Turska is one of these things I have been tinkering with, but for some reason have neglected to mention here until now. It is a silly little UI/framework library meant to be small and easy to use, mainly aimed for games which have modest UI requirements anyway.

The very first version of the library was featured in Truck Dismount™ back in 2003, and the library was a simple component object/event based system back then. Later I got interested of the IMGUI concept and abandoned the old API to recreate it. Along the years it has always been open source – first hosted in SourceForge.net and nowadays in Google code.

Now I have finally upgraded the library version to 2.0.0 (this version is also known as Turs2). Check out the Turska home page if you want to know more.

The Ludum Dare 48 hour game development competition was again held three weeks ago, for the 11th time. The theme was minimalism, and I created a game called warrior.

It did quite well, achieving 1st place in graphics and technical votes, 2nd place for polish, and 3rd place for both audio and journal.

Assembly’07 is over. I held a seminar presentation there about Immediate Mode Graphical User Interfaces (IMGUI for short), together with Jari Komppa. You can check out the slides.

With XMunkki I once again created a 4 KB intro, Rose Shank (download Windows zip). What’s special about the creation is the fact that it was created in a custom language which uses LISP syntax (Lisp-ahtava aka IL4). The code is compiled into a custom minimal bytecode and a VM for that particular case. Respect to XMunkki – he is the brains behind that nice little system which we have talked about for some years, and he finally got around to implementing it!

If you hadn’t heard yet, I recently also quit working for my previous employer Sulake Corporation and co-founded Secret Exit Ltd together with Jani Kahrama. We created a prototype of one of our game concepts for the Assembly Game Development competition. Cinnamon Beats took the 3rd place although it’s still in pre-alpha and we have received many positive comments about the game.

Update: Sources for Rose Shank are available.
You can also view a YouTube video of it!

With my friend XMunkki we decided to release the source code to Andromedary, our 4 KB intro which came to 2nd place in Assembly’2006 event. Download it now and don’t forget to check out other 4 KB development resources in the IN4K site.