Posts tagged “game development”

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Mixium postmortem

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. Mixium was my entry for the 1st Alakajam!... Continue reading

Texture compression on mobile demystified

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... Continue reading

Choosing an HTML5 2D engine

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 –... Continue reading

A week of dragon stuff

With Mystery Game No. 1 in private beta, while I’m waiting for feedback, I’ve had all week to dedicate to Dragon Attack. A lot remains to be done, especially in the tweaking and balancing department, but there has been a lot of progress. Treasure I added something I’d been thinking... Continue reading

Flight of the dragon

Yesterday I worked on the control scheme for Dragon Attack. In its original version, Glauron, the mechanics are very simple: Horizontal speed is constant. Vertical speed is affected by gravity as usual. When you tap, a fixed amount of speed is added to the vertical speed over the next half... Continue reading

More farming fun

It’s Fun Time Friday again! And a good thing too, because I’ve been busy with Mystery Game No. 1 all week, which I can’t blog about yet. So apart from the welcome break, the Friday farming prototype also gives me something to write about. I’ll be using this post as... Continue reading

Farming Friday

While Mystery Game No. 1 is making nice progress, in the spirit of “throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks”, I’ve decided to introduce what I call “Fun Time Fridays”. On Friday, assuming the rest of the week has gone according to plan, I get to work on whatever... Continue reading

Localizing libGDX games via a spreadsheet

LibGDX has decent localization support via a bundle of .properties files, for example: == strings.properties == app_name=Confirmation App confirmation=Are you sure? == strings_en_UK.properties == confirmation=I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but would you please be so kind to confirm your certainty on this matter? == strings_nl.properties == confirmation=Weet u het... Continue reading

Things that take time

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. Of course there’s a long way to go from a prototype to... Continue reading

Doomsray

I’ve been working on and off on this project for almost two months now, so it’s time I blogged something about it. Here’s the elevator pitch: Ballistic Delivery Service is a wacky party game that puts your spatial insight and topographical knowledge to the test! When conventional delivery companies aren’t... Continue reading

Released: Patchy!

Yes indeed, Frozen Fractal’s first officially released game is there! It’s called Patchy, and it’s a retro arcade-style land-grabbing game for Android. This post is about its inception and also describes some bits of the technical implementation. Design Patchy is the spiritual successor to my one-weekend Ludum Dare entry Park... Continue reading

Game architecture

Although games vary wildly in appearance and mechanics, the structure of the underlying classes and objects is often similar. There is a “world” object, which contains everything else; there are multiple “entities” representing stuff in the world, there’s a “renderer” which tells each object to draw itself, etcetera. My game... Continue reading

Performance measurements

After a week partly filled with lots of food and other Christmas celebrations, I’m back on track. I’ve done some polishing to make the game more game-like. There’s now a neat countdown at the start of the game. You can start racing before the countdown ends, but there’s a little... Continue reading

Level editor

Does a carpenter create his own hammers? Does a painter make his own brushes? Usually not, but a game developer often needs to build his own tools to get a particular job done. One of the most important tools to have is a level editor – you really don’t want... Continue reading

First gameplay

I had hoped that the editor would allow me to quickly test gameplay concepts by using “soft rules”: rules that are communicated to the tester verbally by me, instead of being enforced by the program. For example, I could say “Now try moving the orange ball into the blue rectangle,... Continue reading

Sandbox editor

To be able to test different configurations, I had a rudimentary text-based file format to describe levels in. It was fairly simple and easy to edit, but still, hand-typing coordinates is not my idea of fun. It was time to build a graphical editor. I plan to release the editor... Continue reading