March 14, 2020
Last week I entered the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. I used the the px3d game engine with Blender and ClojureScript to build a game prototype.
Aug. 17, 2019
Recently I've been hacking on a game engine for infinitelives called px3d.
It's built on top of ClojureScript, Blender, and Three.js and it runs in the browser.
One feature I'm particularly happy with is the live-reloading of Blender assets into the game. You hit "save" in Blender and the updates appear in the running game a second later - no need to re-compile or re-load the game.
The way this works is with a background script which watches the assets.blend file. It re-builds the assets.glb whenever it is modified, and writes the hash of the file into assets.cljs. Figwheel pushes changes to the compiled cljs files whenever they change, and there is another bit of code which tells three.js to re-load assets.glb if the hash has changed.
Infinitelives
Infinitelives is the vehicle me and my buddy Crispin use to make games and tooling, mostly for gamejams. The gamejam format is great because it is time-boxed, which means we can periodically do this self-indulgent thing we enjoy without taking too much family or work time.
Gamejams are typically only 48 hours long and so we have learned some good techniques for shipping working code under extreme constraints. A hardcore economy of time, resources, and scope is required.
ClojureScript & Figwheel are perfect for this with their hot-loading of modified code. I built the tight Blender re-load integration for the same reason. Hand drawn graphics consume a lot of time during jams and this should help us really level up on the content side of things.
If you'd like to find out when we release games and new tools you can sign up to our release notifications on the infinitelives home page or follow us on Twitter.
If you liked this you might also like my Roguelike game web template which you can get on itch.io. Thanks for supporting my work!
Feb. 4, 2019
A couple of weekends ago my friend Crispin and I made this game as part of Global Game Jam, an event in which participants build a game in 48 hours.
It was a lot of fun and I got to spend most of the time drawing and doing graphics and music, which was a nice break from writing software.
Oct. 7, 2018
I had an idea for a video game a while back. It's a multiplayer mission game with rogue-like elements, set in various procedurally generated airports through which you can transit.
Everybody's missions are all mixed up together, so you might have a mission to deliver a package and somebody else's mission is to stop you. You might be trying to transit throuh several airports and other people are trying to catch you. You might be trying to find an item that somebody else has hidden. You might be chaperone to a VIP and the VIP is another player. Missions would last an average of 5 minutes each and feature a count-down timer as in the game Counterstrike.
The visual style would be vector based similar to those isometric maps you sometimes see in airports.
I don't play many video games but I very much enjoyed the pace and aesthetic of the game Rymdkapsel by Martin Jonasson.
I found it was an easy game to put down and pick up again for short bursts of play.
Probably my favourite video game is Another World by Eric Chahi which features a vector style and is similarly easy to play in small increments.
