Hempuli's blog

Hempuli's blog
Visit the main site

Too much stuff going on
Posted on 2010-11-08 00:13

Those… two(?) of you who’ve read the blog through may already have noticed the bane of my game-creation progress: I get projects going, they go nicely for a while and then WHOOP they give birth to two new, unrelated projects and the same continues until I finally manage to complete one of them and then leave the rest to die. I don’t like it, my morivation just kinda jumps from one thing to another. I hope something miraculous will happen in the future to cure this. Maybe I should just realize that one has to try to shamble through the tedious parts and not just seek fun in game creation?

Anyway, I’ll list my current stuff here:
Beyond the Black Hole: I’m quite confident I’ll eventually finish this, slowly though. I also thought of maybe redoing the current game to remove the keyboard control – it might be more appealing to Your Average Gamer if it was mouse-only.
World Generator: The generator itself is sleeping but I’m working on a game that might work with it. More about it later.
Excavatorrr 2: I have several ideas for this, but at the same I’m thinking that the game might benefit greatly from flash. However, several attempts with MMF 2 flash export have proven that I have to actually learn AS3 before I can get it to work without lag.
The ‘fourth’ thing I mentioned earlier quite much died in silence. I’m still adding some things to it but I don’t have high hopes about its survival.

Currently I’ve been looking forward to make some neat flash game so that I could try more the financial side of gaming. I wouldn’t want to actually sell games, that’d just lower the player interest and make me feel bad, but there’s a lot of money in flash games, even on the ad revenue level. I’ve been pondering several types of games, but my mind has lately settled to some sort of a castlevania/VVVVVV-like thing. Since we’re aiming for those silly casual gamers here, the game shouldn’t be too complicated to play, har har.
Part of the reason I posted those Apocalypse Adventure videos down there is because I’ve also been more interested in games with similar gameplay lately. Ideally, the World Generater Game would fill this slot very well, I’d just need to add some post-apocalyptic stuff to it, so I thought that since I’m working on that, I could use the same engine for a non-PCG game. There’s not much of it yet, however, I’ve been concentrating on graphics. I got a weird idea – if I make some graphics first, it might feel less of a chore to make the actual code.
Anyway, here they are. I started with the normal guy and the skeleton, and since Minecraft is a nice game I thought that I’d add the rest of them. Creeper will not appear in the World Generator game! Sorry!

Tags: Games, Plans, FIG, World generator, Excavatorrr

More stupid old videos
Posted on 2010-11-06 02:49

I looked back through my ‘finished games’ -folder and found Apocalypse Adventure, a Ludum Dare entry I actually made some posts about on this blog! So not THAT old. Anyway, the game had a similar fate to Excavatorrr – it was way too hard to control and play, so everyone nodded their heads in “yes neat game, quite huge for 48 hours” and then turned away. So in order to get some people actually see what kind of buggy craziness I had going in the game, I recorded a full playthrough. There’s also the old, non-full playthrough at vimeo, but it’s bad quality and overall stupid.
Anyway, here they are in order:

(Broken video)
(Broken video)
(Broken video)

enjoy!

On other news, I submitted the demo of BtBH to the Independent gaming festival’s student showcase competition, and the entry list has been published.
http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2011.php?id=261

Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Happenings, GDC

Ported Bulletsss to flash
Posted on 2010-11-03 21:21

So I wanted to experiment a bit more with this flash exporting feature of MMF 2 so I ported my older game Bulletsss to flash and put it up on Kongregate! I wanted to see what kind of money I can get out of an obscure game if my share is 25% of the income. Not much, I guess, but Doooors did something like 11 $ for me. Ok, that’s low. Haha.

Anyway, if you’re interested check it out at: Kongregate
I changed a couple of the levels and fixed some bugs, too!
Also Noby did a really nice track for it! Noby, you’re the best. :)

Tags: Games, Small games

Best Game Since Who Knows
Posted on 2010-10-22 18:51

My internet friend Jan-Willem Nijman (Jwaap) made a really really addicting game called SuperCrateBox! If you read this, do check it out ASAP, I’m totally addicted. And I also hold the best score on the scoreboards (currently, though probably not for long).

LOOK HERE

Tags: Games, Other

Beyond the Black Hole video-thing
Posted on 2010-10-18 18:31

For some reason I wanted to make a video about BtBH. I hope you like it.

(Broken video)

Oh, and this is the third time I use Movie Maker for anything. Sony Vegas looks rather interesting, but its middle name is ‘expensive’.

Tags: Games, FIG

Klik of the Month Klub #40 – HELLOWEEN
Posted on 2010-10-17 18:47

We had the latest KotMK this Saturday, this time themed Halloween (big surprise, eh). I had some ideas ready, but they weren’t quite halloweeney so I decided to try another thing and made a Zombie shooter – with a twist. I can’t help it, I just am not able to create a basic shooter. So instead I made a shooter that runs in reverse. Yes, It’s like mushroom engine, but a lot simpler.

So here it is, the game doesn’t have a name but I call is seibmoZ due to the way it works.

DOWNLOAD

All instructions are given in the title screen. Again, don’t expect much, KotMK is a 2-hour compo!

Tags: Games, Glorious Trainwrecks, Small games

Bloom or no bloom; that is the question
Posted on 2010-10-12 21:26

So a certain very awesome person called Looki (He’s helped me a lot over the years!) made me a nice bloom overlay that didn’t suck unlike the other bloom shaders for MMF. However, now that I have it in, I’m not sure if it’s the best choice. I’ve tried different combinations, and today has also been a nice lesson for me about shaders overall.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to get a similar blur as was in the desktop picture, but darn if I know what are the functions in Paint.NET’s “soften photo”-tool! So we’ll have to rely on bloom.

So here are a couple different choices. From left ro right & top to bottom: Bloom and shadows, just shadows, nothing, and just bloom. Sorry about the changing background colour; bloom brightens it up a lot so I had to alter it. And I’m really not sure what would look best!

Here are also some crazier attempts:

(Broken image)
wee!

Tags: Games, Plans, Procedural generation

New direction!
Posted on 2010-10-12 18:57

This picture doesn't give any kind of a clue of what is going on.

I started making a new, Dwarf Fortress-style control scheme for the 48-hour thingamajig. I just got felling trees working; it’s lovely to watch how the tiny guys hack down any trees you mandate, except those that are either out of reach or from which they can’t return.

Tags: Games, Procedural generation

I’ll call it finished enough
Posted on 2010-10-10 19:17

So, this weekend I tried to create a game around that desktop picture I posted. My idea was to use a deadline to increase motivation, and I wanted to see if I could implement a nice platformer RTS mechanic, something I wasn’t able to pull out earlier when I tried. I guess I still didn’t quite manage it.

Anyway, since I have only 5 hours left and I’m quite fed up with the bugs of the engine, I’ll upload the thing here and let people see what kind of weird bugs they can exploit. I was left with the feeling that the engine is very clumsy and hard to use, what with the player having to do every little thing, starting from picking up/dropping items. Next time I try to approach this I’ll have to try to make the game action-based instead of character-based; by that I mean that instead of commanding every guy separately, the player would just make commands which the characters would try to fulfill, Dwarf Fortress-style.

worp

So, before linking I’ll make some kind of a summary of what I got working and what I didn’t, perhaps a pros and cons list.

* I got the base engine running, complete with felling trees, mining and simple building pieces. You can move the guys and perform everything there is to perform (which is not much, haha).
* The procedural generation part went really well, and I think it’s easy to get some really ace formations. I’m happy with my increased skills in PCG.

– From the things I planned beforehand, I didn’t get in enemies, swords, furnaces, ore and creating tools. Also I planned the characters to move with a balloon that you’d use in the beginning to select your starting place
– MMF’s bloom feature was seriously lacking so I left it out. Someone is looking at this, though, so perhaps I’ll eventually get a nice bloom and grain effect going.
– The thing is enormously clumsy and buggy. There are varying bugs with the characters being unable to walk to places, especially digging can break very easily, and trees/bushes can float in midair. Controlling the characters one by one gets tedious very fast, especially when the digging command can be applied to only one tile at once, per miner. Picking up items is hard because they’re so small, and it’s annoying to drop stuff.
– No effects whatsoever. Boo hoo, who cares.

So the conclusion is that if I want to continue this, I need to fix the bugs, and change the controlling system heavily. Currently the amount of choices available is so narrow that one can kinda manage with the clumsiness, but with a larger system I can merely think of the problems that would present itself.

Here’s the link

Controls:
Use left and right mouse button for everything.
-You can pick up stuff also by rightclicking straight to the object.
-Before doing any actions, you must select a character, so click or box-select them.
-You can also dig and cut trees by right-clicking, assuming you have the correct item.
-Mushrooms can be cut like trees (and they drop brown logs – herp derp).
-Remember that when building, the builder has to be close enough to the place you want to build – the range is about 3 tiles to every direction.
–In case you fall into a pit at the start, press F2 to retry!
-There’s absolutely nothing to do yet, you can just build walls and ladders and be cool. Try to dig through the bottom.

I had a lot of fun making this – hopefully I can fix the stupidities and get some real stuff going eventually!
What a great way to ignore my current, ‘proper’ projects! Hehe.