So, I was in the Aalborg University in Copenhagen from thursday to sunday, making games and meeting cool (and occasionally less cool) people. I managed to finish two small games during the 48h game jam, one of which got music done by Joonas Turner! For reasons not related to me I didn’t get to submit my games to the voting process, but all in all I was really happy with both. However, the most important thing for me was the social aspect; I had sauna with cool people, had drinks with cool people, slept at cool people’s place and overall cool people were all around me all the time. It seems that Swedish/Danish indie developers are much cooler people than the Finnish ones – there appears to be a trend of more social and open behaviour! I wonder…
KARZ
Cheesy name aside, KARZ is a very simple arcadey arena thing where 1-2 players drive cars around a level and destroy other vehicles with HUGE SWORDS. It’s pretty hard, but I & the guys I played it with found it quite satisfying to play, which is cool. The visuals are intentionally very simplistic and weird, I didn’t really care about graphics here. The players have to cooperate, but they also compete in terms of score. Music done by Joonas Turner.
This game requires a gamepad/joystick! Xbox 360 controller recommended.
It’ll End Tonight
Artsy pretentious artgame with a deep message and ugly visuals. I had a simple idea and decided to get it done in about 8 hours. Overall I’m pretty happy with the result, though – I think the atmosphere works. It takes only about a minute to play through the game, so I recommend checking it out. Controls are WASD + Mouse, although joystick/gamepad is supported and even encouraged. For pads, move with left stick and use stuff with Button 1. Button 6 (right shoulder button) also does stuff.
So, I took part in a 2-month gamedev competition known by the name A Game By Its Cover. The idea is that there’s a bunch of various fake game cartridge images uploaded, and you choose one of them and create a game around it. I collaborated with Jajitsu and Fireshaw, the former of which is a great artist while, Fireshaw being just an all-around cool guy. He designed the levels and did a large part of the actual game design. We also got music from the Hyperduck team, which was really really cool!
We used this cartridge:
I’m not a fan of this cover, really; it’s quite bland and doesn’t give me any inspiration. Luckily, Fireshaw and Jajitsu got some neat ideas from it, so the game ended up being rather solid (in my opinion).
This is kind of silly and not at all cool and amazing, but I just finished a level editor for a competition collaboration project I’m working on (along with ESA and such). Thing is, this editor has some functions that I haven’t tried implementing before, and thus it feels really cool to see them in action. It’s kind of hilarious (in a tragic way): it feels really good to create a level editor that looks and feels solid and bug-free, but actually creating a game using said editor can be feel like a huge chore.
Here’s said editor:
For comparison, here’s the rather simple (but useful!) editor of Environmental Station Alpha:
On sadder news, I still haven’t finished that ~summer game~ so work on ESA wont continue for a while still.
Oh and I also made a painting:
Also also my birthday was yesterday. I’m now one step closer to godhood death.
Too busy to write anything new, so copying from other places:
I made the game Cloud Realm! In the game you control a boy with a glider-type apparatus and fight against a huge robo-serpent thing. There’s only one enemy due to running out of time, but in my opinion the atmosphere & controlling of the glider work pretty neatly and thus I’m pretty happy with the game. There’s also some sort of a “backstory” or “interactive intro cutscene”, although in hindsight I have no idea what I was thinking there. I’d definitely love to make a larger game out of this, but I’m also quite sure that this kind of gameplay would be best fit to be made in flash. Maybe this is the True Motivator for me to learn Actionscript?
~CONTROLS~
A & D – move around
W, SPACE & Left mouse – jump when not flying
ESC – skip the first part of the game (in case you want to get to the action quickly)
Left mouse – shoot while flying
Right mouse or E – leave a bomb while hanging from a surface
Space – cling to a surface and jump off it, more about this in the in-game instructions
In the game you’re controlling a glider-ish vehicle, so horizontal momentum matters a lot – you glide when your horizontal momentum is high, but start losing altitude when you slow down. However, diving a bit and then accelerating makes you gain height. This may need some trying but you have infinite retries!!
All this is also explained in the in-game instruction screen. Shouldn’t be too weird.
screenshots:
Approximately 3 hours 30 minutes left, and I’m quite far into my project. I think I’ll make it! After finishing this, however, I have to return to work on school stuff. The joy!
