This time I had decided beforehand that I wanted to do something more ambitious, and I decided to make a 2D platformer game with its main focus on boss fights! That’s a lot of ambition, something I got painfully aware of… I did however manage to finish it on time for the jam.
Except having an ambitious idea, I also hosted a Real World Gathering at my office at Isotop.
Read on if you want to know more about the event and the process behind the game…
I have found a fantastic tutorial series on 2d in Unity which can be found here (it’s several hours in length).
Not only do they build a complete game (instead of the usual one-screen-tutorials most others do), they also tackle complex subjects such as slopes and moving platforms. And they do it with really beautiful code! It’s very obvious that the programmer is extremely talanted. He manages to keep the code very clean and readable, and keep the abstraction levels very well separated. This is one of the best game programming tutorials I’ve seen in a very long time! I highly recommend it!
And after watching through it I started writing my own custom 2d physics. Why? Because I don’t like the built in for 2d games. You cannot do obvious things such as cloud tile collisions for example.
I was wrestling a bit with how to get my tiles 1:1-scale. Turns out this is the way to go:
Set camera to orthographic (2d), and set the size to screen height/2. Since I optimize for PS Vita screen (960×544) that’s 272.
Now the tiles are super tiny. That’s because I created the vertexes with 1 unit as spacing. My tiles are 64×64 so I can either re-write all my vertexes (multiply them with 64). OR we can keep the 1-unit vertexes and divide the camera size (272/64 = 4.25)
Bingo!
Will probably cause some problem when I have to move my sprites by 1/64 per pixel… That’s future Tommy’s problem though =)
Oh, and if you have a dynamic size of your screen you can use Screen.height;
I have a really simple/stupid demo today. It is however a little bit more awesome behind the scenes as I render the tiles to a mesh programatiacally in Unity. I used most of the stuff from this really awesome tutorial http://studentgamedev.blogspot.se/2013/08/unity-voxel-tutorial-part-1-generating.html (but I left off in part 2 when he started with custom meshcolliders. That was after I found out that Unity has a 2d Edge Collider…. NICE!
I’m done witht the Tutorial now that I’ve spent the last week working on.
<< Click to play >>(req. Unity Web Player)
It was a very good tutorial, and I think it was good to make a complete project from start to end, including different screens, win/lose-conditions, sounds and publish settings. Highly recommend that tutorial for anyone who’s new to Unity!
The tutorial so far is actually really good! It goes a bit out of line in name of teaching, but I guess that’s ok.
There is no way I’ll be able to enter in that miniLD, but I guess that’s ok too. Better to go through a few of these tutorials instead and get to know all the quirks of Unity instead of trying to learn by bashing my head against it.
As soon as the tutorial is complete I’ll post a link to the final game.
Oh, and note to self:
I really need to get more familiar with MonoDevelop. It works when I copy-paste code from a website, but some methods just seems like they won’t autocomplete at all, like the
I also need to figure out the keyboard shortcuts for starting the game instead of having to click on that tiny button. Peferablydirectly from MonoDevelop.
But this is a common frustration when starting with a new editor =)
Ok, unity has a lot of new stuff to cover. Today I started from scratch with a simple 2d-tutorial.
It turned out to be quite good, covering sprites, spritesheets, animation and animation controllers. Good stuff!
On June 28, 2013, me and Simon finally released our long running hobby project Ripple Dot Zero, and soon after it began to spread across the internet. We were of course hoping to get some attention for the game, but we were completely overwhelmed by the response we recieved from press and fans.
Here are a selected number of reviews and comments. And I have to say: getting responses like this really warms my heart!
Last night, at the annual EGR Operator Awards (EGR is the world’s acknowledged leaders in business-to-business information provision for the online gaming industry) Quickspin scored big by winning the prestigious Game Of The Year with the game Big Bad Wolf.
It’s also worth noting that our game had some really fierce competition. Among the other nominated games you’ll find titles such as Elements: The Awakening by Net Entertainment and MONOPOLY Plus by IGT (the links are to their youtube trailers).
So I’m very happy for Quickspin to win this award, and I’m also very proud myself since I took a very active role in the development of this game. As Lead Developer I designed the overall system for the game, implemented the “swooping reels” feature and lead the team during the production phase as Scrum Master.
So my huge congratulations to Quickspin, and to the entire Big Bad Wolf Team.
I knew beforehand that I wanted to make a game that I could port to mobile devices and tablets, but the theme got me off guard a bit. The take became that you have to save cute pink blobs from a bomb with a 10 second fuse.
Big bad wolf is a slot game with a nice twist. If you get a win, all symbols involved in that win will be removed, and new symbols will fall down – meaning that a win can trigger another win, chaining together huge combos (like bejeweled).
I was lead developer (and scrum master) on this game, which was produced by Quickspin.
If you missed the announcement-trailer you have to check it out immediately! Yes now! Do it!
In-game screenshot from Ripple Dot Zero
Today is a big day for me. Today we announce the official release date for Ripple Dot Zero, my long ever-lasting game project together with Simon (you can find more Ripple info on our Pixeltruss-blog), but right now I just want to share my personal view.
I wrote the very first line of code for this project in February 2008, that was for our custom made level editor, and started working on the game engine shortly thereafter. That is more than five years ago!!!
Supernova is a Slot Machine from Quickspin, where you can multiply any wins you get with the amount specified in the two right-most reels (by most you can get x10 + x10).
The game gets pretty intense if you get really high wins (as this video below shows).
For the most part of this project I was the only developer. I was also Scrum master. One of the two artists working on this game together with me was actually Simon, who made all graphics and level design for Ripple Dot Zero and Metro Siberia.
This time I was aiming for a space shooter game, with a very special control scheme that I’ve been having in the back of my head for several years.
Unfortunately I’m not very pleased with how my entry turned out in the end. Read on to get more details…
I’m done witht the Tutorial now that I’ve spent the last week working on.
