As a member of IGDA I was recently informed of an event in January called the Global Game Jam and I wanted to share it with you. Basically, game developers around the world meet up for an intensive, creative session to create a game from nothing but a few rules and a group of strangers. It sounds really fun and I hope to be a part of it next year.
I just wanted to quickly share this tool I found via Zach Archer’s Blog. It’s called Pixen and it’s an open-source Mac based pixel editing tool. The interface is familiar enough - kinda like Photoshop but designed specifically to deal with pixel art. I found it very useful. If you need 8 or 16-bit art for a game or something, give it a shot.
ECMA script 4 (or 3.1) and OpenGL 3.
I may be in the (rare?) position of being highly interested in two disparate technologies. The first being an online scripting language standard governed by ECMA (used in Javascript & Actionscript). The second, an open standard for real-time rendering governed by the Khronos Group (OpenGL). In recent days these two languages have faced most unfortunate developments. First the ECMA script 4…
One of the new features in KitchenSync 1.5 is the ability to tween animations on a MovieClip’s timeline… and I’m not just talking about gotoAndPlay(), I’m talking about controlling the starting and stopping points, speed, and easing functions of an animation on the timeline with code. It does this by incrementally controlling the current frame number of the MovieClip using a KSTween and a special ITweenTarget (a class used to control the values of an object) called TimelineController.
Take this FLA animation.
As you can see, there is a simple animation using a guide layer and labels on the key frames.
Like puyo puyo + world of goo + puzzle bobble
TIP: this actually broke Firefox for me but worked in Safari.
I’m not sure where the name came from but Foam is a very easy to use, open-source, AS3, 2-D rigid body physics engine created by our very own Drew Cummins. I’ve been using it for an upcoming video game project that I’m doing and I think it’s pretty special. So special, in fact, that I became a contributor to the project.
Foam offers a fairly straightforward way to create a physics simulation model by assigning forces to rigid bodies and optionally, render it to the screen. Look at Drew’s site for more information and demos.
Greetings from GDC ‘08. I’m here in S.F. getting the scoop on the game industry first hand. So far there has been some pretty exciting things and I’ve been totally overwhelmed by the sheer size of the industry.
One of the most interesting things that I saw today was the Independent Game Design Competition. Here were a few of my favorites from the competition finalists.
In Flipside, you play an escaped mental patient with bipolar disorder. You start out a happy-go-lucky person in a brightly lit field
but at any time, you can let your dark side show and flip the screen into a nightmarish version of reality. You have different abilities depending on which world you’re in so you’ll need to go through both modes to beat each level. The amazing visuals for this featured a lot of DIY-looking textures such as cardboard and the character really looks like a paper doll.
At first glance, Fez is a classic 8-Bit, 2-D platformer with incredibly cute graphics. Then the camera flips around and you realize that your character is actually in a 3-D space. Well, mostly. Your character only interacts with the environment in a two dimensional way so using the depth-squashing adds a puzzle-like element to the gameplay.
Pay special attention to the faux-Engrish used in the dialog.
In world of Goo, you control a colony of crude oil-like creatures who are able to stretch themselves into complicated structures. The goal of the game is to engineer a structurally sound scaffolding to move your colony to a destination. The gameplay is quite a lot like Stick Remover but in reverse.
Crayon Physics Deluxe is a very simple yet very expressive game. The goal is to move a ball to a target across the screen and all you have to work with is a crayon. All you do is draw something with your crayon and it becomes an object with physical properties. The genius thing is that there are as many ways to get the ball to the goal as you can think of.
Tomorrow morning I’m off to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference! It’s very exciting! If you’re going too, send me an email and let’s meet up there. Here’s what I look like:
Feliz Día Del Amor, Niños,
Why not try out an oldie but a goodie! Kid Cupid is a game I worked on a few years back while I was working with Domani Studios. The idea is that you’re the ‘real’ cupid who’s fending off the incoming impostor cupids. The motivation for the art style was that you’re playing the fantasy of a 3rd grade kid who was flicking candy hearts over his valentine cards on his desk at school.
Surprisingly, Kid Cupid is still fun 3 years later.
