Posts with tag 'No More Sweden':
Chnakess Tags: Games, No More Sweden, Small games, Happenings News! And stuff! Part 1 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Ludum Dare, No More Sweden, Other, Plans, Small games Maybe weekly? progress post #99: I’M BACK Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, No More Sweden, GDC, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, Happenings Nordic Game Jam 2017! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Nordic Game Jam, Happenings, Plans, ESA 2, Cloud Realm, No More Sweden, Other, Art, Small games An open apology to the Ludum Dare community (and other game jam communities) Tags: Other, Happenings, Other Jams, Nordic Game Jam, No More Sweden, Ludum Dare No More Sweden game jam 2015! Tags: Games, ESA, No More Sweden, Happenings, Other, Plans, Streaming No More Sweden 2014! Tags: Games, Small games, Happenings, No More Sweden Also working on this Tags: Games, ESA, Officer Alfred, Happenings, No More Sweden Oh right! No More Sweden 2012 Tags: Games, Small games, Happenings, No More Sweden Environmental Station Alpha keeps going Tags: Games, ESA, Happenings, No More Sweden
Posted on 2018-08-07 03:31
No More Sweden 2018 was last weekend, and it was a fairly good time. The venue, STPLN in Malmö, was sweet as usual and managed to be generally not too warm despite the general temperature. I even got to swim in the ocean – there’s a really nice large pier nearby and the water was really comfortably warm.
Anyway, I managed to finish some stuff despite taking it easy and spending a lot of time just chilling and playing boardgames. My themes were Sand Dunes and Chain reaction, which led me initially down the path of creating a cellular automata -style terraforming/citybuilding thing. I didn’t get very far, but here’s a neat landscaping thing:
My plans changed abruptly when someone (whose name I don’t remember :( ) sitting near me showed their idea of a turn-based snake game with the objective being defeating all enemies rather than eating fruit. Seeing this made me think of some concepts regarding roguelikes and chess pieces, and I got the concept of combining chess and snake in my head. I felt slightly bad about drawing so directly from someone else’s idea, but I really wanted to try this concept and ended up making it my entry. The game’s called Chnakess and I think it goes in a fairly different direction than a more general snake-with-enemies would have gone.
The game’s essentially a puzzle game where you try to eat all the chess pieces as the snake. I managed to create several different scenarios with different layouts, and although there are some bugs I think the result is pretty solid as far as 48-hour chill gamejam things go.
So yeah, all in all a very nice weekend. This month will be extraordinarily busy so these little moments of possible relaxation are especially valuable. If I have an empty moment somewhere I might update Chnakess a bit to add more chess elements, such as castling. We’ll see.
Posted on 2018-07-22 18:27
UGhghg, even when disregarding the sloppy weekly progress updates, I’ve been extremely bad at keeping this blog up to date with things I’ve been doing! Let’s try to fix that! Here’re some things I’ve made during the past several months:
– I made a game for Ludum Dare 41! It’s called Super Metabolism Bros, and it’s a kind of a mix of Dwarf Fortress -like real-time strategy with autonomous agents and platforming. The idea ended up being very rough and buggy, but it was a fun little thing and part of my long-enduring fascination with autonomous agents in games and pathfinding. FrankieSmileShow played the game on-stream and it was a fun time. I had a lot more plans (bacteria, at least) but didn’t have time for those.
– I had my 2-week Summer holiday a week ago, and during it I toyed around with shaders to create this fake 3D effect. It’s very satisfying to create this kind of stuff, although whether it’ll become anything or not will have to be seen. It’d be neat to make a cardgame or a boardgame with this style! (Alexis Kennedy’s Cultist Simulator definitely inspired me a lot)
– Stumblehill is done! It was featured as a part of Humble Bundle’s Monthly Bundle for July. There were some bugs at launch but they should be gone now, although I do plan to update the game a bit more before I call it fully finished. All in all, the project was fun and while I left things very much too late, the result turned out to be fairly neat. This also helped me a lot to get a feel for digital painting, although digital animation is something that feels way beyond me. Massive thanks to Anna Magdalino for the audio and Lucy Green for the writing!
– After a lengthy break, I’ve returned to work on ESA 2! However, because of various reasons I’ve decided to re-do the game from nearly scratch. I’m going to reuse assets where I can, but it’s still a bunch of work. Sorry about that! But I think the game will benefit from rethought. I’m currently setting up the editor and basics of the engine, but it shouldn’t be too long until I’ll be able to get to work on the actual map again.
– Also, I’ve finally updated ESA 1! Some bugs have been fixed, you can now skip the end credits if you’ve seen them already, and there have been some optimizations to the level loading times that should help especially older computers to handle the game. Many of these little changes have been made with speedrunners in mind.
– Baba Is You progresses onwards, somewhat slower now but nevertheless. I think I’ll do a separate post of interesting Baba gifs and whatnot in the future, but not mentioning it in this general update would be odd. On the video you can heard some tracks I’ve composed for the game.
I’ll also be participating in the No More Sweden game jam again this year. It’ll be held in the beginning of August in Malmö, Sweden. It’ll be good to meet some friends and maybe make some jam games. :)
Posted on 2018-06-15 05:05
Ok! After a couple months of almost total silence, I’m trying to get back to weekly updates & streams. Today I worked on Baba’s map art, seen above in its WIP state, as well as restructuring it to make more sense. I kind of dreaded streaming beforehand but it was good fun once I got going. I’ll be trying to stream ESA 2 a bit more in upcoming streams because I’ll need to work on Baba outside of streams as well.
In other news:
– I won the Excellence in Design & Best Student Game awards at IGF! I’m aware that this update is over 2 months after the fact, but looks like I didn’t post about it.
– Stumblehill, the penguin game, is pretty much done! It was quite exhausting to concentrate solely on it so I’m happy that I can soon leave it behind.
– I’ll be going to No More Sweden, the oddly-named game jam, in July!
Let’s see if I can get this to work, now!
Posted on 2017-04-28 00:19
(Cool photo & cool cake by my girlfriend, Anni :3)
Nordic Game Jam 2017 was last weekend, and I ended up winning it with my game, Baba Is You!
I went in not really expecting much; I wasn’t initially really in the mood for making new games so the plan was to kinda feel the situation and possibly just work on ESA 2 and/or Snake Game. The theme of the jam was “Not There”, and at some point it got me thinking about “not” as an operator in programming/logic. This in turn made me think of a puzzle game where the game logic is part of the game world, and eventually this idea turned into my entry. I was expecting to run to some really hairy coding problems and not be able to finish, but hey, that very much didn’t happen!
I’m not totally sure where to take the game from here; during the event my plan was to polish it a bit and release it mostly as-is, but since people really liked it and it even raised some philosophical considerations in some players, I think I’ll be working on it further.
Download the game on itch.io!
In other news, Environmental Station Alpha’s second anniversary was also last weekend, and I almost completely forgot to announce the sale that went with that. Oh well! Let’s hope we won’t get to its 3rd anniversary before ESA 2 is done.
Next up in the indie gamedev event schedule will be No More Sweden in June; we’ll see what happens there :O
Posted on 2016-09-15 02:00
Just a moment ago I finally realized something I should’ve realized years and years ago, and decided that the best way to approach it would be to write an open apology.
Over the years of participating in Ludum Dares and other game jams, I have partly unthinkingly and partly knowingly cheated and otherwise acted maliciously in ways that have made my results look better than they deserve. This has happened in two ways:
- Using certain bits of MMF2 code I had made earlier to get started with a game project faster, and
- Using the “submission hour” to add content and polish/tweaks
In earlier LDs I’ve taken part in it’s also possible that I’ve added content after the deadline along with bugfixes, but I’m not certain of the extent of this kind of behaviour and I’m fairly certain it hasn’t happened in recent years (not that that makes it acceptable to have happened before!)
The former category of cheating has mostly concerned certain relatively simple “modules” that I’ve added to my projects upon starting to work on them; it would’ve been quite trivial to re-implement the same features during the actual compo and I doubt I’ve gained much advantage via this abuse of the rules; this of course doesn’t make my behaviour any less wrong, merely a bit dumber.
Using the “submission hour” for polish and features has definitely affected the quality of my entries significantly; I have no excuse for this behaviour.
It makes me angry at myself to have abused the goodwill of the community in such a way and I’m very very sorry that I’ve acted this way. The reason behind this kind of behaviour is probably partially in my own naïvete; when I first participated in LD I was much younger and thus had less of a moral compass, and after that it’s been easier to point at past offences and think “well, I did that before so I don’t have to care now, either”, or just not think about the whole issue in the first place. I’m glad I’ve realized that this way of thinking is actively malicious and morally wrong, but I’m really sad it took me this long to actually decide to acknowledge it and the awful things I’ve done. What makes me feel even more awful is the fact that I’ve manipulated my time lapse videos so that this behaviour couldn’t be seen in them.
So, again, I’m very deeply sorry to have acted in such a malicious manner, and I apologize for having been as dumb and mean as I have. Ludum Dare has been a very important part of my game developer hobby for these past 7 years and I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed all the experiences related to the event; I just wish this kind of attitude hadn’t been a part of it behind the scenes, or at least that I’d have been morally sound enough to stop doing it, feel genuinely sorry and apologize a long time ago.
As a gesture that someone hopefully finds useful, I’ve decided to upload the bits of engine I’ve re-used in many of my LD games; right now I can recall two that I’ve utilized in multiple entries (especially the latter can be found in nearly every entry):
- A simple platforming engine. The version I’ll include here contains some extra functionality, such as slopes, because I’m not completely certain on whether I’ve used only the simplest form in a cheaty manner or also this more advanced one.
- A system for quickly resizing the game window to a multiplier of its original size. This is a very simple piece of code, but as a result also very easy to quickly add to a project at the start of development.
Additionally I’ve used Adam “Sketchy” Hawker’s pathfinding tutorial in multiple entries, and while I’m not certain of how much of the tutorial code I’ve copied directly to my entries, I have a memory that suggests that I’ve done so and renamed variables afterwards to make this less apparent. This is awful.
I have used these two particular engine pieces in a similarly cheaty way in other game jams, such as No More Sweden and Nordic Game Jam, for similarly dumb and irresponsible reasons, although without the intention to act maliciously (if that matters).
I hope that the fact that I bring this matter up on my own helps prove that I genuinely feel very sorry about it and wish to be a better person in the future. It’ll be somewhat scary to see what’ll come out of this, but in the end whatever possible bad outcomes are deserved and I’m nevertheless sure that this is the right thing to do, right now.
Here are the two pieces of engine mentioned:
Platforming engine (with slopes) – ThePodunkian kindly taught me the basics of this design years ago (in 2008, maybe?)
Screen size multiplier – I’m fairly sure I implemented this myself and refined it over the years.
Seems like Adam’s pathfinding tutorials are no longer available; I feel slightly uncomfortable uploading them as they are, but if anyone wants I can make a tutorial based on the system I’ve used.
I’ll be posting this on twitter & the Ludum Dare blog; hopefully all relevant parties will see it.
Posted on 2015-07-22 16:42
Well, that game jam was last weekend. And it was lots of fun! Swam in the ocean for the first time this Summer and talked a lot with cool people; game development tends to be not that social most of the time so these moments where I can meet other game developers stand out nicely.
During the actual jam part I started to make a simple board-gameish online game where players have different jobs with different missions and have to carry them out. One of them is a traitor, with the mission to spoil everyone else’s objectives. I didn’t get quite as far as I had hoped, only managing the basic gameplay without the actual objectives, but it was fun making an online multiplayer game again. I probably wont keep working on it, but I might revisit the concept at a later date (although I do have several projects to work on at the moment anyway).
In other news, the game development streams I’ve been doing have been really enjoyable because it’s easier to concentrate on a project when I can’t just stop the moment I feel annoyed by a bug. This has also helped working on multiple projects at once. So thanks, everyone who has joined to watch the streams!
Also, Environmental Station Alpha’s Soundtrack is now out, for $2,99! Go check it out!
Posted on 2014-07-20 09:22
Last year NMS was quite a disaster for me due to some personal problems, but this year has been a ton of fun! I even managed to finish something. Other indie developers are mostly really cool people and it’s cool to be able to follow the creative processes of other people over the weekend. Also instead of the usual pizza’n’burger -type diet, the local shop sells relatively cheap salads, so the overall atmosphere has been surprisingly healthy!
My game is called PILARI, and it’s a two-player arcade thing where the players fight against each other using bombs. I got a sudden inspiration to make a pillar-based topdown platformer engine, but couldn’t decide on where to take it, which made me end up making a simple deathmatch thing. It might still be fun? At least it looks somewhat cool.
~CONTROLS~
ESC – enable gamepad
Control/Q – drop a bomb. Hold for a moment to drop a more powerful one. You can only have two bombs at a time, and when you’re charging a new bomb the other one wont count down. You can use the explosions to propel yourself and your other bomb to the air, since you can’t damage yourself. Landing on the enemy’s head damages them.
Shift/Tab – Jump. Kind of useless mostly.
Arrows/WASD – move.
I think I’ll use the same engine for something in the future. :)
Download the game at Unicorn 7!
Posted on 2013-07-02 14:56
Sorry to whoever happens to read this blog and expects news about ESA; I’ve been working on a brand-new Officer Alfred editor, and I got to say that this time around it’s looking much better than last year! That gif was made entirely in an MMF-built level editor, which makes me quite proud (I shouldn’t be). Hopefully the loading times wont be atrocious.
As for ESA, I added some new cool stuff but I’m a bit stumped about a certain design thing. How to persuade a player to search for something less obvious instead of going in a straight line without having stupid plot-based walls?
No More Sweden 2013 will be held this month, and I’ll be there! Way cool! Hopefully I’ll get some GAMES made, woop!
Posted on 2012-08-02 17:49
So yeah, that one was some 2 weeks ago, but I completely forgot to mention anything about it here.
It was a lot of fun! We were in Malmö, and I held a presentation showing off the games I’ve been working on (ESA, Officer Alfred & Beyond the Black Hole). I saw a lot of cool games from other people, made new friends and ate bettern food than I would’ve expected from a nerd gathering (didn’t eat a single pizza during the whole trip!)
The coolest thing about the venue was that there was a free-for-all workshop downstairs, with a high-quality laser cutter, tons of useless wood and metal (and bicycles). One of the organizers, Martin Jonasson, had created some custom-made arcade cabinets with his friend there, and we got to make games for them during the jam-part of the event. The coolest was a 4-player cabinet, which looked like this:
I of course made a game for it. Due to the cabinet not being tested very extensively, there were some problems with the controls; apparently the cabinet couldn’t send all input so it might be that one of the players couldn’t move at all if the others were using all of their buttons. Fortunately, this problem was partially solved during the event, and the games people made could be played to their full extent.
I worked with Erik Rönnblom, and together we made a game called “The Boulder Will Kill You”. In the game all the players are chained to a boulder, and thus drag it along wherever they go. The point of the game is to get the boulder into a specifically marked area. This grants the players points and more time to move about.
Have a screenshot:
I also started to work on a simple, humorous cardgame, but didn’t manage to finish it:
Posted on 2012-05-12 16:27
Yaay, more enemies.
Also, this year’s No More Sweden is slowly approaching – the event will be 20th of July. If you live near Malmö, Sweden, I suggest that you visit the event website!