There’s this game concept that has been on my mind for years, and I can’t seem to let it go. You step into the wet, salt-crusted shoes of the naval explorers of old: Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Cook. Most of the world is still a big unknown question mark: here be dragons. There are no satellites, no GPS, not even maps. The only way to find out what’s out there is to actually go there – which is a risky venture. Your navigational tools: a compass, the sun, moon and stars, and any information you might learn from the locals along the way. Your goal: to find a route around the world and end up where you started.
Here’s a thing I’ve been working on since January: Blokjes!
In case you can’t tell from the video, the idea is very simple: you get a
sequence of blocks (polyominoes) that you have to place on the board. Each of
them has to fit entirely on black, or entirely on white squares, and the
squares that you place it on will change colour. As the game progresses, the
blocks increase in size, so you have to look and plan ahead to make room for
the bigger ones.
Alakajam is a relatively new game jam based on the Ludum Dare formula. You get
one weekend to build a game from scratch, without using any premade assets. The
theme of the 6th edition was “Duel”, and I teamed up with my pal Marten to make
something. That something became Code of Honour:
We have fire, we have buckets of water, we can get the buckets to the fire… now what? Throw ’em, of course! So if a peep in state PASSING sees that its destination cell is not manned, but rather flammable, it will throw the water onto the fire. (It will also do this if there is no fire. I played with the thought of keeping houses wet to prevent them from catching fire, but didn’t get round to implementing this.)
This weekend was the third instalment of the Alakajam! game jam. I was really happy about the shortlist of potential themes, so I knew this was going to be a fun one. The winning theme, “Always growing”, was my second choice.
As an indie game developer, I find that it’s important to invest time to get to know your tools really well, so you can make the most out of them with the least amount of time. This is often at odds with the urge to try something new and different, which will set your productivity back to square one. But with the eagerly awaited release of Godot 3.0, I felt that the day had come to check this thing out, and see if it could be of future use to me.
Mixium is a puzzle game in which you mix liquids to achieve a
particular ratio. The trouble is: your beakers don’t have any scale on them, so
you can only fill them to the brim or empty them into a larger beaker.
Last week,
I talked about a fairly sophisticated attempt at solving my
2D discrete physics problem,
which ultimately turned out to have unfixable flaws. But I need this problem
solved for my game, so I decided to relax my requirements for the time being.
As I previously wrote, I
recently fell in love with the Kotlin language. It’s been over four months
since that post, and my enthusiasm has not diminished. In this post, I’ll show
how I combined some of Kotlin’s best features to write some extremely readable
unit tests.
In the last
post, I
described my requirements for a 2D discrete physics system I’m working on. Now
that I’ve laid out what the system should do, let’s turn to the implementation.
For a new game I’m working on, I need some 2D “physics” that work in discrete
time and discrete space. In other words: every object consists of one or more
blocks aligned to a square grid, and time advances in turn-based steps. If
you’re thinking of Sokoban, you’ve got
the idea:
As of just now, https://frozenfractal.com is a
thing. This means you can browse my site securely, knowing that the NSA can
probably not see which pages you are viewing. Sort of.
If you’re developing a game for mobile devices, chances are you have run into
the words “texture compression”. Texture compression helps to keep video memory
usage down, reduce download sizes and loading times, and may even reduce power
consumption. In this article, I take a comprehensive look at what the options
are.
Kotlin is a programming language developed by
JetBrains (the makers of IntelliJ IDEA), which compiles down to Java bytecode.
I got over my initial aversion for the ugly name, and decided to give it a try.
Now I never want to go back to Java. Here’s why.
This weekend, November 5th and 6th (and actually yesterday as well), Twistago has a stand at one of Germany’s largest board game fairs, Spielwies’n, in the MOC in München. Come visit us if you’re in the area!
Because Dragon Attack’s performance on Crafty.js was disappointing, and the libGDX port also had problems running smoothly when compiled to JavaScript (plus some unfortunate technical decisions I made along the way), I’ve decided to go for a third rewrite, using better tech. (“Rewrite” sounds worse than it really is – we’re talking about a two-day Ludum Dare project, after all.)
