I thought I posted this yesterday, but it appears that I didn’t!

So yeah, ESA got a really nice and positive mention at Kotaku.com, and as a result the game’s twitter followers doubled. Pretty cool!

Also LD24 was a total disaster from my part – I didn’t finish anything and the theme (evolution) left me completely uninspired. Boo! During the final hours of the event, I did work on something, but it was hardly worth submitting – I’ve been wanting to make a java roguelike for my cellphone to pass time with. Turns out it eats battery charge really fast so I can’t really use even the bare-bones RL I created, but I had fun working on it! Some screenshots:

Yeah, it’s a painting. Tried some new techniques here, though the result is kind of simplistic and ‘bare’.

Ludum Dare #24 is upon us! The final round of voting started today. There are a couple interesting ones (“Break the Rules”, “Don’t Go Outside”), but as usual the general opinion seems to favour the more ambiguous themes (“Abandoned” appears to be a favourite). I have a couple ideas, but we’ll see whether I have time and/or inspiration to finish anything (I probably will!)

Yay.

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).

The result looks like this:

Visit the game’s entry page!

Working on ESA, among other things. Currently I’m struggling through a lot of bugfixing, streamlining and testing, so that I can work on the new areas more easily.

Here’s the area that I should work on after these nuisances have been taken care of:

It’s a temple/sand ruin -themed area, with lots of puzzles and traps. Working on it should be a ton of fun! Oh! And I’ll soon get to work on the seventh boss, or third mini-boss if you prefer.

In the meantime, have a random teaser gif:

So yeah, that one was some 2 weeks ago, but I completely forgot to mention anything about it here.

It was a lot of fun! We were in Malmö, and I held a presentation showing off the games I’ve been working on (ESA, Officer Alfred & Beyond the Black Hole). I saw a lot of cool games from other people, made new friends and ate bettern food than I would’ve expected from a nerd gathering (didn’t eat a single pizza during the whole trip!)

The coolest thing about the venue was that there was a free-for-all workshop downstairs, with a high-quality laser cutter, tons of useless wood and metal (and bicycles). One of the organizers, Martin Jonasson, had created some custom-made arcade cabinets with his friend there, and we got to make games for them during the jam-part of the event. The coolest was a 4-player cabinet, which looked like this:

I of course made a game for it. Due to the cabinet not being tested very extensively, there were some problems with the controls; apparently the cabinet couldn’t send all input so it might be that one of the players couldn’t move at all if the others were using all of their buttons. Fortunately, this problem was partially solved during the event, and the games people made could be played to their full extent.

I worked with Erik Rönnblom, and together we made a game called “The Boulder Will Kill You”. In the game all the players are chained to a boulder, and thus drag it along wherever they go. The point of the game is to get the boulder into a specifically marked area. This grants the players points and more time to move about.
Have a screenshot:

I also started to work on a simple, humorous cardgame, but didn’t manage to finish it: