My Minions

Download
Windows (2 MB)
Linux, Slackware 64 build (3.4 MB)

Instructions
Build a pathway and then place objects or release minions on it, everything must be on a path. Place musical objects or make the minions turn or split to make sound and create some music. Or you can create a digital circuit and make it do something fun.

Controls
Mouse Left - Place an object
1 - Toggle up through objects
2 - Toggle down through objects
Space - Release a minion
K - Kill all minions

P - Pause
Left Shift - Increase speed
Left Ctrl - Decrease speed

L - Load map
S - Save map

F1 - Console, nothin fun :(
F10 - Exit the game

Now beware, I didn't have the time or energy to create a full blown level saving, so it will always use "level.dat" in bin as it's save file. It will overwrite and it will do so without asking.

Source
https://github.com/treeman/My-Minions

If you want to build it yourself it depends on: lua, boost and sfml.

I will make a formal post and all that jaz when I wake up tomorrow, or maybe I'll sleep the whole day... Nah not really, but at least a while.

Here's my entry btw, didn't turn out the way I wanted it to but in the end I'm quite satisfied. There are a ton of possibilities for it though.

Oh well. Nap time!

I want to make games again..

I can't promise a new game this weekend but I think I might have the time for some game creation on friday, saturday and sunday evening/night so I just might. The last time I even had a massage course the whole day on sunday/saturday so I should be fine.

This time I also think I can come up with some more sound and music compared to the last time (where I only had two thuds!). I got LMMS, a free music creation program. I really suck at making music though lol.

I haven't made a game since I switched to Slackware either, luckily SFML is cross platform. I've also got my old 7days library, my collection of old game creating codebase which I was pretty proud of for a while.

For graphics I think I'm aiming for some pixelated cool stuff with mtPaint. Pixelated stuff looks awesome, if you're good at it, and I'd like to make something similar.. At least a little similar.

Unreleased fun pixel graphics

So for a quick recap, if I'm going to make a game again this is what I'm going to use:

1. LMMS for music
2. SFML as the core game library (graphics, sound and input)
3. 7days library for useful stuff
4. mtPaint for pixel graphics

As usual it'll be made in C++ (I might do something else another time) and I'll probably listen to Raubtier, Sarah Brightman, Hans Zimmer and some classical composers (Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi etc).

I'm home in Övertorneå again and it's fairly chill here. It's pretty nice to eat food someone else has made, and I don't have to think about holding the apartment afloat. Admittedly Veronica is a great help (I might actually be the help).

I've been meaning to program a bit but I've only done it a little, I've been watching starcraft and just chillin' for the main part.

I'll be sure to update a bit better for you mr. Blog.

Glasses: makes the cool cooler

I took home three frames I think and tried them out and I settled some I thought were fairly good looking, nothing special mind you but at least they didn't look horrible on me. Then I went back and I settled on the semi-expensive ones and then I waited. And waited. Then I went back and asked but the glasses didn't fit into the price class I'd chosen, something about the frames being too bent, so I had to pay some more.

Then I waited again, and a little bit more... until I called once more, now I was getting pretty pissed, but they should be here this Friday. They called on Thursday and finally I had them! It's funny, I was going to demand some discount but even the pricier glasses didn't fit and so I got some really expensive ones. Fair enough I thought and so I left.

The first few days were pretty disoriented, but man oh man what a difference. It's funny how you don't realize how bad your sight is before you get a pair of glasses and that really fit me well. Suddenly I didn't have to stick my nose into the screen to see the text and today I was at school the whole day! Sure I'm a bit lazy sometimes but I also couldn't concentrate like this before.

Life is good.

So now I'm a bit worried, luckily not as much as my girlfriend, and what's the cause of this? The lack of water is probably the source of 90% of my headaches but now when I drink and drink it only eases of a bit and then it's back. Painkillers help a bit but I don't want to turn into a junkie just to be able to act normally.

Luckily I think I've found the reason, but sadly it's not the very best one. I think I need glasses. I squint all the time in front of the computer and I'm getting headaches when I'm reading. So this Friday it's judgement day. I dunno what I'm hoping for, if it's glasses then fine at least it should be better, but if it's not then it might be a bigger problem somewhere.

Me of tomorrow?

And if that wasn't enough, my long lost Modern Perl is finally here! I've skimmed a little and boy I think I'm going to like this one. I'm soon up to two digits with my programming books and I really do like them. Even if I'm not doing anything in that particular language it's still fun to just read about. There's always something you'll learn and even if not I still find it soothing.

Reading books, threads, blog posts or random forum rants/wars about programming is sometimes coffee for my brain (I don't actually drink coffee or anything with caffeine. I'm almost feeling like an endangered programming species).

If the book is actually worth reading we'll see and I'll report back when I've gone through it.

Now I haven't really spent a lot of time with the things I've been focusing on, but I've been a whole lot calmer and not as stressed up as before. So I think it's good for me.

This week I'm gonna focus on something I haven't really done so much, namely programming. The little I've done is some stuff for school and it's fun and all, but it's not really the same as working on your own project. Now I think I'll try to complete the assignments for the course, but that's not really a priority and if it's even a little bit stressful then I'll cut back on it. We've got plenty of time left and it's not worth it to get stressed by something like that.

No I'll focus on Perl (my new Perl book should arrive this week) and making something fun: an IRC-bot. A simple bot isn't much of a challange so I need to add some cool functions to it. I'm really annoyed that a friend of mine is always ahead of the latest manga releases so I think I'll automate that one. I've actually already made one in both Perl and lua, but they're pretty damn bad so this time I'll make it right. Naturally I've got a ton of other stuff to add but we'll see where we end up.

The point isn't to make a bot with a million features, but to start hacking on something fun. Hell I'd be happy if I just stick to the new book and learn Perl a bit.

The thing is that I need to work at school too and everyone there use emacs. Emacs is in many ways similar to vim, but they're a bit like bitter competitors and if you're a vim user, like me, then you're not an emacs user and vice versa. Also I haven't gotten vim to work as I want to at school, meaning it doesn't work exactly like I'm used to (I'm quite picky with that). So what I've done up until now is that I've been working from home and trying to avoid emacs as much as humanly possible.

It's been working okay so far, but I don't think it will for much longer. When we're declaring our labs our teachers use emacs, when I need to collaborate with other students then they most likely will be using emacs and when we have our exam. It was pretty ridiculous yesterday when we had to show our lab and I got really, really nervous on how to open multiple files in emacs... It feels like something I should be able to do in my sleep and if there's anything like a nerd ranking somewhere I think I just hit rock bottom.

No this shouldn't be allowed to continue so now I'm going to give emacs a try. I doubt that it'll replace vim but still I think it's quite nice. In theory it should be just as nice as vim, with really fast code editing once you get used to it. Here's a better comparison of the two. I guess I just don't like the idea of having to climb another intimidating learning curve.

But the past is the past and this week I'm going to be study focused. Not that I need to study, but I really need to rework my study technique. I've been going on like a classical student, in the bad sense, by skipping class and getting super stressed when the tests and deadlines are over me. Somehow you manage with some last-minute studying and all is well.

Well not really. I already have a bad stomach and stress makes it a lot worse. Even if I didn't have this problem stress is never good, especially not when you need to take this test or finish this assignment for tomorrow. It screws with my health, my study results and it intrudes on my free time far too much I'd say.

This is when I dusted an old bookmark I found a long time ago: Study Hacks. It's some guy who writes about studying and study technique and he's got some pretty good ideas. This is what I'll focus on this week: to change my routines and take control over my studies and don't let them control me.

Here's a little rundown of the main principles from Study Hacks as I understand them;

Do fewer things
Sure it makes sense. When I signed up for an extra course last year I felt pretty damn stressed and I couldn't really focus on my other courses knowing I had this extra class I missed to catch up with. It was even on my mind when I tried to do other things and when I got my stumach problems I decided to drop it. That was seriously a pretty damn good decision: I felt a lot better with it gone.

Do them better
Also what are good grades? They should show your skill but if they're good they should also impress. And what are you most impressed by? Someone with straight-A or someone who's read 40 points more but with slightly worse grades? I think we're more impressed by deep knowledge in a smaller area (better grades in fewer courses) than by someone who's a know-it-all but specialist-in-nothing. Maybe it's a good idea to focus on getting really good grades instead of trying to do too much at once and risk to spread out too much?

Know why you're doing them
Lastly it makes sense why you should know why your study technique works (or doesn't). So we can change and adapt. After all what is the definition of Insanity?

"Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results" - Albert Einstein

It's funny how I notice all these little, syntactic similarities (haven't done anything real with the language yet so I'm a bit shallow now but whatever) from different languages. It was a long time ago I came across a language that distinguish between functions and subroutines. I think that was the case with Visual Basic, my oh so dear first language a few years ago. Might've been five years ago?

Anyway quite enough of that, I don't want to derail too much. What I really wanted to write about is when our new teacher, who by the way is completely awesome, asked us who thought they were a great programmer. Most of us laughed it off but I think there were two, maybe three, who raised their hands.

I thought about raising my hand, but who do I think are great programmers? Knuth, Thorvalds, Djikstra, Stroustrup Silverman and Carmack comes to mind. They're probably not the greatest, but they've done some really notable things. Do I think I'm at their level? What a laugable question, I'm miles away. And I'm sure there's some epic bearded fellow somewhere out there who's even higher on the programming skill ladder.

Now what is a great programmer then? I have no idea. But I do know that with all the things I don't know, I couldn't be one. Sure I've done something in about 10 different (some not so different) languages. But there are hundreds more. I've done nothing low level, I have no experience with op codes or assembly and I'm not up to date with the latest scripting languages. There are a few new interesting languages like Rust, CoffeeScript or Go which I haven't even looked at yet. Of course the number of languages you know doesn't make you great, but it just feels like I'm missing stuff.

Sure these guys could be great - who am I to say otherwise? But you'll have to wait a long time for me to spill the I'm great quote. Hell, maybe even a lifetime?

Not really so I don't work on several things at once but so I don't think about the other things too much.

This week I think I'll be focusing on drawing. I kinda like to draw and I drew a lot when I was little but then it wore off a bit, I dunno why. I think I was pretty good too, well I didn't think so then but when I look back at the drawings I'm sure I at least had something going for me.

Recently I bought the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - I'm not really sure why but so far it's been pretty darn good. Hopefully I'll have some progress, but I'm sure I'll have fun whether it's a success or not.

Of course there are some amazing stuff around and if I could get a tenth or even one percentage of his skill it'd be cool has hell!

1. I wrote a simple lua, later perl, which announced when a new day9 episode has come. Later I expanded it to search for new manga episodes, but now it's broken and unfinished.

2. In an attempt to learn Haskell I began writing a simple irc bot, but I never did come far with the language and now I'm a bit stuck. I have the bot itself working but I want to restructure it with plugins instead of hardcoding every command and I'd like to have some interactivity like saving state and fetching info from internet. But I haven't come that far and now it's on a stand-still.

3. Totally not related to the other two I want to learn how to draw. On a little whim I bought the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I was totally blown away. I was a bit sceptic at first but she's explaining everything so scientifically and the results look amazing. Almost too good to be true. But as always I started but I'm not there yet, in fact a pretty long way from finished.

4. Back to the programming business. I'd like to update the backend of this site, but to be fair it's not that important. Just something that'd be nice to do.

5. What's worse is my game projects. What projects you ask? Well I started a few much bigger games this time and they have just faded away from my brain little by little and now I'm not that into them. I mean the ideas are amazing, but I haven't done anything with them.

The issue here I think is that I'm trying to do far too many things at once. Back when I wrote all my experimental games I didn't have these many things going on. In fact they were the only thing on my mind - you know the thing you think about when you're in the shower or before you go to sleep. Hell I've even woken up, all sweaty, and had a solution but the very problem I had struggled all day with!

Paul Graham wrote a nice article about this a while ago. He's more focused on startups of course but the core of the article very much applies to me. I'm not keeping the right idea on the top of my mind, instead I think it's changing - I'm doing too many things at once. One time I'm focused on say learning Haskell but the next day, or even the very same night I'm all wound up about a game I'd like to make! How will I ever get things done if I'm floating around like that?

Of course Paul points out that I'm in good company, even Newton fell into this trap and I have a feeling many more have this problem.

2010 Geek Achievements

1. Wrote a few games earlier this year;
   1. The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros
   2. A Geek Valentine
   3. Beebop The Island Hopper
   4. Where's Teddy?
2. Updated this site a bit.
3. In the process I learned a lot of PHP, Javascript, mysql and design. Fun and useful.
4. Switched to Slackware which I like a ton better than Ubuntu.
5. Learned a lot more linux. Thanks Slackware.
6. Learned a lot more git.
7. Learned a lot more vim.
8. Tried out and configured uzbl which I still use.
9. Learned a bit of Haskell.
10. Tried out Perl a bit.
11. Learned a lot more Lisp.
12. Switched to zsh. It's fine after a bit of config
13. Rebuilt a custom Kernel a few times, some failures but learned a lot. And got starcraft 2 to work!
14. Read a lot. This years high were One Piece and Jefferey Deaver. Real World Haskell scores the highest Geek score.

2010 Non-Geek Achievements

1. Moved to Linköping with my girlfriend Veronica and I didn't just survive but I also liked it!
2. Enrolled in a Linköpings University in Computer Science. We'll see if it'll get geeky later, atm it's a breeze but we have a ton of seemingly fun courses to go.
3. Took a massage course.
4. Learned how to cook more than one dish.
5. Did the dishes, expertly maneuvered our vacuum cleaner and did the laundry. More than once!
6. Started Taekwondo and after a few months of hard work I even got a yellow stripe for my white belt!

2010 Failures

1. Didn't produce enough games.
2. Didn't write enough code.
3. Got worse in my stumach towards the end of the year. Too stressed and not enough regular meals I guess.
4. Didn't blog enough. Sorry :(

Plans for 2011

1. Get good results in school.
2. Make more games.
3. Code more!
4. Blog more!
5. Learn more Haskell (again). This time continue with the small irc bot I'm writing.
6. Learn a few more languages and expand my knowledge. Maybe some low level stuff with C or assembly? Or some more higher level?
7. Get a better sense of algorithms.
8. Try to be a bit more social
9. Get a new belt in Taekwondo.
10. Be a bit more disciplined with training, coding and school.
11. Loosen up a bit more so the stumach won't mess anymore.
12. Last but not least, keep Veronica happy and help around at home.

I thought I didn't do anything this year I guess it's been a productive year anyway. But in 2011 I think I'll do a lot more still.

But it's funny - yesterday when I went down to check on him he was playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3!

One of my absolute favourite games (the whole series in fact) and that got me all nostalgic again. Tycoon games are so good; SimCity, Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Evil Genius and more! I'm not surprised to see him playing this old game, I replay these games myself from time to time. I'm almost through Theme Hospital for the fifth time or something. You just don't seem to get tired of them you know.

Of course I'd like to make my own tycoon game. Not entirely unlike Jonas IceCream Stand but with actual building of course. I wonder how it'd look like though.

evil genius' traps/base planning + rollercoasters + theme hospital's hilarity + simcity's economy = ?

The best of the best games should make something good. That's only a theory though...

Speaking about math then I took an extra course, mathematical statistics or something funky like that but meh it wasn't all I thought it'd be. In fact it was almost a bit boring and when I got problems with my stumach again (dunno why, but I think it has to do with stress or my irregular eating patterns, or both) so I kinda dropped it. But nothing's really missed: we're gonna have something similar later on anyway.

Now I haven't made anything game related in a while which sucks. A month ago or something I was poking at some prototype but it hasn't gotten anywhere yet. I was going to enter ludum dare 19 but then I kinda just didn't, and now it's too late to do anything. And I have like a thousand ideas I'd like to do, but I don't seem to have done anything.

Argh!

And then there's my other programming interests of course. I've been poking at Haskell a few months ago but now I actually want to learn the damn language and the best way to do that is to make something real from scratch, so I've started my own (atm extremely simple) irc bot. Then I've bought the classical K&R C book and some book about Erlang and I'd like to get going with those too.

Add to that we're gonna do Ada in school after christmas which could be pretty darn fun too. There's surely not a shortage of stuff to at least!

There are still a few homework things I need to do from time to time, but those are often either math or lisp which are pretty fun so no harm has been done to me yet.

I should really begin with the game making again now when my schedual is opening up a bit.

A secret preview of my latest game project.

I'm now a pretty happy student at Linköpings university and I'm reading something similar to Computer Science or Computer engineering, but I guess it'll become whatever you make it to be. For starters we're reading a bit math and a bit common lisp, which is fun but hopefully this is just the beginning.

Me and Veronica are now living in a fairly nice apartment and I think I've increased my cooking skills a few magnitudes since I got here. Admittedly that's not a too big of an accomplishment...

I haven't had any time, or energy, to focus on game development. There are a few things I'd like to do but we'll see what happens. My friend on the other hand has been productive and he has just finished one of his big game projects: Hochstapler.

Hochstapler, the epic production from Gridlock Games

It's a really fun game with some inspiration from the old commodore and I really recommend you to give it a try. The only downside is of course that I just can't beat his highscore!

Where's Teddy?

Download
Where's Teddy? (6.2 MB)

How to Play
Your mission is to find teddy and his teddybear friends. The problem is that it's dark and it's really hard to find them if you can't see where you're going but thankfully you have a candle with you and if you're lucky you can stumble on more candles to keep you from going completely dark.

Controls
Move with Arrow Keys
Switch and light candles with Space
Next Level: N
Previous Level: P
Reset Level: R
Console: F1

Credits
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Music: Joshua Holtz - Sounds of Insects
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/A-Game

1. Introduction
2. Analysis
   1. Actions and confirmation
   2. Varying the mechanics
   3. Consequences of the rules
   4. Mods
3. Conclusion
4. References

Original essay here.

Introduction

This is the second essay for the course Game Design and this thime I will be analysing the game World of Goo a bit.

The first level

The game is very simple. You begin with a structure and a few Goo balls, the charming balls bobbing around there, which you can drag and drop to build on the structure. Your goal is to reach the pipe and it will suck in the surviving Goo balls and you need to collect a certain amount of balls, in this case at least 4. All you ever use is your mouse and one button to pick up and place the balls.

A step by step of the core mechanics

The beginning levels are very easy but it will get increasingly harder and you have to plan your building so you don't use up too many Goo balls.

But as it's a physics game you will also have to think about gravity so your tower won't topple over and crash, which will happen to you a lot in the later levels.

Oh noes my bridge is collapsing!

That's about the whole game concept right there; build structures to reach the pipe but use so few balls, or building blocks, as you can. You might think that it's a shallow game with doing the same thing over and over – but you couldn't be more wrong, there are a lot of different Goo balls to play around with; sticky balls, dangling balls, exploding balls, shooting balls, removable balls and more which will force you to change your build process in different directions. The level design is simply fantastic and it challenges your constructions and it makes the game very varied.

The levels are both fun and diverse

The game which inspired World of Goo, namely Tower of Goo was an experimental one week, one person game with the aim of simply building a high tower and you can still do that in World of Goo in a sandbox mode and you can compete online on who makes the highest tower.

The level chooser screen, be proud of those flags!

If you like challenges there's more to do: for every level there's this extra hard ending criteria – a challenge – for you to get gray hairs from. There's time challenges, constraints on number of moves and a minimum of balls collected and some of them are extremely though. If you're successful you'll get a nice little flag on the level chooser screen.

The game is quite large with 5 different chapters and there's around 10 levels each. Every chapter has it's own theme and they vary quite a lot; there's focus on explosions, balloons and there's even Goo balls you can shoot! This gives the game fairly long but it manages to stay fresh all the way through.

The 5 chapters + sandbox (Tower of Goo) is the World of Goo

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Analysis

1. Actions and confirmation
2. Varying the mechanics
3. Consequences of the rules
4. Mods

Actions and confirmation

One of the things World of Goo does really well is to communicate to the player. When a first time player loads the first level it's almost always clear what to do, you have this helpful sign showing your first move (drop a goo ball here) and you have this curious looking pipe just above you and not much else to distract you. After each level you get a score screen on how you did and both the level and world screen are helpfully showing your progress and what to do next. But to me the most impressive thing is how your actions are handled.

When you hover your cursor over moving Goo balls or removable joints you'll get a clear marker around the selected ball and it'll stop and give you a cute look just to show you 'Hey! It's me you wanna pick up!'. Likewise when you have a ball selected and you're moving it around for a good spot you'll get a small notion of where it's going to connect and always you have a nice big clear marker on where your cursor is.

Selecting, building, shooting and moving

Visual confirmation in all honor but what really makes actions clear is the sounds. For every Goo ball hovered over and every joint constructed there's a short confirmation of your action and for every dead Goo and every block crashed there's an unique sound to let you know that something bad happened here in your little world. Every Goo that go down the pipe will emit a happy little laugh and you just love the hear that extra peculiar laugh which will tell you if you did complete the extra level challenge.

I didn't find any sound or visual effect for when your action fails, for example there were no error sound when trying to click in an empty space and the mouse pointer never acknowledged my clicks if they weren't valid. But you can say that they aren't necessary, because for every valid action and for every click you can make, where something actually happens, there's always a confirmation sound and that is enough to let you know that something was successful and unsuccessful.

Although simple the visual and auditive feedback works absolutely wonderful and I never had to wonder if my actions were registered, it felt like they always were and if things didn't work as I wanted to I realized pretty quick that I was doing something wrong.

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Varying the mechanics

The concept of the whole game is really quite simple, create structures with drag n' drop Goo balls, add in some simple physics and you're done. It's amazing how captivating something simple as this can be and I believe it has a lot to do with the small incremental changes the game makes all the time.

One thing the game does is introduce new Goo balls all the time; balls you can remove multiple times force you to climb and restructure, balloon Goos create interesting aerial acrobatics and a sticky Goo makes the structure mobile.

Lifting off and climbing is possible thanks to different Goo balls

Even Goo's with minor changes like industrial Goo which you can't control or dangling Goo which will only dangle down gives a lot of depth to the game thanks to the great level design.

There are lot's and lot's of levels which change the way you play

It's not just build straight up; it's build around, use balloons to topple the tower from island to island and it's surprising how hard it is to build a tower in water or in a tumbler, you really have to stop and think or else it won't work. The game is constantly varying it's mechanics and you have to change with it, you have to evolve to keep up.

Perhaps the most radical experiment is the fourth chapter. We get new Goo's that shoot! This is different from our regular balls that we can move around freely and they usually build or attach when we release them but these launch themselves when we drag n drop them. It's the only way we can move them around and with one type we get to shoot and build.

Shooting Goo?

Still staying true to the basic mechanics, select ball, drag n drop for effect with some physics and this could easily have been a game of it's own.

Going the other way around World of Goo also experiments with the drag n' drop of Goo. They introduce block Goo which is immobile and it doesn't walk around your structure like the other Goo and the only way you can move, the only way you can interact with them is to move them around and use them to block and for support or just to create a very unstable tower.

Block Goo; immobile and blocky but yet they manage to add something to the game

All in all World of Goo uses their simple core concept to it's limit with a ton of variation and experimentation and it makes the game feel novel all the way through those 50+ levels.

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Consequences of the rules

World of Goo is a physics based game; when building structures you need to compensate against gravity so your tower won't collapse and you need to make sure your structure has enough joints so it can withstand tension and compression. Physics games are hard to create, you can't rely on a perfect representation as it's too hard to simulate perfectly and there are many edge cases you'll have to handle.

You can for example make it easier through this level if you force your structure into the wall and this “break” it. In real life a structure like this would completely break but in the game that doesn't happen, the joints simply turn inwards and now you have a nice and short structure to move around.

Small structures are easier to move around

This happens because in the rules you can only break a structure if you either drop it into the ocean or on spikes, and loose them forever, or if you connect with a special construction destroying cogs. Here we exceed the tension and the compression and instead of breaking we get our joints twisted.

You even have to abuse the rules because the extra hard level goals can't be beat otherwise. I'm sure the creators chose to incorporate the bugs into the game and they even call them features in a way to create bigger challenges in the extra level requirements.

Some core game rules abuse

The left picture:
In World of Goo in some levels there are sleeping goo balls which you can't get control of if you don't get your construction close enough. But you can pick up and move around the balls and even throw them and if you do you can actually make the sleeping balls bounce around too. If you throw at the right angle you can bounce the sleeping balls close enough your structure and they'll wake up.

The middle picture:
Your ultimate goal is the pipe and it will start sucking in your goo balls if you get your construction close. But if you have the green goo balls which you can remove from the structure you can get a small structure hanging from the pipe's suction! Then you proceed to move the rest of the goo balls freely onto the structure and you will get a lot more balls collected. It's so good you can actually get every goo ball, except one, if you do this trick. Incidentally the creators noticed this bug, or feature, when testing and so they set the extra level goal to precisely one less than your total balls.

The right picture:
In a level there's a huge head which hangs from a small hook. When you've exploded the head you can get the hook to attach to the wall by throwing goo balls at your dangling structure. It will then connect to the wall because it doesn't make any distinction to exploding heads or walls, it just sticks to it.

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Mods

The game is more or less a closed system but if you're interested it isn't too hard to create new levels, alter the online scoreboard (which has happened a lot) or even add new Goo balls. The site goofans.com is a dedicated site which collects fan-made levels and mods.

Colorful balloons and a new Christmas level

There's even a tool, GooTool, which is a tool which let's you manage your installed mods, manage your profile stats, general options like screen resolution and even add in your own language.

These changes, these mods, are mainly geared towards resources and not the actual game rules. It is possible to change them but then you more or less have to rewrite and mod the game on assembly level. This could be said about every computer game but it's really hard and time consuming to do, but it sure is possible.

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Conclusion

I think World of Goo is an excellent game and there are so many things it does right. The game is good about telling you what to do and when you've done something good by using both visuals and sound effects. The game basic foundation of the game is really quite simple but they manage to create a lot of diversity and this fresh feel throughout the whole game by introducing small, and big, variations to the core mechanics.

The simple rules will create a few bugs and surprising side effects but they turn it around and they even call them features when they force you to use them if you want to complete the extra hard level requirements.

There are a few mods and new levels out there if you hunger for more and with a little effort you can create your own, even if most of the game rules are quite inaccessible.

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References

Salen & Zimmerman, 2004. Rules of Play. The MIT Press.

http://2dboy.com/
http://www.worldofgoo.com/

http://goofans.com/
http://goofans.com/gootool/about
Accessed may 1st

I used a sort of "notes in the basket" approach where you placed some notes with words in a basket and randomly drew two and then you should come up with something with the two words. But I'm too lazy to write a lot of notes and it's pretty damn hard to come up with a lot of good words too, so I tried to automate the process.

I searched for some random words and found this site: http://www.wordswarm.net/ and I pulled out a few pages and got a few thousand words. Then I made a very simple tool which randomly combines two lines from a file and creates a sentence, much like the you would with the notes but this is just so much faster. Granted I had a lot of shitty words and I got a lot of garbage lines but I could go through so many lines it was a very simple task to get these 50 one-lined game ideas.

These are not fully fledged game ideas, but merely seeds from which you could grow a game.

• Pensionere wheelchair race
• Fish and surf on the fish
• Deep sun exploration
• VimCity - A simcity but with ascii chars which will teach you vim
• Crazy units RTS
• RTS with important landscapes - Destructable, things moving, rising water, paths in snow etc
• House destruction - explosions!
• Hospital creation with strange diseases you need to cure
• Create Nautilus - an underwater city creator
• Prison diner maid - give lunch to hungry prisoners
• Prison break - with stealth, create stuff with different things
• Bread seller - bread maker tycoon?
• Night debt collection hero
• Imprison Berth the jewel thief - police hunting a thief in the night/museum
• Feed azimutal, the mythic beast in the sky
• The 59th beetle-killer squads patriotic killings
• Trauma center boom
• Make mt. 63 a tourist franchise
• Chop the mighty "King's wood" from the legendary forest of death
• Untagling Sarsenet - the predecessor to skynet
• The great pie theft
• Sawyer the egoist ant
• Herbsman Abdal, the lone man growing herbs in the desert
• Carving the first images - like caveman style
• Bart the Darting hero
• Brady the Big Eater glutton - Rush into restaurants and eat everything, then split
• The struggle against Montezuma II, A mayan RTS war game
• Industrializing Cakedoom
• Mini racers the beginning: Autobahn
• Saunter on thin ice - wannabe ice princess
• Clark the Corrupt and Ruler of the Rhen - screw your inhabitants and take all the money
• A wooden submarine - the first submarine, the turtle
• Aristocrat apartment building
• Managing the missionaries hygiene
• The world's best Toasts
• The raspberry in Cosmos
• The viking slap-up
• Digging after tea
• Colorizing the world with a trumpet
• Round Rod explores Square City
• Ordering the Oranges
• Smuggling over the boarder
• Life at the Toxic Waste Dump
• Creating a Ghost Town - with real ghosts who want to live their life
• Riding a Lawnmower and killing Gremlings
• Digging gold on Mars
• The life of a Bacteria, birth, mutation and world conquering
• Put the surfing Duck
• Butler who's carrying silver

They're all from 1 to 5.

Innovation: 3.75
This is by far the most positive of the bunch and the one button timing combination worked great!

Fun: 3.29
Again a good grade and I thought the game was fun although it became really frustrating.

Theme: 3.17
The islands wasn't very prominent in the game and the game could've been about anything really, but again I'm more than happy with the grade.

Graphics: 2.54
Very simple and with some more effort it would've been better. But I'm happy, programmer graphics ftw!

Audio: 2.14
I only had two click sounds but still got fairly high. Many decided not to vote on it and I wouldn't either. They were just last minutes add-ons but good to see someone liked it.

Humor: 2.54
I didn't focus on this at all but got some decent grades from it anyway. Not sure if my graphics are that ugly.

Overall: 3.13
The most prestigious grade and it's okay. I'm absolutely happy with it, especially since my desperate hope was to get something playable out of this.

Community: 1.64
The community rating is for posts and stuff over at the Ludum Dare homepage. Sadly I didn't spend time there, almost at all, so I can't really say anything about this.

Overall I'm really happy with everything and I'm really happy with my relatively good grades.

I will do my very best to make my next game even better, but atm I can't seem to decide which idea I want to work with (I have like 4-5 serious ideas I'd want to explore).

About Ludum Dare

Ludum Dare is a competition which runs maybe two times a year and the competition is 24 hours long with a specific theme. After the 48 hours are over everyone who submitted a game can rate the other games in different categories such as graphics, fun, theme and overall. More info here.

The other entries

View all 205 Ludum Dare 17 entries

Holy hell they look absolutely fantastic! Taking part in a competition like this is so humbling, I can't even begin to compare myself to the best games out there. But that's good, I have games and creators to look up to and so I know how I can improve. Which by the way I can do with everything.

Stats

This time I didn't log my hours and so I don't have a good enough graph to show you. Thinking back I worked about 8 hours during this 48 hour challenge, two of them on Saturday and the remaining six late on Sunday. I didn't work many hours on this game but the hours I did work were really productive.

Pressure

Once again I think I've proven that pressure is the best motivator. The game feels as finished as any other game I've made. Sure it's not the biggest game and it has very limited features but it was made in less than a third of the time. Actually even less if you count the hours and not the days!

The Game

Even despite it being extremely simple it did suck up a bit of my time when I tried to beat it (which will take you a minute or two). I kinda liked playing it.

The graphics are pretty good, I have a pretty special style and I personally think it's not half-bad and hopefully you like it too. The music and sound are... well there is no music and I have like three sound effects in total - two of them are different kinds of clicks!

Overall I like it, but it's nothing really special. If I would try to give it an unbiased score (we all think our children are fantastic after all) it would probably be a 3 of 5.

Conclusion

The pressure of a deadline is a powerful motivator and now I've found that no more than a week, or even a weekend, is enough to make a game. And it might even end up being enjoyable.

Beebop The Island Hopper

Download
Beebop The Island Hopper (0.6 MB)

Controls
Any Key.

Credits
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Random Coolness: Ludum Dare
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/ludumdare17

Chockingly... ugly

All is not what meets the eye though, I've got the basics done with fully scriptable islands and actually the very basic gameplay too. Now it's just the blows and whistles left (meaning it's about 90% left).

1. Introduction
2. The Journey Begins
3. The RTS Boom
4. Life After the Boom
5. The Modern Age
6. Conclusion
7. References

Original essay here. This post is just a reformatted version with pictures.

Introduction

This is an essay for the course Game Design and I'm going to give you a ride through the evolution of RTS game genre. I like RTS games and I've played them for as long as I can remember, from the classic Red Alert and Age of Empires to the newer Supreme Commander and Starcraft 2 (beta).

First of all what is a Real Time Strategy game? How do we narrow it down? The first distinction I'd like to draw is the Real Time part. Games like chess and civilization are most certainly strategy games but they are not executed in real time. Instead you wait for your turn and then make your move. Turn-based games like these are in my mind not RTS games. Neither are “God games” like SimCity and The Sims. You have very few boundaries and you can do what you want, when you want and how you want. But I think of RTS games more as a competition – a race against time.

I'd like to draw a loose definition for an RTS: “harvest, build and destroy”. Practically all RTS games are based around the idea to get money or some kind of resources to build up an army and proceed to destroy your enemy.

I will focus more on the beginning RTS games as they are still the main influence to all RTS games and then I will a bit more quickly go through the modern games and the modern ideas that continues to drive RTS forward.

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The journey begins

In the beginning there was no RTS games. Hard to imagine I know but that's the truth. When the idea of RTS was born the gaming scene looked a lot different from now. In the 1980's Nintendo had blown new life into the video game industry and it was the simple games that held us entertained, games like Pong, Tetris and Pac-Man. However the tides were shifting and more advanced games like SimCity were on the rise.

Dune II (1992) wasn't the first RTS game, there had been several games with RTS influence in them but this was the first complete RTS. The game was all about control. You chose exactly what units to build and when to build them and you could command every single unit at will – perhaps drive it across the map to check what your opponent is building?

The game introduced the concept of a tech-tree (Technology Tree) where you could “tech up” to stronger but more expensive tanks or you could continue to build cheap tanks. Gone where the days when you had to rely on a rock-paper-scissor balance between units, such as tank beats artillery which beats infantry which beats tanks, and instead you had the choice of countering a tank with a bigger tank! Or with a mind-control tank or you could choose to destroy the factory producing the tanks. Choosing the right time to climb up the tech-tree became vital to your success but it was complicated by “the shroud” which was a black fog covering the map where you haven't been. This in turn forced players to scout and check what the opponent is doing having to constantly revise what units he should build and if he had to tech up.

The sandy land of Dune 2

Perhaps the most revolutionary concept Dune introduced was the resource system. To build things you had to have spice, the game's only resource, and to get spice you had to harvest it on the map and bring it home to convert it to money and then units or buildings. What this practically means is the player had to have control of the map, he had to have a place he could get spice or else he would probably die. The concept of map-control is something that is driving virtually all RTS games to date. The first online capable game was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) but the online boom wouldn't come just yet. Instead it was the game Command & Conquer (1995) who refined RTS a bit more. It wasn't a graphical masterpiece nor very complex instead it's simple but it just works. The game screams atmosphere and war. All the units were pretty straightforward (I mean who doesn't know an apache, a rocket launcher or an M1A1 tank?) so it was pretty easy to pick up. But beneath the simple exterior lay a surprisingly deep game.

The game built on Dune 2 and in fact some fans nicknamed it Dune 3; the shroud and the resource system was the same and the tech-tree was built upon and it introduced the concept of a BO (Build Order – a predefined order to build things to maximize unit production or similar). C&C furthered the sense of control, in Dune you could just select one unit at a time but here you could select several, you could then store it in a group 0-9 and whenever you pressed the number again the group associated with it would be selected.

Instead of the “tank, bigger tank, biggest tank” from Dune C&C furthered the unit differences with tanks and infantry. Infantry was weak and could even be run over by the tanks with a satisfying splat sound, but they were dirt cheap and vital for early scouting. Tanks on the other hand were strong and fast but they were expensive and they had to rely on driving over infantry in order to effectively kill them. This gave the game a whole new level depth.

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The RTS Boom

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) became the first mega-successful RTS game. For some the interface was a letdown with no groups or build queues but instead it introduced the standard right click. Example with a peon: if you right click on a gold mine he will harvest and if you click on an enemy he will attack. It also allowed you to build anywhere opening for the oh so popular tower rush (build offensive defense towers). For the first time we got to have full naval battles with battleships, submarines and even a very own naval-resource. They improved the shroud and turned it into the now standard Fog of War where the fog regrows if you don't have any units there.

But the thing that really set Warcraft II apart was the online multiplayer. A huge community gathered and spawned leagues, clans and ladders and essentially creating the base of modern competitive RTS gaming.

Command & Conquer Red Alert (1996) was the original C&C but more and better. It kept the defining pieces but moved up the pace with high yield minerals and a stronger focus on tank warfare. In fact the focus on tanks was so strong that it introduced the concept of a “tank rush” where you amass a lots of tanks quickly and then rush your opponent to catch him of guard. The factions were different and unique and featured for the first time full featured land, sea and air combat. Red Alert also has a crazy and good story where Einstein witnesses the horrors of Hitler and proceeds to g back in time and kill, but without the competition for Stalin a new war breaks out. This placed new importance on the story in RTS games, a tradition which still continues today.

We can spot Red Alert's mighty mammoth tank

If you think about classical RTS games the chances are high you'll think about Age of Empires (1997). The game is one of the most influential RTS games and if you've ever played it it's easy to see why. It's balanced, polished and very deep. It's one of the first games to introduce the concept of “Ages”, essentially tiers in a tech tree. There are four ages which let's you progress from the very basic clubmen to advanced bowmen and even war elephants. The whole system is nicely done and the progression to higher tiers is fluent and it adds a lot of depth to the game. The resource system is still one of the most complex in any RTS with a whopping four resources for you to balance. Another new concept was the random maps. This way every game was a whole new experience with lots of different chokes and the importance of scouting was set on a whole new level.

There are games that would introduce one or two novel ideas and then there is Total Annihilation (1997). The game was the first 3D RTS game and it featured real physics simulation. Gone where the days when your units would hit instantaneously and without fail, here everything was simulated; on bumpy terrain the shots could fire into the ground, the front units would absorb and block hits and higher terrain would give the benefit of an increased range. TA was one of the first games where units could shoot while moving, making for some interesting run and dodge tactics. Dead units would even leave wreckages on the battlefield, wreckage that would block movement and you could reclaim them and regain some of the metal you used to build them.

When we're on the topic of metal and resources – TA has one of the most unique resource systems to date: they're unlimited. Unlike games like C&C with a finite resource system you never had to worry if you had enough, metal and energy would be regenerated infinitely so it was never a question if you could afford it, but how long it would take to be built. TA reintroduced the “Hero unit” from the era before Dune II, where you actually were a unit and if that died you loose.

TA was more a game without limits than anything before – battles with hundreds of units were commonplace and when the big units in other games fired across the screen, the big guns in TA fired across tens of screens or even across the whole map! Where other games had strong Rock-Paper-Scissor counters TA had none. You could even fire artillery at airplanes (although pretty useless). Instead the balance revolved around unit speeds, turning times and overkill.

Until this day, almost 12 years later, Starcraft (1998) is still the most competitively played RTS. The game had a great story and had three completely different races. Other games differentiated their factions with units but in Starcraft even the way you built things was different. But the thing that sets it apart from anything else is the community and in particular the competitive gaming scene that gathered around it. It's so ridiculously popular in South Korea that it's considered the National Sport there and the players are treated as rock-stars.

Why did this game become so popular? I don't know; it took almost a decade to get it balanced good and it isn't extremely fast paced. It's really fun to play but almost more importantly is that it's fun to watch, the immersion factor and the excitement of a high skilled game is unparalleled and I think that's what sparked the formation of a dedicated community. Then the community in itself is a reason why Starcraft has stood the test of time – the formation of pro leagues, great map support and excellent coverage has made sure the community has flourished.

Starcraft 2, the most successful RTS game yet

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Life after the Boom

The success of RTS as a genre sparked the creation of a lot of pretty similar, but often very good, games like one of my personal memories KKnD (1997). However it didn't take long until the next big revolution: true 3D brought to you by Homeworld (1999). Total Annihilation had used 3D terrain but Homeworld set the player in space and gave the freedom of the Z-dimension. Instead of just moving on a flat, albeit bumpy, surface you could now move freely in any direction you'd like. In addition Homeworld became known for it's atmospheric and rich story and they introduced persistence in the single player campaign. It means that you would retain all of your units and upgrades from your last mission and if you had finished it badly with only a few units the next mission would prove impossible and you had to replay it.

Building on a concept and improving it has been heavily used in RTS and it has brought us some of the very good games. Age of Empires II (1999) was all of the original but better. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) upped the pace of of older C&C games and created a fun, with some good humor, easy to pick up but hard to master classic RTS game. Red Alert 2 still had a cartoony 2D look who many loved but it was to become one of the last 2D RTS games.

Age of Mythology (2002) was a spin-off from the Age of Empires with all its goodness but with additional “God powers”. Rise of Nations (2003) incorporated classical board game features such as territory and it tried out a resource system with a whopping 6 resources (crazy!).

Warcraft III (2002) continued on where Warcraft II left but with added focus on abilities and RPG like hero units. The game is very centered around you gaining experience and leveling up your hero by killing neutral monsters, called creeping, as the three heroes you could have are more powerful than the rest of your army. Instead of a hard unit cap like in Starcraft Warcraft tried the approach with upkeep: if you have a large population you'll gain less gold and it worked pretty well as multiple expansions would do more harm than good.

The focus on heroes and abilities made the game really micro intense (taking care of individual units) as opposed to the very macro (economy) centered Starcraft. (It's pretty amusing in the current Starcraft 2 beta where you can actually see what game the top players used to play, Starcraft players usually have great macro but pretty bad micro whereas top Warcraft 3 players micro a few units but their economy is bad.)

A human player harassing an Orc in Warcraft 3

Command & Conquer Generals (2003) shifted the focus for the C&C series. It made the building panel a bit more free, so you could easier build where and what you wanted, it had radically different factions and sub-factions but it had a very poor story but perhaps the most noteworthy addition was that upgrade change unit behavior instead of simply making them deal +1 damage. For example infantry was weak against tanks but with an armor-piercing upgrade they could destroy it.

Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth (2004) had a pretty interesting and different build system. Where other games placed no limits on where you could build the game only allowed you to build on specific places and they were very limited. This forced you to really think about what to build – one mismatched building and you could get your entire army mismatched against your enemy. It also had a sort of RPG experience points tree whit a lot of different power ups you could have, but these too were limited and forced the player to make hard decisions, and hard decisions are good.

Dawn of War: Warhammer 40,000 (2004) changed the well known resource system, instead of harvesting the player was given “map points” combined with an in-house generated resource. You also had squads, which were treated as one unit for easier control and as several when in battle.

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The modern age

Company of Heroes (2006) is a pretty special game. It fuses the cinematic experience from an FPS with the tactical and strategical depth from an RTS. You command a lot less units and you're a lot closer to the battlefield. The environment is almost fully destructible and your units will take shelter behind anything they can find. Things like where you attack a tank became important as the armor was considerably weaker in the back and ammunition and fuel was considered a scarce resource.

The immersion of Company of Heroes is simply stunning

World in Conflict (2009) took the tactics even further and is considered an RTT – Real Time Tactics. In WiC there are no resources, just a sum given in the start of the game for you to call in units with. When the units are killed the points are slowly given back ensuring you won't run out of units. The game is solely focused on controlling your units and thus isn't really a true RTS in my eyes but a game bordering between the two.

Supreme Commander (2007) is the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation and it stands in stark contrast to WiC's tactical focus – here it's about the broad strokes man. Given the strategic zoom you can zoom out until you can see the whole battlefield and all the hundreds of units are there for you to command. The scale is huge, nukes and experimental super units trashing around gives the game an epic feel. But there's a lot more to Supcom than watching huge battles, it's using the whole TA system with infinite economy, wreckages and no hard counters. We have new intelligence modes; in addition to line of sight as in almost every other games there are radar, sonar and omni (see all). To counter these we get cloaking and radar jamming units. Another thing Supcom does well is the improved interface with infinite queues which tie well with the infinite resources so you don't have to babysit your factories to get them to continually produce units.

Me and Toejams showing off in Supreme Commander

Today there are both big scaled games like Hearts of Iron III (2008) and small-scale like Company of Heroes. There are games that relies on the old tried-but-true formula (Starcraft 2 currently in beta) and other more novel (Darwinia 2005). If you look closely you'll notice the core the old RTS games are still here, unchanged. Starcraft 2's resource system is basically the same as in Dune II and grouping are still the same as in the original C&C. Games are still living on, and building on, the successful ideas of the past (the new C&C, AoE3 etc) and I personally think they will continue to entertain us, Dune II style, for at least a couple of decades more.

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Conclusion

We've been through the evolution of the RTS from the beginning with Dune II until modern games like Supreme Commander and World in Conflict. The simple one resource system has given birth to four and even six resource systems and some games have opted for “map points” or different infinite resources. The simple shroud concept has turned into the now standard Fog of War and there has been some advanced intelligence gathering going on in a few games. The Hero concept with borrowed RPG elements are now standard in many games and the tech tree has been branched into several different flavors. The scale has both been amplified and minimized and units has differentiated themselves from each other.

Thanks to the online multiplayer pioneered almost 15 years ago has turned a little niche genre into a mega-industry with competitions held in several different games and countries. But where the genre is heading is anyones guess, but whichever way it's heading I'm sure it will continue to entertain and surprise you.

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References

Everything accessed 21 mars 2010

gamespot1, gamespot2
History of RTS during the years 1989-2001. Pretty good.

Gamereplays RTS history, a great resource written by several RTS enthusiasts.

A top 20 list, take it with a grain of salt. Used for inspiration.

From wikipedia various stuff (mainly dates):
Dune the novel
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans
Darwinia
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
KKnD
Age of Mythology
World in Conflict
Hearts of Iron 3

You can find the whole source for the site, excluding a few security related files ofc, on github where I've also uploaded a small to-do list and some ideas I might want to implement.

Here's a small summary of the stuff:

1. Allow editing all the information pages without doing it through phpmyadmin, merge it together with the post editing.
2. Change the layout of adding comments and it's preview, try unhide it.
3. Fix the layout of search and possibly tweak the inner workings
4. Revamp archive page, maybe use it as a sitemap?
5. Add read next/previous posts on post and older/newer posts?
6. Make comment editing work, for guests too.
7. Statistics!! I have third party statistics but I want stats for the most active commenter and other stuff.
8. A greater 404 page
9. Refactor, remove garbage code and refactor some more.

I'm itching a little bit about a new game, but first thing's first.

I've been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I've been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the games up.

Lately I've been using vim and I really like it but the learning curve is really high, so why not make a game about it? To make the learning progress easier and hopefully even somewhat fun. I haven't come up with a great idea yet, and thus I haven't started, but I'm pretty optimistic.

I also mentioned Ludum Dare but as the looks of things it ain't gonna happen this time. I've got a massage course the whole weekend timed on just as the 48 hour game making competition is and I don't think I wanna stress myself to manage the both of them.

Instead for a game I've been focusing on learning Haskell and on improving this site. Trying out different stuff like trying a new paradigm and trying out different languages is a really good way of Sharpening your Saw. Yes technically he meant doing things not related to programming, such as math, but I still see it as doing something completely different and improving while doing that.

For example Kohana, the framework this site is built on, has made me think more about tools and frameworks instead of just language features as it transformed my awful, hackish site into this beautiful little thing literally in the blink of an eye. Or take jQuery which took my epic cross-browser checks and transformed it into beautiful code. These two seemingly small changes made the boring web developer process really fun!

Yeah that's what I've been doing; I've been widening my horizon and I've been having fun at the process! Wooo

He suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for "mere" entertainment

I don't agree with this view and neither did he:

Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years worth of events by reading fiction. Yes, it is true that what happens to you in real-life — with it’s finality and incomparably richer stimulation – out-weighs that of a book. However, the course altering moments in life are infrequent. Fiction provides a means of accelerating your “personal growth.”

He then gives us a list of fiction characters who has made him who he is, many small pieces of trait that has become a part of him.

Interesting I thought and I began thinking of what characters I could identify with (Lincoln Rhyme and Robert Langdon comes to mind) but then I started thinking of games. What games has made me who I am? It's not an easy answer and it'll never become exhaustive but it's interesting to think about and here's my try:

Worms
I played the demo of Worms 2 to death, I ran to my friend all the time to play Worms Armageddon and I've been addicted to blasting ugly worms with banana bombs ever since.

RollerCoaster Tycoon
I love rollercoasters and I love to build stuff so naturally I played the games a ton... I'm still tingling with excitement when I think of building a super-coaster. The builder that is me was born with this.

Hospital Tycoon
Another constructor game with hilarious humor and I'm still harboring thoughts of resurrecting this beauty as a new game. I think it was one of the first games to make me think about actually making games instead of just playing.

Counter-Strike Source
The best anger management there is. Or well I'm not really civil when playing it but it lets me went out pretty damn good, but don't sit near me when I'm playing - it's not good for your ears.

World of Goo
The game that opened my eyes to the wonders of Indie Games.

Supreme Commander
Introduced me to the world of competitive gaming, or rather the competitive mindset. It also helped me become a better person by helping and being a part of a great community.

Evil Genius
Humor + Base Building = Epic Win.

These are just a few games from the top of my head, some had big impacts and some slightly less so.

We started with a quote and that's how we'll end it:

I am the product of my parents, my friends, my life, my experiences…and my teachers.

phpBB is fantastic in many ways; easy, fast and easily managed but it just didn't feel right as I hadn't done it. Kinda the same as why I'm not using any popular blog tool but I've rolled my own. It feels pretty good to use a site you've written completely yourself...

And no I don't want to write my own forum now, for now I'll stick with a tweak here a tweak there on the site.

At first I had been stuck for ages with my never-ending projects and I had literally nothing to show for all my coding. Well now things have changed a bit: I've successfully released seven experimental games, games that more or less are playable, working and sometimes even fun! These months have taught me that games aren't impossible year long projects, they don't have to be perfect to be enjoyable and above all they taught me to get things done!

Here are a few lessons I learned the hard way.

Iterate
Don't try to make the game perfect from the start cause it won't be perfect and it won't be pretty. Instead create the ugliest, crappiest playable version of your game you can and then work from there. The best games where those who got playable the earliest: MenuCity, Bugger and Jonas IceCream Stand. The other crappier games such as A Geek Valentine and Black and White got playable just in a very late stage and indeed they also became the least fun.

Fun isn't created on the spot - it's created through iterations. It's like carving a wood figure. You don't create it with a big slash, you carefully chop the wood off little by little until the figure is complete. This is how I think good, fun games are made.

This quantum leap wasn't achieved with a big chop, but with many smaller ones

Get things done
This is the thing that changed with me the most. At first I thought games where all about the planning stage - the idea stage. It's important to have a great idea and it's good to write down things sure but you can't just sit on your ass doing the big talk and not actually do anything. As said about iteration you can't make the game perfect from the start and you can't the whole game from the start either. The game will change and your idea about what's good for the game will change too.

Take for example my latest game A Geek Valentine. I had envisioned the game as a game where you built trap combos from a top down point of view. But the game changed into a pac-man type (I'm not all too happy about it though). For better or worse games and ideas change, stop planning and start getting shit done.

Set Goals
In December I had the truly great theme New World Order and it spawned the best game idea I've had, a sort of SimCity game but instead of building stuff you plot to take over the city and taint it with your evil propaganda. Like in North Korea or in the old Soviet. But the game was not to be.

Why you ask? I think it's because I never had a goal - I broke the one week rule and I could just push the deadline further and further and I never got anything done. With other games when I was at the 2-3 last days I always got a big energy boost and I always managed to get the game finished. But here I could just say "meh, I'll do it later" and so it never got done. It's Duke Nukem Forever all over again (maybe a bit smaller okay). Goals will help immensely to get things done.

Have fun
In retrospect I should have had an overall goal for my experimental games too. I never put an end date - it was just new month = new game and in the end it wasn't very inspiring to just churn out a game. It was as if I just had to make a game, it wasn't something I wanted to do and it was almost as if it had become a chore.

Mind you I've had lots and lots of fun making these games and the games who were the most fun to play were also the ones I had the most fun making. You could divide my games into three categories I think.

The beginning: Fun
Balls
Black and White

The middle: Really Fun
Bugger
MenuCity
Jonas IceCream Stand
Failed game: The Zed Worker Party

The end: Not so Fun
The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros
A Geek Valentine

The funny thing about this is that it works really really well both ways. Both how fun the games are and how fun I thought it was to make them. I think this is an indication for all you game developers out there: Have Fun, not only will you live a happier and longer life but the game will also be a lot more fun!

Conclusion
I'm not sure what the meaning of this post was. At first I wanted to state a new beginning for myself and then it turned out to a lessons-learned post... but whatever.

I won't be doing monthly experimental games for a while now, I'm happy with the results but I'm not at all motivated right now and I need a little break. I will continue my game making but it just won't be exactly the same - maybe I will try to release a game, any game, each month or I'll focus on making "real" games - games which are everything I want them to be, not just a proof of a concept. I guess that's something that's been bothering me about my experimental games - it feels like something is missing.

Next time I've got my sights on the Ludum Dare which instead of a seven day game is a two day game! We'll see how that'll go.. If I have the power and the time to.

I've also written a small piece about the Evolution of RTS games, heavily shortened to fit a perfect 5 pages a feat I'm quite proud of. Of course I wanted to write a hell of a lot more.

In short: Not much has happened and not a lot is happening but we'll see what the future has in store.

Anyway let's get this going!

A Geek Valentine isn't a good game by any means, it's really nothing special. The gameplay sucked really bad. It's kinda funny as I told Sundb00m this would be my greatest game gameplay wise. Yeah right..

Hard Work Work!

This is a small graph which shows how I've worked for a straight week from the 22th to the 28th. The Y-axis is hours and the X-axis is days. The labels are for either work or break and the height of the green peaks if you check it on the Y-axis is the sum of both green and red. Green is for hours where I actually worked and the red is for when I had a break. You know food, clipping toenails, reading manga and playing counter-strike.

Total work time: ~25 hours
Total break: ~15 hours

Weekend work: 13.8 hours
Weekend break: 8.3 hours

The noteworthy thing about this is that I spend more than half of the whole week's worth of time in the weekend and I probably got even more done during that time. I think it's the whole deal with being chased with a the brutal thing of failure that motivates me.

Graphical Adoration

About the game let's start with the positive stuff. I really like how the game looks, it actually looks pretty darn good (even though I forgot about the girls' turning, now they're just looking forward). I'm really improving in a graphical sense, something I thought impossible when I began this journey.

Do something you Like

Like with a Big L. I felt I had a really nice idea going for this one. In the end it looked and felt like a bad pacman clone but this wasn't what I had in mind at all. The idea was to build cool trap-combos sort of like in the Epic Game Evil Genius.

Here's a plan for an über-trap in Evil Genius

I really love Evil Genius and especially the base building but let's face it - I failed. But the idea kept motivating me and it was really fun to try to make it happen.

A first small taste of an "AI"

How do the girls move? They have a 5x5 vision with a 2 radius (they're in the middle) and they choose what to do. If they see the dude close to them either in front, left or right they'll go there. Otherwise they'll try to follow a path in front of them or to the left or right. Otherwise they'll just go in a random direction.

They are extremely stupid and you can trap them in a never-ending loop fairly easy and it's a stretch to say they have intelligence but it was pretty cool to dip my hand into AI programming. I know it's extremely shallow and bad and stuff but still it was pretty rewarding to see them actually move around on their own...

I might actually develop this game further with special regard to AI. Change the core of the game so you can script both the player and the girls, just for laugh and giggles?

The game sucks but hey...

Yupp it's not my best game, in fact I think it's one of the worst. But I still like it a lot and my trap-building idea is still alive and I might develop the game more, improve the AI and focus on building traps (need a lot more cool traps damnet). Yes I think I might do that...

A Geek Valentine

Download
A_Geek_Valentine.zip (4.1 MB)

Controls
Steer with the arrow keys.

Use spacebar to:
1. Build the time machine
2. Buy and place traps (Just face an empty square and choose a trop on the top right)
3. Sell traps (Face and click)

Story
Well it's Valentine's Day and as the geek you are this is the worst day ever. Luckily you havean almost complete time machine hidden here in the grass and if you could complete it you'll be safe for now! But beware... The girls are searching for you! Place traps and run away!

About
This game, as usual, was made for The Experimental Gameplay Project. This time they asked for a short explanation on how the theme would fit together so here it is:

Rejection + Valentine's day = feelings hurt

And you're the one hurting all the girls' feelings. Enjoy.

Credits
Music: Nighttime Falls, I'll be Waiting for Her - ilocan18
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/Rejection

Booyah!!

It was 14,6mb!!

Now every way you look at it, that's incredibly huge. It's like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the exe file which should be small, except that it's not.

I started out chopping off everything regarding exceptions, cause all c++ resources I've read say exceptions will take space like a mutant gremlin. Okay I thought and chopped away everything - but nothing happened.

Now that's weird, what happens if I scrap this.. and this.. It ended with me beginning a big revamp of my whole "engine", or rather collection of stuff - nothing inherently wrong as it was badly needed - but nothing happened with my exe file! It was still almost 2mb big with basically only a hello world...

Then it struck me! I had been using -g with gcc and without any optimizing at all. When I turned on size and speed optimizations and scrapped the debugging the change was quite extraordinary.

The mutant 14 637 kb was magically transformed to a more fitting ant size of 856 kb. I couldn't save much of the total file size (23 254 kb -> 20 768 kb) so while I apologize for hogging your bandwidth, time and harddrive space I'm hoping you won't be too mad at me.

The Time

I spent about 24 hours on this game. A whopping 30% was break time, mostly me eating, reading manga or playing games... This is proof of me being really lazy this month I think.

It's pretty cool that everything regarding the scripting, loading the little levels I had from lua files and writing them took only a mere hour! I could have saved so much time if I would've scrapped the whole levels idea completely. (Levels are more than just the code it takes to load them from a file... a lot more)

Immersion

We all love big bangs and loads of stuff flying around on screen and sadly I didn't deliver. I had all these ideas of pieces of dead afros flying around and dead things piling up on the ground which you'll walk over... but I never did any of it which is sad cause it would be pretty damn cool.

Another thing is the messages on the left side. Pretty cool - if they would actually say anything, but again I didn't have time or the inclination or whatever to do anything with it...

All we're left with are the quakes which are kinda cool but they could do with some tweaking, maybe shorter and less frequent to really get the omg effect.

Gameplay

It plays okay. Not a lot happening, it's just a race against time. The immersion part would really hot up the gameplay cause really, it's fun to blast things into the sky!

Conclusion

The game feels like it's not finished. The whole afro thing was cool but it's not revolutionary or anything different. It's stuck in the middle between random ideas and mediocrity. Too bad.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...

The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

Bullet masher - can you keep up with 100 enemies at the screen? Try it!

Download
afro.zip (19.8 MB)

Instructions
W: up
A: left
S: down
D: right
mouse: shoot
space: leap into the sky!

Credits
Music: The Last Prophecy - Matthew Le Blanc (SynthR)
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/100-things

So let's forget our small mishaps (yes I'm looking at you - December month without a game) and roll out a new theme. As usual I'm following The Experimental Gameplay Project's theme which happens to be 100 Things.

And Things could mean anything from sprites, sound effects to pixels or enemies.

Making it was the easy bit - now we need to generate some content! Where is the almighty sundb00m when we're in a desperate need for spam?!

Available on Github

It's nothing special really, if you want take a look at the code and help me improve it.

This is why I'm giving me an early Christmas gift: I won't make the December game in a week. In fact I haven't even logged the hours, I just work on it a little here and a little there and boy it's nice not having to do something all the time.

But there are downsides of course. I'm breaking my rules which is... bad and I don't have that productivity boost I always get when under a deadline so now I'm pretty far behind.

And now I'm off with New World Order and (for once) I've got a really really good idea!

What does the U.S one dollar bill, the French Revolution and Zion have in common? It's the conspiracy New World Order of course!

The paranoid can find it anything so this shouldn't be a problem?
Right?!

I spent almost exactly fifty hours on this game and that's by far the most I've spent on a 7day project. To be honest it's probably more but I'm not really good at logging all the hours...

A Race

This game was a race against time from start to finish. I understood right from the beginning this wouldn't be easy. Creating a whole GUI from scratch, composing animation and a focus on graphics(!). I've never done a GUI, it would be really easy with a decent framework for it... But I don't have one for it so all the GUI code is really messy and hard to maintain.

I guess I'm learning the coding lessons the hard way. Keeping it structured and maintainable even, no, especially under pressure is extremely important. It's a good thing I have a fast iteration cycle repeating itself for every new game I'm making.

Art

I keep saying it again and again but I'm not a graphics designer but I should stop saying that! Although not wonderful I think my games are looking good and this game is no exception. It's certainly the most complex graphical wise.

The fading effect on the sky was pretty cool, but it's kinda crude and it doesn't fit the overall theme very well. The theme has a few distinct colors with a little "childish" feel to them. I feel the fading adds a bit too many colors to it. But I do think the end points (in the middle of the night with all the stars and when it's as light as possible) looks pretty good. And I'm not sure it was a very good idea to include a MenuCity silhouette in the background.

A beautiful night sky.

Gameplay

Sadly I don't think the gameplay was one of my best. Sure the first five maybe ten minutes are a blast, they almost awoke my slumbering tycoon feelings. But the game is so badly balanced, it's far too easy when you've passed a point in the game. The problem is that I balanced the game the last handful of hours on the very last day and that doesn't work, not at all. A great gameplay needs to evolve, it can't be created just there on the stop. Well that's my experience at least.

Conclusion

I think the game is really great. Sadly it gets boring far too fast but it does have great potential. It's almost worth given a remake as a "real" game.

Jonas IceCream Stand

Get wild and become a Crazy Dealer of IceCream!

Download
jonasicecreamstand.zip (12.8 MB)

Instructions
It should be pretty self-explanatory, it's a very simply tycoon game.

Credits
Music:
All Around Us - Eric Maskol
I Will Always Look up to You - Steve Chatterton

Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

NOT

There's practically zero visible difference. You might notice the 'Quick n Dirty File Download' or the little line of text towards the bottom of the page, or even the ability for multiple tags! That's kinda freaky stuff eh? And only +1 week to do that! :D

The big thing was actually a complete rewrite of the whole site. From really bad and random spaghetti code I managed to produce some half-nice code. I wrote the site with Kohana which was a blast to use! If you're making a page of some sort I can heartily recommend to give it a try.

Soon it's time for some game making again, I just need a good idea... hm.

The idea that games are art is an old one and there are a few games considered art - but it's really hard to make an actual art game. But I'll try :)

Let's start with a hideous graph:

God it's ugly, but it works I guess. I spent about 32 hours on this game which is the most I've spent on an experimental game so far. The bulk of the game was actually done really, really quickly like the second day or so. All the gameplay was there and with pacemaker art too! The last 5 days of production was focused on polish, level design and art.

Art
I spent a lot of hours doing the arty business and I think the game looks really good. You'd think the art I have in the game would be doable in a lot fewer hours than I spent and you're absolutely right. In the beginning I had a very different style in mind, it was supposed to be a dude trapped in a console (a beautiful one) with all the ground, the birds (yes birds!) and the blocks all comprised of numbers... But as I worked on it I switched more and more to the style I have now, albeit diverging from the theme but meh.

Production
These games I'm doing, they're more about production than the games themselves I realize that now. Naturally I'm making the games how could they not be about games?

It's just my impression but when I'm doing the games my focus is more on the process of making them, like planning on a free day which I can get zoned and only focus on the code, instead of playing around with "cool" stuff.

This is good I'd say! But meh - we all like cool stuff, I mean it's cool! But making things happen, making things work on screen is way cooler than having them all set up in my head. And besides, my very best ideas (and games) have come when I focus on making them work instead of how cool they should be.

What is is always way cooler than what should be.

The Game itself
Ahh the game... This one is my very best; it looks as good as Bugger, it's more addictive than Balls and it's even criminal to compare the levels to those of Black and White! So what could be better? There are a few things:

1. Horrible tutorial. I tried to redeem myself here but still.
   
2. Be able to move the camera for an overview of terrain. This I had planned, but I had other more important things to do and then I sorta forgot about it...
   
3. Go back 5sec or a few moves. I mean how many times did you press the rest button? I know I did press it a dozen times too many.
   
4. Move up with the side keys instead of having to switch, and slowing down, between up and side. This was suggested later and I don't know why I didn't think of this from the beginning :S
   
5. Repetitive sound. Well honestly I.. uh... yeah. The song is wonderful but some variation would be nice. And for the next game you need to stop and change the music from a menu, instead of the obscure console options. (sound_enabled 0 in console f1 or set in settings.ini)
   
6. Disappointing ending. This one is so true.. I might spoil this for you but the last level isn't as demanding as the ultra hard ninth level. And there wasn't even any ending credits or anything like that, almost like cleaning my room real good without anyone acknowledging it =(
   

Yesterday I checked the date and there's almost two weeks left until my next monthly experimental game! I might have to start another side project... hum hum...

So this is me trying to redeem myself! I can't go back and change the game and make a better tutorial - that would violate my limit of 7 days for each game so here's the next thing. A nice walkthrough with a lot of pictures explaining the basics and it'll show you how to actually complete the tutorial! :p

This is you in the first level.

The big thing seems to be your ability to pick up stuff. Use the down key to pick up a block. The yellow stripey things are there to show you how many times you can pick up a block, so be careful.

You can climb one block up with the up key, naturally with or without a block on your head.

If you fall down you can't get back up, here it's okay - but don't move too far to the left! Then you'll get stuck and you can't turn to drop the block.

Put down the block with the same key you picked it up - down. Notice that the block went all black and you can't pick it up anymore. This will be the cause of some real frustration later on, trust me.

And here we go! All we have to do now is climb up that silly looking city silhouette and walk to the goal. And we're done! =)

Hopefully you'll find this helpful if you're stuck and dunno wtf this game is all about. If you want a walkthrough on some later levels just let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Slidoku which is a sort of mix between Rubik's cube and sudoku. I enjoy puzzles like those and I really enjoyed this one too - it took me a while to beat it but I just love the feeling when you do. If you like puzzles take a look, it'll be worth it!

My game is very reminiscent of the old calculator classic Block Dude made by Brandon Sterner. If you like that game, or any puzzle game for that matter, you're gonna love this one.

MenuCity

Download
menucity.zip (7.4 MB)

Instructions
Left/Right arrows - Move
Up arrow - Climb
Down arrow - Pick up/Put down
f1 - Secret dev console

If you're stuck this might help: Walkthrough Level 0

Credits
Music: The Year Before The War - Eric Maskol
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

I also like to program, that's almost a must if you should make a working game from scratch, so I figured why not use it to make something productive and hopefully something fun?

Wow it seems like forever since I begun this monthly game business, but it's only been two months since I first thought about this and here I am having finished my third game. I've really come a long way, in the beginning I though I'd only make state of the art crap games. Like I would struggle to even get a Tetris up and running. That's partially why I decided to make Balls.

Anyway I started out with a small idea: speed-typing. It later turned out to be bugs you killed, but that's of minor importance really. They were supposed to bind to the theme Failure by letting the average gamer feel how a programmer fight for his life against bugs. Bugs are for those who don't know errors in your program - they can be as simple as a wrong letter in the wrong place causing havoc in the game or a bigger thing like a fundamental flaw in your game. Think about the balls who got stuck in mid-air in Balls. That's a typical bug...

If I followed the theme good or bad you be the judge. Personally I don't think it was as clear as I'd want it to do but meh.

The game itself took 25 hours to make - but more than 5 hours of them was me having a break...
Here's a little jummy pie of what took time:

Compared to my two other games I spent a bigger part on both graphics and level design - and that was sourly needed imho. The "embedding scripting" part is where I built in the ability to build levels from lua. I think the result was really good and it saved a lot of time just being able to edit a file without having to recompile every single little change.

You can make your own levels too, just open the "levels.lua" file in a text editor and make your changes. I won't explain anymore since it's really simple.

I'm also using about 1/5 of my working time to rest. Jikes! That's almost too much. But I dunno, it really hurts staring at your computer screen hour after hour. My longest session - without a break, even a bathroom one - was almost five hours. I totaled more than 10 hours that day I think.. As always I do the bulk of the work when I'm out of time. The last two days were responsible for at least 90% of the work!

I guess you could say that's a lesson: you're most productive, and ambitious, when you've got a smoldering iron up your ass.

The gameplay wasn't what I was planning on - yet again - but I'm actually quite content with the game. It's able to grab your attention for at least a few minutes before loosing you and it's absolutely the prettiest one I've ever made! Enjoy! ^^

Bugger

Download
bugger.zip (7.9 MB)
Update: 21 sept - small bug fix.

Instructions
Type the text on the bugs to make them disappear, that's all folks!

Credits
Music: Dare to Breathe - Tom Fahy
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Let's rock!!

Hopefully I'll get a week somewhere with enough spare time to create something. It's a damn sure I'll have to make a game about submarine warfare!!

Lessons I've learned

1. Levels take time
   I know you're all disappointed by a measly three levels in the game and for that I'm sorry. I hadn't set aside time for making the levels in my mental plan so when I ran over the time limit of 7 days I had to cut down on some stuff - this time it was the levels.

2. A codebase rocks
   For my first game I had some basic code from older projects I used, like handling states, a small menu and a vector class among others and that saved me a whole lot of time. Now I had even more code so I got something on screen a lot faster and I could afford beginning with creating the dude and his animation (although I kinda overdid that) knowing I already had the basic foundation in place. Now I'm going to get my coding skillz up and the experience and this is another really big stone which will allow me to make bigger and more badass games later on.

3. It might not suck so hard after all...
   In the beginning I was pretty confident but I quickly lost that momentum and I thought a lot about how sucky this game is... It's not polished, it's not fun and the levels suck etc but it turned out to be okay! I have to stop being so damn negative! These are experimental games for crying out loud, they're expected to fail once in a while and guess what? It doesn't matter!
   

Yes I know there are a lot of things bad and wrong with this game, but this is a competition with myself to create a game in only seven days and you can't always polish the games like your heart tells you to do.

Black and White

Download
BlackWhite.zip (11.2 MB)

Instructions
Move left and right with the arrows, jump with space and change the blocks with enter. Esc into the menu and there you can enter a highly advanced (not) level editor to change the levels however you want with left and right mouse.

Credits
Music: What we take to the grave - Tom Fahy
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

I wonder isn't this something very common? Not just in game development but for everything in life; we always stick with our idea of perfection and stuff that we're familiar with, trying hard not to do something different and unfamiliar. I can honestly say I've tried to make something fresh and different but maybe that's my problem. I'm trying too hard and when it's impossible I still won't let it go... Just maybe it might work if I do it like this... maybe?!

No this month's game is going to be crap, I can see it. Polish, which I believe is the single most important ingredient in a game, is non-existent. And worse yet, the gameplay is bad - in fact it's even worse, it's unplayable and boring! Never mind that I'll give myself tomorrow to give the game a bit more love in the hope of making it just a tiny bit less sucky.

What do you think; should I release the game - no matter what - after one week and ignore my need for perfection or should I give the unfinished and "bad" game more love so it might be a little better and a bit more fun to play?

Anyway I realize I can't make the one week mark... which sucks... and the game isn't looking or feeling the way I want it too but I will release it when I've made it slightly less sucky.

1. point and click monkey island style adventure game - the beginning c++ adventure for me. Kinda harsh start up don't you think? I thought so too - it never got anywhere near completion or playability.
   
2. another heavy game - think fully destructible environment. Need I say more?... No.
   
3. the Game Engine - the project everyone dreams of making games ends up doing and either discover it didn't amount in anything playable, which I did, or you'll end up thinking creating games is extremely hard and it'll take years for just a small game.
   
4. the Dream project - I've been thinking of making a few posts about the games in my dreams. Which I'll most certainly complete! Sometime... Maybe...?!
   

But what I did find was kloonigames, some guy who did the same thing I'm doing. Or I'm doing the same as him: following the footsteps of the Experimental Gameplay Project. Making a game in 7 days, something surely impossible, and I haven't even made any game before! Oh crap! But as Petri (kloonigames dude) so elegantly put it:

My experiences told my that creating, even a small, game takes months, if not years. So to do it in 7 days seem frightening. And not only the code, but graphics, music, sound, levels and all things included. I shit my pants even thinking about it and almost gave up. Luckily I realized that the worst thing that could happen (beside shitting my pants) was wasting a week of my life. I could do that easily with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon.

And here's a summary of my first ever game Balls. It's available here for download.

The Good

1. I got it done!
   It seemed impossible and it scared the hell out of me. But I made it!! Aaah... It feels so good right now. And the game is actually pretty fun! It doesn't suck, it doesn't crash (but it's a bit buggy) and I can sort of say I managed to stick to my theme Addictive Gaming. Now with this over with I can focus on my next game. Not just now but in a while, now I'm confident to try new, bigger and hopefully better things and I know I can pull it off!

   I'm on top of the world! Nothing is impossible! Superman and Neo - you're just sooo jealous right now.

2. It didn't even take long...
   I end up using timelog from kloonigames to track my time. The game took 25,5 hours to make, but I spent 7,5 hours of that time on a break! Either reading manga, playing cs or just surfing around and chatting. This isn't the time to nag about my lack of concentration and that I'm lazy, this is where I realize I didn't even work myself to death making the game. I could afford a break here and there, and now when I think about it they were really necessary.

3. Pressure is good
   I did manage to implement some physics and collision detection, even though it's really simple. This was a first for me and I did it under a tight schedule! A coincidence? I don't think so, a small amount of pressure is really really good. It is during these times I'm most productive and I really do get things done if I have to.
   

1. The motivation didn't stick
   Although I made the game and it was pretty good I didn't even remotely invest as much time in it as I could - and I don't know why. I lost that super motivation pretty early in development and when I hit a bug or something that needed a lot of changing to implement I usually cut corners or just ran away screaming.

   Is this the every day life of a developer? If it's this though to get motivated wonder how you can motivate yourself working on a shitty project?
   

1. The code
   Wow - I'm never showing the source of this to anyone! I tried doing the things which would make the game nearest completion, I did cut some corners but in the end the job is done. But it's really ugly and before reusing the code I'll need to clean it up a lot!

   What's that smell...? It stinks of smelly code!
   

Balls is a game about... balls. Well it's all in 2D so maybe Circles would be a better description but I don't think that captures the attention enough.

I didn't think this was possible but here it is! My very first jewel =)

Balls

Download
Balls.zip (7.1 MB)

Instructions
Well... There's nothing to it really. Move the mouse over the balls to make them shrink, survive until the top is filled with balls.

Credits
Music: Markovich/A.M.P. - Twisted in flight
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Puh... my first game! Wish me luck =)

And sure, you're right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never got the traffic I'm fantasizing about but I can try to summarize the site in one sentence: I'm going to make a themed game every month. There, I've said it. Tired and scared of wasting my time with a monster-project I've decided to use the experimental project model. Basically I'm going to make a game in 7 days, kinda like God made the world. And I'm alone making these games, all the gfx, the sound and the code.

If this got you interested check back regularly for some cool (I hope) games and read my about section.