Kloonigames

Splash screen by Hideous

Last weekend I traveled to Malmö Sweden to participate a game jam called No More Sweden. This was the second time the jam was organized and it had grown from our humble begins of 10 people to a party of 40 or so. It was a sweet jam and I had a lot of fun, meeting old friends and making new ones. And making games as well.

We had a web-camera that was broadcasting video from the party place to the internets. So now thanks to advanced technology you can experience exactly what No More Sweden was like if you were a web camera running at the speed of 1 frame per every minute.

Big thanks to Martin “grapefrukt” Jonasson and other organizers for the work they did to make this happen. As a sign of my appreciation I’ll post an image of Martin with his mustaches on.

Photo credits to Data

We also made a game together with Martin. I was responsible for the coding and Martin played the part of a graphics designer. And he played it well, going as far as to demand such features as: “You have to use the color burn filter when you render this sprite” and “We have to have dynamic lightning effects in our game”. The game design fell into place pretty nicely, even though when we created a quick a mock up of our original idea we had to scrap it, because it sucked hard.

Here’s a pic of me battling with some bugs in the code of our game:

Photo credits to Data

We’ll release the game after I’ve fixed few things with it. I’d expect it to be out on the 1st of August 🙂

Here’s what No More Sweden looked like from the point of view of my laptop’s desktop.

Ever wondered how to prototype a game really quickly. I decided to record my work progress with a tool called ChronoLapse. So here’s what it looks like when I work on a prototype.

The game that I created can be downloaded from here: https://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/sticky_notes

Here’s my first Experimental Gameplay Project (v3.0) contribution. The theme was Unexperimental Shooter. Don’t ask me why. I tried to stick to theme to the best of ability, which turned out to be harder than I originally thought it would be. My first try spinned off to the experimental territory faster than cactus makes games. (I’m still working on that more “experimental” game, but it has already passed the 7 day deadline by mile).

Sticky Notes Shooter is a shooter made out of non trademarked stick notes. Basically it’s a low resolution (32 x 24) shooter with a stop motion esque rendering. The other cool part about the game is that it generates space invaders randomly. The algorithm for this was way too fun to write and play around with and it was inspired by Jared Tarbell’s Invader Fractal algorithm.

Sticky Notes Shooter

Download

Sticky_notes.zip (7.4 Mb) (release 1)

Instructions

Your company has just trademarked all the pixels in a 12×8 space and it’s is your job is to travel around the galaxy and fight pixelated monsters that violate your precious trademark. Your name is Tim L. and you’re a professional trademark troll. You’re the best there is.

Arrow keys move Tim around and use space to fire his cease or desist gun.

Credits

Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho
Music: Martinibomb – The Love God. The song “The Love God” is freely available at http://www.comfortstand.com/catalog/049/ under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic -license.

Sound Effects created with the DrPetter’s sfxr.
Fractal Invaders inspired by Jared Tarbell’s Invader Fractal.
Sticky Notes Shooter uses: SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and GLEW.

The project that inspired me to start Kloonigames is back in a new modified format… And I’m part of it \o/

Experimental Gameplay Project was originally a semester long crunch to crank out 50 experimental games (one every week). And it had a profound impact on me. I was blown away after seeing the games that these guys had managed to do in such a small time frames. I discarded my old spend-a-few-years-on-your-freeware-game habits and started Kloonigames and decided that I would try to crank out a new game every month. And that turned out to be a way better idea than I could ever have imagined.

I’m honored to be part of this and so horribly shamed that my first assignment is late. I have my reasons but luckily Shalin is slacking off too 🙂 But my unexperimental shooter should be done today or tomorrow. In mean while you can go and test out the already released games by Allan Blomquist, Kyle Gray and Kyle Gabler.

Version 3.0 of Experimental Gameplay Project is bit different from the previous ones. The main idea now is to hold a friendly monthly prototyping competition amongst our selves. Which means that I’ll be (hopefully) creating a prototype every month, which means that monthly games will be back on this site well… But more about that later. Now I should go and start coding my game… But first I’ll play a little Spelunky to get inspiration… NO! I should code first and then reward myself with Spelunky… But on the other hand I did update the blog so I should reward myself now. Snakes beware, here I come.