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

Day 4 of 7 day journey to the release of Crayon Physics Deluxe for the PC. It’s a photo day.

Here’s the room in which the work on Crayon Physics Deluxe was started. Notice the huge amount of junk lying all around. That’s because it’s a storage room (at my parent’s place) used to store all my old computers and other junk that I’ve collected over the years.

The post-it notes contain small TODO lists. This is taken right after I submitted the game to the IGF. Two weeks before this there was only one post-it note on the monitor.

Picture of Old Bastard. Compiling the game on the old bastard takes a little over hour.

Post-it notes from the last two weeks of development.

Continuing my Ludum Dare progress report.

4 hours to go: So I ended up implementing the animation system. It turned out to be a really good thing. It helped me out a lot… I even managed to constrain myself from over engineering it.

Overall things are looking pretty good. I have still some small things to do (tutorial screen), but I could probably “ship” the game as it is. Some more polish would be nice and sounds would be really cool (I’m looking at you SFXr) . I’ll probably have to sacrifice a hour to add them. It’s really hard for me to say how well the gameplay works. It’s interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s compelling enough. And now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else came up with a very similar game mechanic…

Here’s a shot from the current build:

The game will be released couple hours… If you’re in a hurry you’ll probably download it faster from the Ludum Dare blog as it will take me a little while to add it here…

And now for something completely different… I ‘m taking part in the 10th Ludum Dare competition. It’s a 48-hour solo-game-development-challenge-competition-thing. And here’s a little progress report on my game.

Now it’s the beginning of the second day. Morning so to speak. I still have something like 15 hours to go, which should be plenty, if I don’t end up wasting it by doing something idiotic. Like starting to build this elaborate animation system, which seems really tempting… I sense the presence of a Programming Succubus.

Yesterday I got off to a really slow start. I over slept and lost something like 10 hours. But I got a lot done. The gameplay is pretty much there already (little tweaks here and there) and today should be all about the “polish”.

Here’s a screenshot of the game in action…

Yeah, it’s a color matching game… I feel so ashamed.