Sept. 13, 2009

update: Oh wow, I completely forgot that there is already an awesome indie game called Dyson, thanks for reminding me, Dan!

Here's another AsteroidsTNG prototype. This asteroid field goes on until MAXFLOAT before looping (I think) and it contains up to 2^32 unique asteroids. I had to remove the collision detection, so you can fly through asteroids, but don't let that stop you from exploring! Oh wow, I just tested this on Internet Explorer and it runs hellishly slow. Sorry IE user, whoever you are. :(

(click on the image to play)

I think if I was ever to turn this into a proper game, I would call it Dyson, after the physicist Freeman Dyson who came up with the concept of the Dyson tree, which I would hope to work into the game. A short time ago I had the great fortune of briefly meeting Freeman Dyson's daughter and tech luminary, Esther Dyson, source of the following great piece of advice:

"Fail cheap. Fail fast. Fail often. Always make new mistakes." -Esther Dyson

I am a huge fan of this philosophy, especially when it comes to rapidly prototyping software and games.

This game was written inside the jsGameSoup framework.

Writing games for javascript and the canvas tag feels a bit like being an eight year old again, trying to squeeze every last cpu cycle out of my parents' Apple //e. Good times!

Aug. 31, 2009

Hunt is an augmented reality game. Players enter the game by downloading it onto their mobile, where it runs in the background all of the time.

Whenever the player goes into a public place such as a shopping centre or park, they become "in-play". They can also enter the "in-play" state by requesting a quarry at any time and the server will assign a geographically proximous quarry for them to hunt. A player will often be quarry and hunter at the same time.

In order for the player to claim a frag, they must locate their designated quarry in the public space and aim their mobile's camera at the other player. On the screen the quarry's unique icon will appear over the other player. Once the hunter snapshots the icon and player together, they claim the frag. The quarry can defeat this by doing the same to the hunter first. The snapshot must contain an icon with a clearly visible person beneath it to be a valid frag.

If a player is in a public place and they become a quarry, they will be notified by a normal mobile notification (sound, vibration, sms, etc.). If the hunter is within a certain distance, the quarry will be notified with a different "danger" sound.

A website tracks frags by player, area, etc. Frag verifications are crowd-sourced on the site or by email, sms, etc. Random users will be asked to verify the frags of other players.

Aug. 28, 2009

This is a free album of breakbeats, bloop-bleeps, and guitars which I never properly released. So now I am. It is Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to download, copy, share it if you like it.

Enjoy!

cryptolect

It would be nice if a few more people hear it, so if you like it I would really appreciate it if you blog/tweet or whatever about it.

This album was composed with a type of old school software called a tracker early this decade, which was and still is often used to make video game music.

Thanks for listening.

July 19, 2009

I was having a really dull time trying to port my GameJam0509 entry to anything other than the development platform, Debian GNU/Linux. I managed to get it running under Mac OSX 10.5, but Windows was giving me a really hard time, so I've done is what any self-respecting internet slacker would do and made a game trailer instead. This is all ingame footage (sorry about the low framerate but the game is heartily unoptimised).

The Infinite 8-Bit Platformer concept is an idea I had ages ago, and the basic game design is this:

  • There is no shooting or killing in this game. The primary game mechanics are exploratory and social. You can run, jump, go through portals to new levels, and collect things.
  • Content is user generated. As you can see in the video, the game includes an in-game editor. You can edit levels, portals (connections between levels), and items.
  • It's massively multiplayer in the same way that a MUD is massively multiplayer. As you explore the levels you can see other people doing the same, and you can stop and chat with them, give them items, etc. (this bit isn't implemented yet).

So basically I was hoping that if enough people used the game enough we'd end up with a massive, social, network connected platformer which you could explore for hours and hours, always finding new and interesting things, places, and people. Maybe I'll finish it one day, we'll see. In the meantime, all there is is this trailer and blog post. :)

Anyway, one things that GameJam0509 taught me is that the old way of making games kind of bites, and the web based entries kicked butt. From now on I think I'm going to try and do game development in the open, on the web.

July 18, 2009

I've been doing a lot of really boring, but neccessary work on the documentation for jsGameSoup, the Free Software library/framework I've been writing so that I can make web based games without using Flash. So here it is (click on the image below). Enjoy!

jsGameSoup link image