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.
This is the second part of this postmortem. Catch up on the first part here.
Sunday morning: controls and gameplay We have fire, we have buckets of water, we can get the buckets to the fire… now what?
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.
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.
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 last week’s post, I discussed my first two failed attempts at creating something like physics on a 2D grid. It gathered a good deal of attention on Reddit, with several replies from people claiming to have solved it, only to introduce new problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This… is Leonardo’s Painting Machine! It’s my entry for the Ludum Dare 36 compo, a game jam where you make a game in 48 hours, this time to the theme of ‘Ancient Technology’.
This is the third and final part of a series in which I explain how the artificial intelligence works in my latest game, Twistago. In case you missed the first or second part, you can catch up on them here and here.
At the beginning of this year, I posted a set of goals for the first half of the year. The idea was that a public commitment would help me stick to them.