Procedural Content

Despite being in an almighty swirling shitstorm of work right now, I've somehow persuaded myself that it would be a good idea to enter the competition over at The Independent Gaming Source, where they're calling for games which have procedurally-generated content. I dunno - I must be the eye of the storm or something.

Anyway, I spent a happy morning last weekend beavering away on the laptop in the sunshine, and got a swirling-circle-cloud-thing going for a little pixel dude to leap around on, collecting pieces of stars.

Now I just need to add some baddies and a difficulty curve and I can get back to the other 5 projects I'm working on!

Doom 4

Another wonderful game from Pixeljam - this one is called Dino Run. The gameplay is very simple: the asteroid apocalypse has arrived in the Cretaceous Period and all the dinosaurs are fleeing the doom.

You play one such dino, and run from left to right, leaping over your fellow dinos, eating those small enough, catching rides on terradactyls and surfing the wave of molten doom.

This is pixel art turned up to the max - the gameplay is simple, but the detail and range of interactions belies any screenshot - those Pixeljam guys obviously have real love for this game. There's even multiplayer, and the ability to buff your dino's stats with points awarded from successful runs.

Things and Non-things.

This game called Karoshi, where you have to kill your little platform jumpin' guy on every level is great fun. Play it!

Gametap have an article titled 'Indie Games Blowout 08' that looks worth a look. Read it!

My friend Caroline has a fantastic new blog about useability which I hope to contributing to soon. Laugh at it!

I'm alive and well and beavering away on a number of projects which will see the light of day at some point so help me.

Lovely animation

Note to self: study this video closely before iterating the tree code from Flora. The musician is someone called Josh Pyke - who I've never heard of - and the artist is James Gulliver Hancock.





(Via drawn, as so many things seem to be these days).

You Have to Burn the Rope

Postmodern video games! More of them please!

This game is inspired by Clockwork Orange, Castlevania, that article in the latest issue of Edge about Boss Battles, and Portal.



It's here. Huge investment of time not required.

Gymnast

Had a great meeting last night about a new collaborative project with Daniel. All the really high level things have been thrashed out, and it looks like there will be enough overlap with Hohokum that I can reuse a lot of the code, which should mean we can concentrate on some interesting gameplay and visual treatments.

On that subject, a playable version of Hoho is now long overdue - I just need the time to bash out a string of small levels that introduct all the basic concepts. They're mostly all designed in my head even! It won't be this weekend though - the beta for Flora is next week and I'm going to Olympic Studios to record some songs with the Cock on sunday.

Once I stop being so busy, I can't wait to check out this game by Walaber - the JelloCar dude. I'll be interested to see how such complex motions have been mapped to the two analogue sticks..



Gymnast - launch trailer from Walaber on Vimeo.

I'm in a Wide Open Space

Thinking about ideas for a forthcoming collaboration with a friend of mine reminded me of an old game I remembered fondly, despite having never played..

Back when I was 8 we had a PC XT with a couple of games that my dad brought home on 5.25" diskettes from his pals at work. We had Space Quest 3 and Police Quest and some D&D games like Hillsfar, and some free ones too, like Alley Cat (I can still remember the music!) and Montezuma's Revenge. Sometimes the majority of the fun was extracted from working out how to make them run!

Anyway, I somehow acquired a copy of an early multi-format games magazine, whose title escapes me. Even though we only had a crappy PC and my pocket money wasn't in game-buying league yet, I loved that magazine, and read and re-read it until it fell apart. One game that always stood out for me was the one below: Typhoon Thompson on the Atari ST - a computer I never owned. Something about being able to explore a big wide ocean really stuck with me, and definitely explains why I was so taken with the sailing aspect of Windwaker.

I was reminded of this game the other day - and the only words I could think of to search on were 'Atari ST, Sea Sprites' - so I was delighted to find this video:

/flounders for ideas

Bambos says:
plus he doesnt know c++ and isnt interested in learning

Ricky says:
I don't understand people who get hung up on languages

THEY'RE ALL THE SAME!
(basically)

Ricky says:
it's like saying:
"well I can ride elephants, but only if they're Asian elephants"
"I don't know how to ride those African elephants!"

Ricky says:
yes.
it's EXACTLY like that.
especially the part about the elephants.
/firm nod

Hohokum Meeting

Had a really productive meeting yesterday evening about Hohokum, with Dick and Nat - a designer at Morpheme who will be helping us with the game. In retrospect it's surprising how many things we managed to work out, especially since I wasn't sure exactly what we were aiming to achieve before we started.

It's amazing the extent to which three heads are better than one. Issues that seem intractable when you're thinking about them by yourself are solved instantly the moment you have to explain or justify your thoughts to a group. And as you think on your feet, solutions seem to come from nowhere. It's like putting the game design over a flame - the assumptions burn off the surface, and the design heats up, becoming more fluid and can be molded into a new shape.

Working with a graphic designer is interesting too. I find it allows me to decouple gameplay mechanics from their visual representation in a way that isn't so easy when I'm working solo. This means I can consider mechanics in the abstract, knowing that someone else will be worrying about to communicate them visually.

Plenty of coding to do over Easter anyway!