORE coding a single line
• Use more object pools, instead of creating objects on the fly.
• Find a better way to handle the growing switch/case section in the game manager.
• Graphics.. I started looking at blender again. Did the beautiful stars in it
• Write posts on the way instead of having to remember what I did after the fact.

Hope you enjoy the 10 levels of this mini-game “Left” (named as such, as  you have a tendency to turn left).

Now, go make games!

– Henning

Screenshot of main screen, the 10 levels and the game completed screen.