My personal blog.
If you haven’t yet played my game, Shade Dogs, it’s now FREE for a limited time, Get it now!
“A casual puzzle game with oodles of charm. 4 stars.” — 148Apps
This update also brings the following changes:
After a couple of months of intense work on Moonman I finally submitted it to GDC China’s indie games festival yesterday. I don’t think it’s complete enough to become a finalist, but it’d be very cool if it did — it would mean I would get to display the game during the big GDC event in Shanghai. Nonetheless, it was an awesome motivator to get stuff done, and stuff definitely got done.
Here’s a short gameplay video I had to make for the submission. Enjoy!
Update: Unfortunately Moonman didn’t make it into the festival, but the finalists all look like really amazing games. Better luck next year! [:D]
The Simple Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) has reached version 2.0! SFML is a great c++ library for creating 2D applications and games, and offers cross-platform access to graphics, input, sound, networking. I’ve been using the beta version in Moonman for 18 months, and it has one of the nicest APIs for a library. Along with the new version, SFML also has a brand spanking new website with lots of helpful tutorials. I’d definitely recommend SFML to anyone who wants to build 2D games, or as a nice alternative to SDL/GLFW/GLUT/etc. And if you don’t use c++ don’t worry, SFML can be used from a number of other languages, such as Python, Ruby, and Java.
Hi there, you blog-reader you. I’ve finished a new game! The game is called Shade Dogs and is available now for iPad, iPhone, and iPod in the AppStore. To get it you can search in the AppStore for “Shade Dogs”, or just click this link. The game is a mix of physics puzzler and mini-games, with awesome colourful illustrations by Jakob Haglof.
Check out the trailer and images below, and don’t forget to join the facebook page to get updates about the game. We plan a series of content updates and are looking forward to getting suggestions from people about what they’d like to see added to the game.
Also keep an eye (or eye-stalk) out in the near future for an article I’m writing covering my experience with making my first game for iOS, how I collaborated on the game with someone I’ve never met IRL, and what it’s like to be an independent game developer.
I made a new game in 2 days for this xmas advent calendar on tigsource. It’s about exploding reindeer. Click here to play it now in your browser. If you make any cool custom levels, then I’d be stoked to see it, so leave a comment here with the URL.
Enjoy the holiday season!
I just added another paper to my list of publications. This paper describes how Fugu works, and illustrates how some complex forms can be created with the system. The paper is yet to be published, but a pre-print/draft can be downloaded from here if you’re interested in procedural organic geometry generation.
Porter, B., McCormack, J., Wetter, J., & Dorin, A. (2011), “A Procedural 3D Modelling and Animation System Based on Lua”. (to be published) (PDF)
We describe a flexible, script-based system for the procedural generation and animation of 3D geometry. Dynamic triangular meshes are generated through the real-time execution of scripts written in the Lua
programming language. Tight integration between programming environment, runtime engine and graphics visualisation enables a workflow between coding and visual results that encourages experimentation and
rapid prototyping. The system has been used successfully to generate a variety of complex organic forms and animations including owers, Haeckel-inspired submarine life, and abstract organic shapes. We use examples in each of these areas to detail the main features of the system, which include a set of flexible 3D mesh operations integrated with a Lua-based L-system interpreter that creates geometry using generalised cylinders.
Work on moonman is progressing well. In the past two weeks I’ve been looking into lighting, and have found a relatively fast solution that looks alright, albeit with a few artefacts here and there. More WIP images can be found in the latest posts in the devlog.
Playing around with terrain generation for moonman and using heatmap-style blocks to help explore it… made a pretty picture… :)
If you have a PC with a decent graphics card, you should definitely check out Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, a program that fits under 4kb that explores a giger-esque fractal world. The world is generated mathematically, and uses some uber programming to generate and render it in real-time on a decent gaming PC. It’s gorgeous.
And if you don’t have a decent PC you can just watch the video on the youtubes.