Knock the Monster

September 1st, 2008

A little over month ago I was in Sweden, participating this awesome event called No More Sweden. (I’ve been meaning to post a small blog post about that ever since). No More Sweden can be best described as an indie game jam; bunch of friends getting together during a weekend and making games.

Me and Erik Svedäng (of Blueberry Garden -fame) made a game together during that weekend. That game turned out to be this NSFW art game, with a feminist message and we weren’t sure should we post it online or not. So what we did was I continued to work on the game a little and we agreed that I could release the SFW version of the game here.

Knock the Monster

a screenshot of Knock the Monster a screenshot of Knock the Monster Knock the Monster screenshot

Download

Knock.zip (7.4 Mb) (Release 1)

Instructions
Your girlfriend is dead and the Gods say that to bring her back you have to knock over dozens of Monsters.

The goal is to knock over the green monster with the 16-ton weight. You can draw chains and if the boulder hits the end of a chain it will get attached to it.

Draw chains with your mouse. Right clicking will remove chains. To start the simulation click on the Start button (or press space).

Once the simulation is running you can cut chains by clicking on them.

Troubleshooting
If you have problems getting the game to run I’d suggest on installing the newest DirectX 9.0c drivers and making sure you have .Net Framework 2.0 installed.

Credits
Game by:
Erik Svedäng
Petri Purho

Music: Martinibomb and the Coconut Monkeyrocket – Munster Beat!

Sound Effects: anvil_strike_1.ogg – anvil_strike_8.ogg are from Sample package “Industrial_Percussion” by l0calh05t.
chained_up.ogg is from cadenas.wav by plagasul.
click_ok.wav is from click 1 d.wav by TicTacShutUp and
click_deny.wav is sampled from click 1 off click.wav by TicTacShutUp.
Sound effects are licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

The game uses Erin Catto’s Box2D physics engine.

Inspiration source: Experimental Gameplay Project.

Knock the Monster uses: SDL and SDL_Mixer.

Top 24 Games I’ve Created

August 25th, 2008

7 day games that I've created in the last two years
View the full sized image at Flickr

Wow, I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of this blogging thing: 7 posts this month, updated wordpress to the latest version, wrote a headline directly from a blogging guide. Those professional bloggers all say that the headline is the most important thing about a blog post and nothing drives traffic more than “Top X Y things” -headlines. Professional blogging career here I come!

Seriously. This is the link. I updated this blog a little bit and created this page that lists all the games that I’ve created. The order is chronological so it’s not really a “top 24” list of my games, because it’s so hard to judge your own babies. (No it’s not, but the real reason is that this was much easier to do from the technical point of view. It keeps it self updated and everything.)

Gamma 3D

August 16th, 2008

Gamma 3D

The fine people of kokoromi just announced Gamma 3D. Gamma has now become this yearly awesome indie art game party held in Montreal as a part of the Montreal International Game Summit. This year’s theme is stereoscopy and they are calling for games that use stereoscopy as part of their gameplay, instead of just being a purely visual trick. It’s an interesting challenge.

Last years theme was low resolution (256×256 was the maximum) and the results were surprisingly beautiful and inspiring. A lot of really good games came out the last year’s challenge: Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much, Passage and StdBits are the first to pop in to my mind. My entry was Bloody Zombies, which wasn’t exactly the most artistic entry of the bunch… So needless to say, I’m really looking forward to what will come out of this year’s Gamma.

If you’re interested in participating the submission deadline is October 15th. And the Gamma3D party, with the selected games, beer and 3D glasses is taking place on November 19th.

Making of Geometry Wars

August 16th, 2008

A while back I was watching this 1UP feature about Killzone 2 and I thought to myself that I should do a similar studio tour here at Kloonigames office (a.k.a. my apartment). It would have been this parody with these fake motion capture studio shots explaining how the physics of Crayon Physics Deluxe are being made. Stuff like that. Unfortunately the brilliant guys at LoadingReadyRun beat me to it with their Making of Geometry Wars video. Damn.

[via newretro.org]

number_of_xboxes_bought_because_of_braid++

August 6th, 2008

Well, I went to the store and bought a Xbox 360 so I could play Braid today… (Read the previous post.)

I just finished playing though the first world (collected all the puzzle pieces), and I’m totally blown away by it (pun intended). My congrats to Jonathan Blow and David Hellman and everyone involved. You’ve created one beautiful game.

The Princess is in another castle

Also I’d like to repeat what Chris Hecker said about the game. If you enjoy the game (which you will) spread the word. Tell your friends, blog about it, digg about it. Independent games, like Braid, don’t have the marketing power that big studios have. They really need the word-of-mouth to be successful. And if there is any justice in this world, Braid should be a huge commercial success. Put your part in and make sure that Braid doesn’t end up being the Psychonauts of indie games.

Now I’m gonna go and solve the rest of worlds…