Features - RiverMan Media

Practical Tips for Small Team Game Development

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:34:49 +0000

Last week I gave a talk to the Northern Arizona University ACM chapter on my experiences developing games with a small team. The presentation is geared toward small, independent, teams, but I hope it will be valuable to anyone interested in creating games! You can download the presentation in PowerPoint or PDF format:

PowerPoint: small_team_gamedev_riverman.ppt
PDF: small_team_gamedev_riverman.pdf

Digital Color Mixing Exercise

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:53:19 +0000

One of the toughest aspects of creating digital art is grasping how computers produce different colors. Mixing red, green, and blue light is quite different than mixing colors of paint. However, choosing colors via RGB values is fundamental to working digitally.

This exercise will help you intuitively feel how red, green, and blue light combine to create the entire gamut of visible colors. We will also explore the opposite of additive RGB color mixing: subtractive CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow) color synthesis.

Photoshop Tip: Get rid of ghost outlines around sprites

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:43:26 +0000

There’s a nasty little problem that happens when you use hardware-accelerated textures to render sprites in a 2D game. The edges of your sprites, which look nice and clean in Photoshop, take on unsightly “ghost” outlines when the sprites are scaled, rotated, or drawn at non-integer coordinates. The outlines are fuzzy, blink in and out, and are painfully distracting! I ran into this problem in our first game, Cash Cow, and only now have I found a consistent way to fix it.

Chrono Trigger DS: Completionist Secrets

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:57:12 +0000

I love Chrono Trigger, and for the past couple months I've been playing a ton of Chrono Trigger on the DS. This page is all about the secrets that only a completionist has the drive to find. It's a work in progress, and I'll be adding to it as I come up with more interesting things to report. I'll also answer any Chrono Trigger questions here.
Latest Update: Lord of the Dance

MadStone Postmortem on Gamasutra

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:33:14 +0000

Gamasutra, one of the web's leading game development sites, just published our MadStone postmortem. Check it out here. This article, written by yours truly, Jacob Stevens, is a brutally honest analysis of what went right and what went wrong during MadStone's development and marketing process. Whether you're a game developer or not, I think this will be an interesting read!

Read the MadStone postmortem

Take the MadStone Savant Challenge!

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 02:12:45 +0000

The creators of MadStone want to put your skills to the test. Now that MadStone has been out a couple of weeks, we would like to challenge our fans to complete MadStone on the hardest difficulty: The hidden Savant mode. If you are able to beat the 1-Player game on Savant Mode, we will immortalize your name and list your score on our Top Players Board. But that's not all. The first twenty players to submit their scores will win 2000 Wii Points™ (US and Canada residents only). And last but not least, one of these twenty players will have their likeness included as a character in RiverMan Media's next game! That's right, YOU could be in our next WiiWare™ game!

MadStone has Arrived!

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:01:34 +0000

Listen well! We are thrilled to announce that MadStone is available on Wii Shop Channel™ for a price of 800 Wii Points™! It is a dream come true for us to publish a game on a Nintendo system. We're incredibly grateful for the support that the press, Nintendo, and most importantly, our fans, have given us over the last year. Check out the MadStone page for screenshots, info, videos, and links to our exclusive strategy guide and behind-the-scenes articles.

PS: Stay tuned for the announcement of our next WiiWare™ game. RiverMan Media is about to set out on our most adventuresome quest yet.

Nintendo trademarks used under license. WiiWare is available only through the Wii console.

Object Oriented Game Programming: The Scripted Event System

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:37:18 +0000

The Scripted Event System has saved me more time than any other idea I've ever had as a game programmer. We use it everywhere. It controls cinemas, runs AIs, executes visual effects, creates complicated character animations, and much more. By itself, it is a powerful and flexible system, but its true strength comes from how it works in conjunction with the Behavior System and Robot Functions.

MadStone: The Official Strategy Guide

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:01:32 +0000

Welcome to the Official MadStone Strategy Guide! If you're looking for advice on how to improve your MadStone skills, or if you're just interested in how the game plays, you've come to the right place.

Programming MadStone: Drawing a Wall of Blocks

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:35:38 +0000

Early on in the development of MadStone, we thought it would be cool if the play field looked like a castle wall made of stone blocks. There should be blocks of different sizes and shapes, and all of the blocks should look like they fit together, no matter what shape the overall structure took on.

Sounds easy enough, right? If MadStone was built in a 3d engine, this would have been done for us, but MadStone is entirely a 2D game. The challenge here was making a set of completely 2d blocks look like they fit together in 3 dimensions.