2009-08-12

My stuff for Assembly 2009

4K intros for Asm09
Last week I attended the Assembly’09 summer event, like I have done every year since 1992. Although this time I didn’t make a game and didn’t hold a seminar session, I still contributed in the 4K intro competition… twice, actually.

Again I worked with XMunkki on an intro called Dream Creditor, which ended up at the fourth place in the competition (Download Windows zip / YouTube video). Additionally I made a tongue-in-cheek-production with little marching elephants called Irrelephant. Audience seemed to like it a lot so it placed on the 3rd place! (Download Windows zip / YouTube video). You can probably also easily spot that my little 2D walker prototype (from my previous post) ended up as part of this production.

2009-07-30

Simple 2D walker prototyping

Like I said, I’d post a bit about some prototyping. Nowadays I’m usually using Processing for small prototypes. Some years ago I used to use EVALDRAW for little algorithmic tests. I love it for the immediate feedback when working with it, and also the different modes it provides.

But after I started to like more the whole concept of isolated first-stage prototypes, I felt EVALDRAW wasn’t just enough for all of my needs. After pondering with some alternatives I ended up “standardizing” on Processing, although it would still have a lot to learn from EVALDRAW. :-) However the one cool thing with Processing is that you can export your creation to be a stand-alone mini-app or even to a web page. As long as you have installed Java.

Lately when working with some ideas for a platformer game, I wanted to make some tests for a “walker”. To be exact, the simple kind which would just use some carefully chosen formulas like sine curves to move feet and body.
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2009-07-28

Skipping Asm’09 GameDev compo

Not a game
I have attended the Assembly event every year starting from 1992. Starting from 2002 they have also arranged a game development competition. I have participated in that compo every year – my first one there was Stair Dismount™ (which was also the winning game).

However, this year I won’t be taking part. I actually have been churning out code for a week or two for an entry. But the submission deadline was on last Sunday and I just didn’t have enough of anything playable to have a first submission… Updates are allowed, so it wouldn’t have been an issue to submit something half-finished, but I was far from that.

I have one long-standing idea for a nice additive feature to a normal side-scrolling platformer, which is what I had in mind. That’ll wait for another time. On the image right you can see a small glimpse of the test code I made – although the image doesn’t really tell anything. Even the tile graphics are taken from free graphics sets of Lost Garden (thanks!). But I’ll probably post a bit more about my prototyping tests later, as I had fun time making some new stuff as well as polishing some old code.

PS. For a few years I have also held seminars at the event. This year I was asked to talk about iPhone and our company experiences, but I felt I’m not the right guy to have that talk so I passed on the opportunity. I recommend you go and listen to scoopr‘s iPhone development talk (he’s my colleague).

2009-07-22

Advancing Wall of Doom

Tsunami Warrior paper prototyping
Back in April I took part in the 14th Ludum Dare 48 hour game development compo, and the theme was “Advancing Wall of Doom”. I finally got around to writing about it to here as well.

Read on more from the game page. Also the source code is there for peeking.