Merry Christmas and stuff

Busy like everyone else. Parents visited us and we celebrated christmas together. It was nice. My wife gave me a DSi and Zelda, Phantom Hourglass. :)

No programming have been done for a long time now. My puzzle game still lacks ideas to make it fun, and I don't have any better ideas, yet. Things are calming down now so I will soon start hacking away on a game or two,

Bleh!

Still no progress being made! But I have been very busy too. And it sucks.

Thinking of putting the project on hold for a while to gather ideas and energy.

Also this

I have read a couple of articles online about publishing indie games. What's the difference between indie and, let's say, "bed room coder"? What is the definition of indie? Am I an indie? Is my game it? I'm not going to sell the game, it will be free for everyone, but that shouldn't matter, right? Since it's not backed up by a publisher I will assume it's indie. Not that I care much, really. Just a bit curious.

The only reason I'm thinking in these lines is that for the first time I might get payed for releasing a game. Not directly, but through ads. But not ads inside the game, so you should not have to worry. I'm going to upload the games to some portals that share the ads money they get. I don't think I'm going to get rich, but some tea money would not hurt.

One article said I should have a homepage, so I guess I should look around. I don't feel like paying for one so I guess my options is a bit limited. I'm horrible when it comes to remember to update a homepage. But I'm also horrible when it comes to remember to update a blog. But I have improved a lot in the latter, so maybe it's time to get a page again. At least I will have a place to upload the game to once it's done.

Not so much progress

I have made very little progress during the last couple of days. Working weekends now and my free time have been occupied by other important real life stuff.
Got a lot of work in the comming days too, but I think I should be able to squeeze in a few hours here and there.

The main issue now is that my game design is not good enough. I knew this from the start, but hoped ideas would come during the development. They usually do, but not so much this time. I'm unsure where to go from here with the idea and have asked some relatives for help and suggestions. We'll see what they can come up with.

HTC hero awesomeness

blogging from my new and shiny (well, brown actually) Android phone. all typos and gramatical errors is a result of my fingers are too wide for the touchscreen. and because the wordlist is in Swedish and doesn't help much when i write in English.

progress

I have made some progress with my puzzle game. did a major gameplay redesign and fiddled with the looks. I think its going to be sweet!

And google Chrome beta for osx is installed. Love it! except that unity Webplayer doesn't work in it. yet.

Going indie?

Will i jump on to the indie train? Got a little something in the making. Nothing big, more kind of an experiment.

Retro!

I'm working on a FPS shooter as well. Designed to look like some VR thing from the 80's. A bit of Tron here, and a bit of Dactyl Nightmare there...

Currently working with the enemy AI. I want them to chase you when they see you, and go where they last saw you if you're gone, etc. It works, kind of, but I'm having some problems here and there as well. I really enjoy working with Unity since it makes things a lot easier, but I wish they had IronRuby or something in there as well, together with some nice docs. For the moment I'm using some kind of Javascript thingy. I miss ruby.

RR November game: Fireworks

On the Retro Remakes forum, it is declared that November is the month of games featuring fireworks!
(Or pictures featuring fireworks... or just about anything, as long as it is about fireworks.)

Am I mad enough to create a game about fireworks? It's only 6 days left of November...

... I think I am! :D
And I will use Unity3D for it, because it will most likely save me a lot of time, something I don't have a lot of!

Minigames

Thinking of making a game with a lot of small minigames in it. Everything (probably) will take place in a small town, and the player picks a minigame to play in that town. The graphics will be very cartoony and the games easy and aimed for kids.

Sort of. Something like that. We'll see how it goes. Maybe it could turn up as something I could sell?

Chrome OS

There lives a little Google fanboy in me. And that little fanboy almost jumped up and down in joy when I saw a Chrome OS video.

It doesn't have anything new or revolutionary. It is small, and simple, and doesn't look better than the rest. If it didn't have Google pushing it, it would fall over and die!

But since Google is pushing it forward, I'm now jogging along to see where it goes, and as soon as I can grab a copy and have some spare hardware to test it on, I will be a happy camper! And probably jump up and down in joy.

Windows binary

The windows version have been out in the public for some days now.
Get it here: http://www.ippa.se/berzerk.exe

I have had some problems with the OSX version, but also have been very busy the last week so I haven't had much chance of fixing it. Will hopefully get it done this weekend.

Not sure what my next project will be. I have been looking at the free Unity3D engine, and would like to do something with it.

It's done!

Berzerk is done! (still contains bugs, I bet)
Working on producing binaries for Windows and OSX.

Back again!

Back from a cruise, will continue to work on the remake when my energy has returned. Being drunk on a boat really drains your energy, doesn't it? :)

Ippa got a lot of work done with the online highscore board. Sweet! I'm currently ranked as #3, while Ippa has the #1 position with about 3 times as much points. I think he cheats! ;)

And another thing...

Must make game harder. Maybe I'm getting too used to it and therefore easily gets high scores, but it could need a tweak here and there. The robots must shoot a lot more often, for example...

I Blog Much These Days

Highscores is in! And a nify score name entry screen with a wheel of rotating letters. Looks sweet!

And Ippa, who helped me a lot with this remake, is also creating a website so we can send the score up there for people to see and try to beat! It will be great! :)

It's very very late now. Wife will wake up soon and go to work. (well, in a few hours but anyway)
Time to go to sleep. Got a lot of chores to do tomorrow, and then go to work.

On saturday we will go on a cruise. That will be great as well!

A List of High Scores!

Ippa did an update of his framework Chingu today, and in it was a highscore list class. Happy times! Tonight after work I will start hacking on a Highscore screen for the remake, unless he have done that one too. :)
The game have gone through a facelift as well. And a lot of bugs have been found and killed. I also tweaked this and that multiple times. It's a bit easier to get a high score now, but you'll also die pretty soon afterwards. ;)
Here's a new screenshot of it. It looks way better in the game.

I Hate Bugs

First real bug has surfaced. Sometimes the input stops responding a little. But just a little. I can move like before, I can shoot like before, but just not in that direction. :P
I had the problem at one time that I could only shoot to the left. And not like up, left or down, left. just left.

The really odd thing about this bug is that it disappears when some other, unrelated, part of the code is changed. For example, the laser shots was just simple lines in the beginning. I later replaced them with an animated image, and suddenly I could not shoot to the right... I then changed something else somewhere, and suddenly I could shoot right again.

Not sure why this bugs jumps in and out like that. I think it has something to do with us pushing poor old Ruby a bit too hard. That, or it's some Ruby 1.8.7 on snow leopard issue, since ruby 1.9.1 on windows seems unaffected by it.

Oh, well. Haven't seen it for a while. I hope it's dead now. Some nice optimizations have been made recently. :)

YouTube butchered video

Here's a video of the remake. The screen capture was of a poor quality to begin with, but youtube apparently decided at it needed a bit more blurry look. :P

And the audio sucks, since the screen capture program could only record sound using the built in microphone, so you will hear me press the keys as well...

Youtube

The Power of Tunes

We added a bunch of music to the game (well two tunes, to be exact). Surprisingly enough, it made the game a lot more interesting. I sometimes finds myself doing something with the game running so I could listen to the title menu music. I could just play the .ogg file, or browse to the Jamendo page and listen to it there... But that's not the same. :)



A lot of tweaks to the gameplay have been done as well, and I added a credit screen. And I replaced some graphics. It's even less stuff to do now! My next big project for the game is to implement the settings menu, but I figure that will take a couple of hours at most. (And then a couple of more hours to fix the bugs, naturally)

Enjoy the sneak preview, but keep in mind that the final game might look a lot different. I'm not quite happy with everything yet. (and I need to redesign the player graphics.)

Zap, Kaboom, pew pew and laughter

Got a LOT of stuff done this weekend!
And we have tried to add a lot of funny stuff to it. Theres a pause menu with a nice scrolling text, the game begs you to start the game if you dwell in the main menu for too long, a nice picture is displayed as the game over screen, and more.

But other not-so-silly stuff have been done as well. I think all the major gameplay elements are in and working. There's a bunch of bugs to fix here and there. And there's always a need to tweak this or that, but It's basically finished now.

Still no highscore list, but that is being worked on. No settings but I will do that some day next week. And I have plans for the credit screen that hopefully gets done next week as well.

The deadline is fast approaching, but I feel that we're so far ahead on the schedule that if we miss this we are probably dead. Or drunk. Or so drunk we should be dead. Or a mix of them.

Should probably prepare a beta to send to a few people. No major bugs known, but there is probably a few lurking between the lines of code...

Smileys are evil

Not much left to do now... The game is basically complete! It even has a main menu! Left to do is play testing, play testing, some more play testing, and filling in the missing pieces, and some more play testing.

The main menu is a black screen with some text on. Lots of missing pieces there... And there isn't a highscore list yet, but that will come. And a credits screen needs to be added as well. And the graphics could use some fine tuning here and there. Some parts needs to be redrawn completley. But it's all there. Everything that needs for it to feel like a game.

The rest is just fluff and shiny objects. It will be sweet!

How much is a robot worth?

Score is now in. And to answer the question in the title, it's 50 points. And a bonus if no one is alive when you leave a room!

I didn't have much luck finding a free desktop recording app for osx... I'm very low on cash at the moment so buying one is out of the question.

Now to eat some soup, and then to fine tune berzerk. Still need to add menus, but that will have to wait until tomorrow or something.

Google Wave is a lively place

Or it will be soon.

Found some friends on it, and more will come eventually. Yay. :)

Now to figure out how to connect this blog with it, to make things easier for me in the long run. :P

Anyone know how to do it and can give me a short tutorial? My google-fu is weak and I don't find much info about it.

Berzerk remake progressing well

Droids, explosions, an evil smiley (currently without a smile), blood, carnage, robotic voice that taunts you... The remake has it all!

Some of the most important things left on the TODO list is scores, and menus. And I have about 2 weeks left until the deadline, so clearly something is going to go terribly wrong any time now. :P

Now off to find some program for OSX to record gameplay video with...

Berzerk remake

I started a remake of the old arcade game Berzerk a couple of days ago. It's written in Ruby using the Gosu library, and a game framework called Chingu on top of that. Turns out that the author of Chingu wanted to help with the remake. :) It's progressing well, and it's now possible to run around in a randomly generated maze and shoot at droids.

Next on my TODO list is to implement some AI code into the droids, at the moment they ignore the walls completely and cannot fire.


Links for people who like that kind of stuff:
The remake code repository (no binary files at the time of writing)
Gosu
Chingu

Google Wave is a lonely place

I need more contacts in Google Wave... But I have no invites. :(

Some friends are waiting for their invitations, so hopefully it will be a bit more action in the near future.

Google Wave

Finally got an invite for Google Wave and wanted to tie it with this blog, but I can't figure out how.

It's a bit difficult to think today since I got a swine-flu shot yesterday and it turns out that I'm one of ten people who react to it. :P