I recently did an interview with Robert of Tornadic Dev Studio from Melbourne, Australia. He noticed my recent announcement about starting as a fulltime indie developer, and got inspired:
At the core, Rocket Mail is a very simple game. I made the early prototype (Doomsray) in less than a day. There are no complicated physics, no advanced graphics, and very little in the way of performance requirements.
After thinking this through over and over and over again, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge, quit my day job and become a fulltime indie game developer!
Just a short post to share something I’ve been working on that mightily pleases the Kerbal Space Program player in me. In testing Orbital Express, it became clear that having three controls (compass direction, inclination, and launch speed) is too much for beginning players.
Virtual reality seems to be all the rage in gaming these days. Everyone seems to be buying into it. Big corporations like Facebook (Oculus Rift), Sony (PlayStation VR) and Microsoft (HoloLens) are pouring money into VR as if it’ll be the biggest thing since sliced bread.
As I’d hoped, my 48-hour game Glauron did pretty well in the latest Ludum Dare game development competition: it ranked #58 overall, and made the top-100 in the graphics and fun categories as well.
After Ludum Dare, it’s back to working on the game I blogged about last week. Name clashes notwithstanding, I’ve decided to call it Orbital Express after all.
(Cross-posted to the Ludum Dare blog.)
This is Glauron, my Compo entry for Ludum Dare 33, themed You Are The Monster:
This was my eighth time participating in Ludum Dare, and I feel it’s my best yet.
Each field of programming presents its own challenges, and game programming is no exception. In fact, I would say that a game is among the hardest things you can program in general.
After a weekend of toil with GRPC, ProGuard, dex, Netty, Maven, Gradle and IntelliJ, I finally managed to build a release APK of the first public version of the Bigcanvas app.
Pickomino (known as Regenwormen in Dutch, Heckmeck in German) is a dice game in which players try to get as many worms as possible. It is largely a game of chance, but there are some tactics involved, which always leaves me wondering: did I make the optimal choice?
Core to the idea of Bigcanvas is that it’s a shared space, where everyone can draw at the same time. Much as it would on a real canvas, this means people can interfere with each other.
How does one store the contents of an infinite canvas into a computer’s finite memory? One cheats. In this case, by taking advantage of the fact that the canvas may be infinite, but people’s drawings are quite finite.
Remember Bigcanvas? The infinite online canvas that anyone can draw on, which I launched in 2013? I didn’t do anything with it since, but the idea has always been at the back of my mind, biding its time.
Hopefully you didn’t notice, but as of now, frozenfractal.com is generated by Jekyll, the static blog generator.
Since its inception in 2010, the site had been running on my own custom-written engine, Utterson.
It’s been two weeks since I announced that Patchy was to be featured in the Play Store. This happened roughly a week ago, and it looks like it was taken down around yesterday, so it’s time for a postmortem.
I’m proud to announce that Frozen Fractal’s first Android release, Patchy, will soon be featured in the Google Play Store! I guess that means it’ll get a big banner at the top of this page, which is sure to drive some eyeballs my way.