Posts from year 2010:
Roads – again again Tags: Procedural generation, World generator STATUS: FOUR GAMES, WHAT THE DARN Tags: Games, Plans, FIG, Excavatorrr, World generator, Procedural generation Excavatorrr silliness. Tags: Excavatorrr, Small games, Games, Procedural generation New site layout-like Tags: Other Smeerp Tags: FIG Doooors Tags: Games, Small games, Ludum Dare Just Wow, not in a good way. Tags: Other Ludum Dare 18 – shameful failureish Tags: Ludum Dare Cities… again Tags: Procedural generation, World generator More unnecessary stuff Tags: Procedural generation, World generator
Posted on 2010-09-19 13:08
I think it looks pretty nice!
Some of the roads are hollow because I made the roads be the more transparent the less they are used. Just to see if that kind of thinking works at all.
The rivers don’t quite care about the climate, but otherwise I think it is quite neat! :)
Posted on 2010-09-14 14:50
I’m currently multitasking several different games at once. I have no problem with that, but I should actually be reading to exams which are going to take place next wednesday. Oh well.
Anyway, I’ll list here some stuff I’m currently working on and tell a bit about their progress.
Firstly, there’s the world generator I made a couple posts about earlier. After a longish pause, I got around to add rivers and roads to the world. After a lot of struggling with getting the rivers look good, I think I’m getting somewhere. Next I should just make the generation automatic instead of manual click-to-create, and then start working on roads.
They look nice, don't they?
Earlier attempt.
The next thing is of course Beyond the Black Hole. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with this, since I don’t think I can bring myself to create all the planned 35 levels. A possibility would be to finish the planet currently at hand, and then the last planet to get 20 levels. I continued working on level 13, as you can see in the post below, but currently I’m a bit stuck with the puzzle. For once it’s not just about motivational problems!
After making that Excavatorrr idea I became sad because I realized how much potential was lost in that one: I myself think that the game was really neat, and that it was positively addicting once the player got hang of the controls. That last bit was the problem, of course: Most players don’t want to take their time to learn a random game, much less if the game isn’t all that big and doesn’t take long to beat. So, last night I started pondering a bit if a remake/sequel to the game could be justified. With my new knowledge, I’d be able to create a much better engine, make a flash export, and possibly connect the game leaderboards to things like Kongregate and so on. That’d be kinda neat. Also the slowness and controlling problems of the original could be taken care of.
There’s also a fourth thing I’ve been playing with, but I wont say much about it yet because I’m quite sure it’ll fail like most other projects I’ve started. So pics will come once I know more!
Posted on 2010-09-14 14:33
It’s coming close to the one-year anniversary of the game this blog started with. I think it’s my personal favourite among my games, though due to certain stupidity from my part it didn’t really get much attention anywhere. Anyway, esq at #tigIRC wanted to see a video about it, so I took my time and made my first Movie Maker video to showcase some of the cooler bits of that game. I thought it might be nice to make some sort of a collection of the deeper mechanics behind the game, since about 5 players out of the few thousand who downloaded it enjoyed it enough to actually play for more than a few minutes. Eh, I sound stupidly bitter here, but the fault was really on my coding.
(Broken video)
AAANYYYWAYY, I like the video and I hope you like it too!
Posted on 2010-09-05 23:04
So I took my time and abused the MMF 2 flash exporting to create myself a nice little applet to embed to the main page. Now I don’t need those awfully ugly game-specific pages. On the negative side, MMF 2 applets aren’t on the lightest side, so the game library takes a while to load. I also updated the title. I had got a bit fed up with the old “REACTOR PRODUCTS” anyway.
Posted on 2010-09-04 01:26
oooOOOOooOOOoo
Posted on 2010-09-01 23:43
Soo, I finished the game today!
Because it’s 23:42 I’ll just copypaste stuff from TIGsource:
“This time I present you Doooors, a platformer that revolves around certain objects. Along with a lot of other stuff, to be honest. There are even a couple levels where doors do not play a very big role, but usually they do. Yes, the name is unimaginative but I think the game title gimmick was funny so I wanted to keep it.
In the game you’re supposed to reach a mysterious blue jewel by means of picking up / throwing various items, ranging from non-goombas and springboards to doors. The game shouldn’t require much platforming skill, but be warned: The Game May Be Extremely Difficult. As the designer it’s hard to tell, but I’d be prepared to say that a couple of the later levels could be labeled ‘very very difficult’. Take that as a challenge, brothers!
== CONTROLS == (These are explained in-game, too)
Arrow keys = move
S = jump and confirm
D = pick up and throw
D + Down = put down
D + up = throw upwards
R = restart
Esc = Quit
Note that the speed of thrown objects changes depending on your own momentum while throwing. That is, throwing stuff while walking makes them fly farther.
This time you don’t have to bother with downloading anything, because I decided to try the brand-new Flash exporter of MMF 2 and made my first Flash Game! Unfortunately, the weaknesses of the exporter show: the game is very heavy.
Go GET IT AAA
Once again I got some amazing music by Noby, do check his youtube account!”
So there.
Posted on 2010-08-28 02:51
Ergh, my account got temporarily suspended tonight because the hoster had detected possible malware/virus content. At first they reported only one file, which I deleted, but it turned out there was much more wrong with the files, so after some struggling I decided to remove all the content altogether from the site, and then add it back after extensive virus checking.
Turns out things weren’t as bad as I initially feared; while there seem to be some files that were genuinely infected with malware/virii, most of the game files seem to not have been affected. Currently I’m checking every file with VirusTotal and adding them back once they’ve got good results.
What’s strange about the matter is that certain games which were reported as malware only get the result when I test the files uploaded on my webspace. The files on my hard-drive generally don’t get any kind of alarm. This makes me wonder how the files uploaded can have been infected. Of course, this makes my job easier: I can just replace the infected files with fresh ones. Still annoying, and I apologize to anyone who may have downloaded possibly infected content from my site. Sorry.
Posted on 2010-08-24 17:15
So, Ludum Dare 18 was last weekend. Sadly, I couldn’t make much for it. There are a couple reasons for this, though. Firstly, I spent last week in hospital due to certain reasons, so I wasn’t in the best of moods during the weekend. The theme also didn’t inspire me much (enemies as weapons). However, due to the new rules of LD, there was also a 3-day game jam going along with the compo, so I took my time and prototyped an idea I’ve had for a longer time. It came out very well, so I’ll extend it to a full game now that I’m ok.
Play the game at this link. Luckily, the game mechanic is simple enough to work with the flash export, so this’ll be my first flash game, too! You can’t ‘win’ the level as it is, i.e. there’s no message for you for winning, but you sure can still bring the orb to the pedestal. The one level I managed to finish is rather hard, so prepare to pull some hair.
Posted on 2010-08-09 17:15
It has been annoyingly hot lately, ranging from 25 to 30 degrees celcius (ok, there are warmer places but to me it feels annoyingly hot). The air has also been rather humid, leading to sweat. I therefore justify my lack of working on the second incarnation of this map generator. Er.
Anyway, cities are in, and although one of them accidentally ended up in the middle of a mountain, they usually try to locate themselves near shorelines and plains. Also, some reworking managed to bring the generation time from 9 seconds to about 2-3 seconds. It’s kinda funny: if it was merely about the colours, I could generate the world in a second. However, because I have to also determine which earth type each colour represents, the generation becomes way longer. Ok, not quite funny.
Next there shall be roads, and this time I’m actuallt working on a game engine to go with the generator. Hopefully we can someday see the rise of an adventure game. Hopefully!
Posted on 2010-08-05 13:34
Now it looks a bit better. Still hard to read, though.
Also, here’s how stuff looks when I treat the height literally:
I also made a simple Mode7 visualizer, but it didn’t work too well:
It’s so much fun just playing with this map that I’m kinda derailed from my original objective. I guess I’ll add cities today.