TLDR - Part 1

So, I’m currently on parental leave for 6 months. I hadn’t planned on doing any programming. I thought taking care of two twin girls 10 months old would take 100% of my energy, but I figured I get an hour here and there every now and then that I could devote to some programming.

I need a project!

TLDR stands for Tommys Ludum Dare Resources… or something. Not quite sure yet.

It’s going to be a 2d game engine built in haxe, on top of openFL and my previously built entity framework Seagal. A small engine, that I can leverage on when doing game jams such as Ludum Dare. And I’ll be starting from scratch.

Here is a list of some things I figure would be nice to have in the engine. I might add or remove stuff as time passes.

• I don’t want it to be tile based. I want everything to be freely placed and rotatable.
• For that I need to write some fancy collision system. Both broad and narrow phase.
• Need to work a lot on making this debuggable. A lot of places where stuff can go wrong.
• In-game level editor will be needed.
• Game objects and animations.

Wow, that’s a lot. I think I’ll stop there for now. We’ll see how this turns out. Today I’ll start on setting the project up.

Bait!

Today Resolution Games (where I work) have released the game Bait! for Samsung Gear VR. Relax, catch some fish, upgrade your gear, chat with the local hillbilly.

I was on the team for the last three months of development.

Platformer in VR - Part 7

Sidetrack! I got an idea that I really wanted to try. Removed the player and focused only on playing with the level design.

Imagine that you are running around on a scaffolding structure really high above the ground. Running, jumping, swinging.

That has always been a dream of mine (if I had more than one life). I guess that’s why I love platformers so much…

Platformer in VR - Part 6

Ugly skybox, but smaller gifs

Tick tick tick… boom! The bomb will carve a spherical hole out of the blocky ground.

Kind of remind me of another game with blocks…?!?

Platformer in VR - Part 5

By pressing the fire button you remove the blocks directly to the sides of you (left, right, front and back) if there is a block there.

Today was just a quick session. Need to play around a lot more with these mechanics to figure out where to go from here…

Platformer in VR - Part 4

There were some obvious problems with my earlier progress with this project, so I had to take a step back before I could go on.

So I created a new scene, wiped all enemies from it, created a 15x15x15 grid, randomly filled it with blocks and dropped the player on top of it. We are progressing forward again, this might be something interesting…

Good bye Wordpress, hello static html!

Finally! After more than two months of work I can publish my new website, where blog, portfolio and devlogs are merged, using Hugo to generate static content.

This is the first time I’ve done html in over ten years… I cannot say I miss it. But at least this meant that I could throw TWO wordpress sites in the dumpster, so I guess it was worth it.

Now on to code some fun stuff again!

Ludum Dare 34: Disassemble

Theme: Two Buttons and/or Grow

Bullet hell with two buttons!

View the Ludum Dare page Play the game (webGL)

With two 5 months old twin girls my time was stricly limited, and I had decided to skip this Ludum Dare. That was until I found out about the theme(s). I loved them both! And I had an idea that would be quick to implement… or so I thought.

The result would be my most successful Ludum Dare entry yet…

Platformer in VR - Part 3

Managed to get some enemies into the game. Make sure to lean forward and look around corners to avoid surprise ambushes!

This is just a very first draft and needs a lot of work, but I really like how this is coming together.

0 Hour Game Jam 2015

Point and click adventure about hunting a unicorn, made in 0 hours

Play the game here, directly in your browser (do not try to play it from your phone): http://www.salomonsson.se/0h2015/

Timelapse of my screen of me coding the game here: https://youtu.be/yMiWicn2LnI

The Zero Hour Gamejam happens once a year, when daylight saving makes one hour magically dissapear. If you manage to make a game within that hour you’ll be able to claim that you made a game in 0 hours (or less).

This is the second time I participate, but unfortunately I did not manage to keep within the time limit. In fact I blew the deadline by 30 minutes. That is either “just 30 minutes”, or “50% over my budget”. I’ll choose the latter, to overshoot by that much is not ok! So why did I fail? Here are my thoughts:

Platformer in VR - Part 2

Note that for this demo I’ve disabled the VR camera

So, it was pretty obvious what the next step needed to be. Particles! I’m not really satisfied yet, but I haven’t spent a lot of time on it. It will have to do for now… I have also rotated the directional light so the shadow falls more right below the player, so you’ll better see where he’ll land when doing a jump.

Next up: Enemies!!

Platformer in VR - Part 1

This is how it looks through a VR Headset

I recently got to borrow an Oculus Rift DK2 from Resolution Games, and for a few couple of nights I’ve been playing around with an idea I had, that actually is starting to turn out pretty cool.

But it’s hard to get enough time with 2 months old twins that wants your attention =D

Playing with shaders - Part 3

My recent days of night dev has been a bit fragmented due to the fact that I have two newborn kids that require a lot of attention. But whenever I get a spare moment I try to do a little bit of programming, so todays post is actually the result of several short days of work.

First of all I needed to read up on plasma effects again. Haven’t done that in several years, and it turned out I did not fully remember how it was done. But I did find the excellent tutorial I used several years ago, I highly recommend reading it!!! It is ugly, but very interesting read: http://lodev.org/cgtutor/

After that I started playing with shaderToy, trying to get a plasma shader running.

And lastly, I implemented that shader into my c++ sandbox project. Something seems to be a bit off though, it is way to bright. I think it is because the range of each sine/cos-effect (that is merged together to form the plasma) has an incorrect range (not 0-1), or perhaps the area is too zoomed in – but it’s too late to start bug-hunting now so this will have to do for now.

Next up: colors and bitmaps!

Playing with shaders - Part 2

Spent several hours rewriting my setup code to play with shaders. This is a tutorial that explains it very nice and cleanly: https://open.gl/introduction

I also found a library for loading png files from disc, that don’t require you to invoke make-scripts and all that madness. Just add one .h and one .cpp-file to your project and you’re done! The name is LodePNG. However, did not come far enough to read textures into my shader.

However I managed to get uniforms working, so I could pass the current time to my shader and animate it. I guess that’s something. That’s all for tonight.

Playing with shaders - Part 1

Since I became a father of two twins, two months ago, I haven’t been able to do much coding at all. Any opportunity I get I have to make sure I do something really small since my work time gets very fragmented.

So I started a c++ project, open a window with an openGL context, and started playing with some really basic shader code. As I said, I didn’t get very far before I had to abort. But it’s something.

Just wanted to save the links to some pages that helped me setting up GLFW on windows in Visual Studio 1013. http://www.41post.com/5178/programming/opengl-configuring-glfw-and-glew-in-visual-cplusplus-express

http://www.codeincodeblock.com/2013/05/introduction-to-modern-opengl-3x-with.html

https://github.com/smokindinesh/Modern-OpenGL-Series

#version 420 core

out vec4 color;
void main() {
float x = mod(gl_FragCoord.x, 100.0) / 100.0;
float y = mod(gl_FragCoord.y, 100.0) / 100.0;
color = vec4(x,y,1.0,1.0); }