Bertils Dev Diary

Bionic cowboy

2012-01-30T23:56:00.002+01:00

I ran out of ideas for bosses a bit and resorted to stealing some ideas from old games, and this idea came pretty natural for some reason. It was pretty fun to make this boss though. Although I'm fairly familiar with coding characters with bionic arms it was pretty fun to make the animations for such a character, having been in charge of implementing someone elses swing-animations in the past. And while his moveset is pretty much stolen from bionic commando it was interesting trying to make a boss pattern out of it. I kind of want to make him playable though...

Gameboy shading

2012-01-30T16:14:00.004+01:00

I was a bit bored and didn't feel like starting coding menues today so I played around a bit with my post effects just for fun. Just had to tweak some colours and change a texture to get this effect. I tried rendering it in lower resolution as well to get it more pixelperfect but it just looked worse

Pompadour

2012-01-22T20:35:00.002+01:00

Another short video of GMC. This is the first boss in the game. He has a pretty simple behaviour but can still be quite hard to defeat.

Horsies

2012-01-05T21:50:00.003+01:00

Short video of an enemy I've just finnished working on.
Gameplay wise it's extremely basic but the art and animation took two days to make. I messed up the proportions a bit and had to do my best to salvage it after the animations were already halfways done. I think it turned out decent in the end.

GMC gameplay video

2012-01-05T20:25:00.003+01:00

Made a quick fraps video of GMC, showing the beginning of Level 1 and the basic gameplay and showing of the artstyle

Development is going pretty well right now, though I'm getting tired of doing leveldesign. I might upload some more videos, showing some more interesting gameplay in the near future

Finally getting started on GMC

2011-11-20T00:10:00.004+01:00

So I've tried applying the rendering technique to GMC. Maybe I'm just crazy but I really like the style and I think I'm finally on track to get started on the game properly. I'm changing the plan a bit and I'm going to give the western theme a bit more focus han I previously intended, and have bandits as enemies instead of robots (though maybe some robots will pop up as well). Having more human enemies will probably change the gameplay a bit as well, but I'll still try have it as MegaMan-like as possible with lots of small simple enemies.

Also got it running on Android now. The post effect that's blurring the colours on the character might be a bit too demanding, and I'm not sure how much it really adds. I like it though. I get 30 fps on my Xperia PLAY, so it's probably ridiculously slow on weaker phones. Then again that phone will be about a year old by the time the game is finnished so maybe it's OK. I'm thinking of making it possible to turn of the post effects; but I have to see how much extra work that will be. I'll have to have two sets of shaders for everything in that case, as everything would work a bit different without the post effect.

Btw, what you see in the screenshot is some really old content that I've tweaked a bit. When I first started working on GMC ages ago, before releasing the Wii Homebrew version with the GreenHillZone-like environment, I tried making a train level but could never get it look remotely decent and gave up. I thought it fit the theme quite well and I don't really need much textures with this style so I tried reviving it.

More rendering tomfoolery

2011-11-16T01:50:00.003+01:00

I was playing around a bit with the old rendering demo from my last post and accidentally spawned in the character from project GMC (who I suddenly turned into a cowboy a few weeks ago) without proper textures adapted for this rendering technique, and I absolutely love the result. The thing is, he's supposed to have two textures, one colour texture and one with some details that gets rendered along with the shading and outlines. But he's using his standard texture for the details, which just turned into massive areas of solid shading and for the colour texture he just got whatever texture was used last. In this case it's the texture for the tree trunk which turned him all brown; he also looked quite dashing when he was all green. I've tweaked the texture a bit to make some more details standout before I took the screenshot though.

The look reminds me of something but I can't quite place it. I think it looks a lot better than when I tried doing proper colouring, and somehow it just feels right with the cowboy motif as well.

I'm considering if I should just go ahead and change Project GMC to this style. I'm thinking very sparse environment art that are just outlines with some sketch shading and enemies in this style with just one colour. I'd have to rethink a lot of things, but I'm pretty much stuck anyway and have a hard time finding an identity for the game. This would certainly give it a unique style and it would most likely speed up content creation considerably, but I'm not sure I'd be able to use much of what I have so far, and I don't know how much variation I can make in this style.

I still have to try running it on phones though. It needs to render to a couple of different framebuffers and do some blurring and stuff, which seemed quite slow last time I tried to do stuff like that on iPhone and Xperia.

Old rendering demo

2011-11-12T12:54:00.002+01:00

Found this old thing lying around on my computer and thought it was pretty neat. I made this about two years ago I think. It's meant to look like some kind of water colour + felt pen illustration. I was considering making some kind of artsy adventure game with this type of graphics, but it never amounted to anything. Maybe I should try to see if I can get it to work on GLES and do something small for iPhone/Android.

I'd need to tweak the effect a bit and have some better suited models for the artstyle though. The effect is done by rendering the scene twice, once with colours and once with outlines and shading. The colour texture is blured and distorted a bit to make to colours float outside the outlines slightly. And the sketch shading is of course done by overlaying a texture with a bunch of lines on all the shaded parts, and offsetting it every few frames to make it look less static

(Btw, I reccommend watching it in fullscreen and HD, the effect is pretty hard to make out in the small embedded window)

And now something completely different

2011-11-10T22:22:00.005+01:00

Just realised that I have just been whining for the last few posts, and that's getting a bit tiresome. So here's something awesome and completely unrelated instead. People in freaky costumes playing sweet Dragon Quest music; what could be better?

Time to move on

2011-11-10T21:46:00.005+01:00

So over a months has passed since I released Helium Boy and I still haven't gotten started on my next game and the sales are really awful. The brief upswing I mentioned in my last post didn't last long and now it's down to just a couple of units per day. I tried having a free weekend last week and got over 50 000 downloads. It only lead to a dozen or so extra sales the day after though, and people also discovered a rather serious bug that meant it would not run on iPad for some people so I got a bunch of negative reviews. Unfourtunately I have no way of really testing the bug as everyone I know with an iPad are able to run it just fine. I've also just gotten the game to be featured in the Xperia Play Recommender which was a longer process than I had expected and I'm not sure if it will pay off. Haven't noticed any effect at all yet.

I've been meaning to make a Lite version for iOS but I just can't decide the right balance of content between the Lite and the full version; having two few levels in it will probably seem cheap, but having too many means that there's not that much extra to put in the full version, which will make it seem like a ripoff, and there's also good chance people won't finish the levels in the Lite version and won't ever need to get the Full one. Maybe I should just put everything in the Lite version and have Ads be the only difference, though I'm really not sure how effective that would be.

Apart from worrying about sales and bugs I've been trying to enjoy some time off. I've played through Catherine and put over 70 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles; might post some opinions about them sometime later. But it's really about time to get started on something new now. Don't feel very motivated though and not really keen on either of the projects I've started on right now, but I guess starting another one wouldn't be a very good idea either.

More sales talk

2011-10-17T17:35:00.003+02:00

After my last post the sales have slowly started going up on a bit iPhone. But now I'm freaking out because I just can't figure out what caused the bump, or if I can count on it continuing.

At first it seemed like nothing I did helped at all. I joined Twitter and some retweeting group; posted a press release on prmac which got copy pasted all over the internet; the trailer got posted on gametrailers and I finally got a somewhat positive professional review. But all it did was to keep the sales at a somewhat steady 10 units a day for a while (it sold a whooping 14 units on launch day). It was only a few days later it started going up, going from 10 a day to 20 > 50 > 50 > 80 > 75.

The last bump could possibly be explained by the release of an update (though I'm not sure how that would actually affect anything, as I was mistaken in thinking updates would appear on the release list in the AppStore). I can't find anything new written about it on the internet, or even any new user reviews, and I doubt it has made any toplists or gotten featured by apple. The sales seem to be fairly evenly distributed wordwide as well.

I don't really understand how the App Store works; how do people find games outside the toplists? Is it normal to get random sales bumps? Or can I actually expect for the baseline to continue at 50-80 a day? Even though it's still not much (especially with the crazy swedish taxes) I could make a meager living if those sales continue and then hope to increase my income after a few more games, but with any less than that it seems a bit hopeless.

Helium BOMBA

2011-10-13T11:34:00.003+02:00

It's been a very frustrating week. I've tried my best to pimp Helium Boy online, I've posted on a couple of forums, sent out promo codes to a bunch of review sites as well as random people to get user reviews, I've joined twitter and some indie retweet group, gotten the trailer up on GT and paid good money for a press release. But the game has still barely managed to catch up to Trouser Troubles first day sales on iPhone, despite being a considerably less crappy game, and those sales weren't exactly spectacular either.

Things have been even worse on the android side. I released a demo but it didn't spur sales at all and even the free demo has only gotten 400 downloads in four days. The new Andriod Market means I can't rely on updates to get attention anymore so I'm guessing the money I get from there will almost completely stop before long.

All in all it's starting to look a lot harder to make a living off iPhone/Android apps than I previously thought. My plan was to make a couple of games as quickly as possible until their combined sales could provide me a decent income and then possibly move on to some more ambitious stuff. But these kinds of sales makes me wonder if that's really possible and if there's much point in starting on my other projects. So I don't really know what to do. Should I keep spending all my energy on pimping my stuff and building a name for myself; should I try different business model (freemium or adds or stuff); should I give up and get a job; should I stop making small generic games and bet everything on one spectacularly ambitious project; or am I just overreacting, and I should just keep at it and hope the sales pick up with the next update.

Helium Boy is released!

2011-10-07T09:36:00.003+02:00

It's finally done! Apple review process was a little faster than I expected so I didn't get time to really polish the trailer or to test the Android version on that many platforms but I think it should run moderatly well on most GLES2 compatible phones.

Android Market
AppStore

Very nearly done

2011-10-02T23:07:00.005+02:00

Today I have finally submitted Helium Boy for review for the Apple appstore. I'm slightly ahead of schedule because I cheated a bit with the last two levels. I was really bored with level design and didn't feel that I could make them very interesting so I made them rather short.

So next week I'll be working on a trailer and try to make sure it runs on as many Android phones as possible while waiting for Apples review team. I also need to fix support for the touchpad on Xperia Play, but that turned out to be quite a hassle. You need to use the NativeActivity class, which is only supported from android 2.3, for it to work so I have to make two versions and change some of the code structure.

Looking back at the blog I realised that I have only been working on it for about two months now. It feels like forever so I was rather suprised. Even with the original version (of which there is little left in the game) and the Wii port I made a few years ago, I still haven't worked on it for more than 5-6 months in total. While the game is hardly massive or even very good, I have to say I'm a bit proud considering the short development time.

Almost done

2011-09-23T21:54:00.002+02:00

I just need to make two more levels and then fix the iphone version and then, after five and a half years (or three months depending on how you count) Helium Boy will finally be done. Hopefully I'll get it out by mid october.
Anyway, here's a quick video:

I can't decide what to work on

2011-09-05T12:04:00.003+02:00

So I started working a bit on helium boy. In my last post I said that I would still focus mostly on GMC though. However, shortly after I posted that I started working full time on Helium Boy and set up a schedule that I have followed pretty rigorously. I have made a couple of new levels and the game is nearly halfway done and it's set to be released in about a month and a half. I'm getting extremely tired of doing leveldesign though and this weekend I started on a new game... I really want to finnish a game soon so I can release something; but I kind of want to work on all three games at the same time

2011-08-08T09:14:00.005+02:00

As I mentioned in my last post I've started porting/remaking my old game Helium Boy to Android. Yesterday I did a little update to the main character, and I'm really happy with the results. It's starting to look a lot less like hideous programmer art, so it's nice to see that I've improved a bit in the last five years at least.

The new version obviously doesn't use any lighting, which I think I'll skip altogether in the remake. It also has 30% fewer triangles. If I manage to update the rest of the graphics in a similar fashion I think the game might look rather nice in the end, though that's quite a lot of work and then I still have to make half a dozen levels or so before I can sell it, and I'm prioritizing GMC right now.

Something new and something old

2011-07-31T18:27:00.003+02:00

I've finally bought a new phone! One that actually works and let's me install stuff, and only crashes when there's a bug in the code. With an Xperia Play I also have an excuse to make more traditional games that uses a DPAD, though I might be limiting my market somewhat as the games won't work nearly as well with an onscreen gamepad.

As for the something old; the game in the picture is my old game Helium Boy that I've started porting to Android. I originally made it over 5 years ago when I was studying, and dear lord the code is a mess! It was originally made in Ogre3D, then when I started coding my engine a few years ago I ported it to this engine and released a version for Wii homebrew; however I barely touched the code back then and the engine has changed so much that it was almost as much work to update it to the current version, and even more work to try to clean it up.

I'm not really sure what to do with it. I think the game is pretty nice and works decently for mobiles, even with an onscreen gamepad, but I'll probably want to redo most of the graphics before I release it. And of course I have to make more levels and stuff, which I'm already supposed to be doing for Project GMC, so it'll have to wait.

Summer Edition

2011-07-14T17:15:00.003+02:00

I've just released Trouser Trouble Summer Edition for Android. Woho. It turned out rather shitty though and is really just a shameless attempt of milking more money from the game; there is very few new features and little new content... I was planning to do a bit more but I got really bored with the project. In total it just took about two very slow weeks, but considering how little work I actually did I probably could have finished it in half the time. There are some new features though; you can now pull up skirts, but it didn't turn out very well so it's just available on some levels, and you can also pull off bikini tops on the beach-levels.

I'm also starting to realise that I really need to get a new phone. Whenever a game is bigger than a couple of megabytes it constantly fails to install on my phone, and the phone crashes randomly every now then; not exactly an ideal development platform...

2011-07-06T17:13:00.003+02:00

I just realized that I hadn't updated my blog in ages, so I thought I might as well wright something. Basically I've just been playing games and watching TV for the last two months and enjoyed my unemployment, but I've finally started doing some creative stuff again.

About two weeks ago I started moving over an old half finished game, Project GMC, to Android. It works decently with an onscreen gamepad, and quite awesomely on an Xperia Play, though I probably need to optimise it a bit to get it running with a decent framerate on older phones. I'm not really sure what to do with the game now though; I'm pretty much done with the porting, and the android version of the engine now has almost all the features from the windows version. However the game itself is a half finnished mess, and I'd have to make lot's of content before I can release it, and I don't really have a vision for the game.

So instead I've started working on Trouser Trouble Summer Edition; basically I'm just going to milk the franchise by releasing an almost identical game with some different graphics, and watch the money roll in. I'm working on some small gameplay additions, but mostly I'll just be making new textures. Hopefully I'll be able to push it out in a week or two.

Finally

2011-05-17T07:12:00.002+02:00

Trouser Trouble is now available for iPhone!

At first I got rejected on my fourth submission with the exact same motivation as the last time. "Specifically, we noticed your app's main concept is to pull down people's pants." even though I had changed so it wasn't even possible to pull down pants anymore. So I figured they hadn't even played the new version or read my messages. So I tried to contact them and complain that the latest version didn't get a fair review and say it wasn't possible to pull down pants and there was no nudity and that frankly it wasn't more sexual than an average 1920's comedy. After a few days The games status was in review again and shortly after it was available on sale on the iTunes. It still has a 17+ rating though which is rather silly, but I don't dare try to change it...

Now it will be interesting to see if the sales will be worth all the trouble.

Happy No Pants Day

2011-05-06T12:28:00.004+02:00

Today is the international No Pants Day; a perfect time to play Trouser Trouble.

Anyway, I've just submitted a fourth version to Apple, and completly changed the game this time. You can no longer pull down pants at all. Instead people are walking by and their pants are falling off randomly, and the player has to pull them up again. This also removes any variety I had in the gameplay because none of the different level types I had fits with this concept and I haven't bothered to think up any new ones. But whatever. I've stopped caring about quality or sales a long time ago; I just want to see if it gets approved.

I kind of like the new description I wrote for the game though:
"A severe shortage of belts is plaguing the land and everybody's trousers are falling off. Use the touch screen to help pull them up again!"
And the message to the review people
"The game no longer let's you pull down pants. Instead the player provides a valuable service to society by helping to pull up people's pants and cover up the mild nudity."

So I guess it's back to waiting for another ten days or so... though I really should be starting a new project soon.

Rejection and Pornography

2011-05-04T21:04:00.004+02:00

For the last few weeks I've been trying to get Trouser Trouble on the iTunes AppStore and just recieved my third rejection. When I first got the idea for Trouser Trouble I was certain that it would be impossible to get Apple to approve it for release on Iphone, and I only focused on the android version. However once the game was done it was a lot more harmless than I had originaly imagined and after reading Apple's Review Guidelines they actually seemed fairly reasonable I didn't see anything that would really conflict with Trouser Trouble. There's nothing in the guidelines that completely forbids nudity, and the game doesn't really show anything. So I decided to port it straight off and submitted it.

After ten days I got the following feedback:
We've completed the review of your app, but cannot post this version to the App Store because it did not comply with the App Store Review Guidelines, as detailed below:

18.1: Apps containing pornographic material, defined by Webster's Dictionary as "explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings", will be rejected

I wasn't really that surprised it got rejected and I had considered censoring it from the start, but never whould I have imagined that it would be classified as pornographic. I'm not really sure who is eroticly stimulated by the lowpoly characters, whose sexual organs, that are a few pixels in size, are sometimes visible for a frame or two. And of course the definition is silly, because it's based on what's "intended", and I should just be able to say that erotic stimluation was not my intention. But it wasn't all bad as it started a lot of funny jokes about me being in the porn industry.

Anyway for my next submission I added a pixelation filter as soon as the player pulls down any underwear. After another ten days I recieved the feedback; the game was no longer pornographic. However, now it violated the following rule : 16.1: Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected. I tried to ask some questions via the resolution center and also made sure that it had the highest possible age rating. But the only response I got was a generic reply saying "We encourage you to review your app content and evaluate whether you can modify the content to bring it into compliance with the Guidelines". Crude and objectionable are pretty vague terms butI did my best to modify the content. I removed the ability to pull down underwear and resubmitted the game.

And so today I have recieved the third rejection. Same rule violation; crude or objectionable content, but this time they have specified a bit more: "Specifically, we noticed your app's main concept is to pull down people's pants.". It only took them three times to notice that... They're still encouraging me to evaluate if I can modify the content to bring it into compliance with the Guidelines though; but I'd think that's pretty hard if their issue is with the main concept.

I'm considering if I should submit another version; where you pull up people's pants instead.

The Making of Trouser Trouble

2011-04-30T16:25:00.006+02:00

The game has already been out on Android Market for two months now but I figured I might as well do little write-up about the project, since I've taken up the blog again.

It all started back in january. I was having lunch with a friend and we were talking about work and stuff and how nice it would be to make money without working. He casually suggested that I should start making games for Android. Having just returned to work at M&D and being generally uninterested in mobile phones I was rather dismissive of the idea and jokingly said that I would much rather keep working on my 3d pants removal technology. The words had hardly left my mouth before a brilliant idea struck me; to my combine pants removal tech with Androids touch screen interface and make game were you pull down people's pants.

That very same evening I downloaded the Android SDK and set to work, convinced this idea would make me rich (well maybe not really). I started porting my engine to Java, rewriting it file by file. It wasn't until a week later that someone told me about the ndk, and that it was actually possible to code in C++ for Android. By that time I had nearly gotten it running, and the official documentation pretty much advised against using the NDK anyway so I kept at it. I was willing to give Java the benefit of the doubt despite my extreme prejudice gainst all interpreted languages. After another week I had everything running in java on the platform. However, it was ridiculously slow. I installed the NDK, tried moving some of he most expensive functions to c++, and the difference in speed was almost silly. So then I started from scatch, and after a few days I had everything running smoothly in c++ and my hatred of java confirmed.

Then it was onto making the actual game. I didn't really have much of a plan for the gameplay but I figured it didn't meed much gameplay. A lot of people were weighing in and having a lot of different ideas, about different gamemodes and different types of clothes to remove and different thing to do to people once their clothes were off, but I wanted something fairly simple. I felt it was best to keep it to just pulling down pants. Partly because it was easier make that look good (as detailed in the post about the cloting deformations), but also because pulling down someones pants is less violent than forcibly tearing of their shirt in the middle of a street. It feels more like a simple practical joke, rather than attempted rape; and regardless what you might think I didn't really want to make a very offensive game. Also there is something inherently silly about people walking around with their pants around their ankles. As I realised that I wouldn't be able to make very sexy people with the hardware limitations and with my limited artistic skills, I though it better to aim for some mild sillyness than for sexual arousal.

In the end the gameplay wasn't really that interesting. I realized from the start that there would be a risk of the game becoming more of a onetime joke than something you play over and over, and therefore wouldn't be spread very much or get a high rating. I added a few different types of challenges and a combo system to encourage people to get a good highscore, but nothing really groundberaking. At this point I was getting a bit tired of spending all my free time working on the game and just wanted to get it over with. So I made a handful of characters, clothes and background, whipped up some rather ugly menues and released it as fast as possible.

The total development time was about two months. It was released on Android Market on the 2nd of March 2011. It has not made me rich... yet...

Unemployed again

2011-04-30T15:56:00.002+02:00

It turned out that going back to Might and Delight may not have been such a great idea, so I have now left the company again; most likely for good this time. The commute got a bit too much for me in the end. Also my train card ran out this month. So in order to keep working there I would have to give another 40 000 kronor to SJ for a new train card or move to Stockholm. Neither option seemed very temping; especially considering that the company's financial future is still very uncertain.

I'm not quite sure what happens now though. I have been looking forward to being unemployed and to work on my own projects, but I happened to accept a job offer the other day. I still don't know if anything will come of it though. So I guess I'll just try to enjoy my unemployement while it lasts and see what happens. If I do get started on an epic project I'll try to keep the blog updated.

Back to work

2011-01-04T23:16:00.002+01:00

Happy new year everyone! I've just returned to work at M&D. It feels a bit weird to start working again and very exhausting to go up at 6 o'clock in the morning to catch the train, but hopefully it will work out better this time around. Of course it does feel really nice to get some money again.
Unfourtunatly I haven't finnished any of the epic projects I started during my time off, but I've done some neat experiments with my engine and some pretty effective optimizations. I've almost quadrupled the framerate (though that isn't really as impressive as it sound, given the state it was in).
Also I finally recieved my wacom board yesterday and I've been practicing drawing ever since; in the little spare time I have now. Maybe I'll post some images soon, if I dare. Other than that I probably won't be posting a lot for a while now.

Lack of Love

2010-12-21T21:09:00.002+01:00

This is a game I've been meaning to play for ages. It's an extremely unknown dreamcast game developed by Lovedelic, with music by Hollywood composer and synth-pop legend Ryuichi Sakamoto.
A few days ago I finally plugged in the dreamcast and played through it. But I'm not quite sure if it's absolutly brillaint or plain awful. The game is a kind of evolution adventure, kindof like Evo and Spore. You start off as a small squid-like creature and then gradually evolve into a large mammal. In order to evolve you need to befriend other creatures and collect their DNA. Each type of creature has a different way to befriend them, and you have to figure out how by observing their behaviour and experimenting, without any dialog or text. I really wish I had the patience to enjoy it but in the end I had to use a walkthrough for most of the game. A lot of times it just seems like you have to do random things or you have to watch the creatures for ages before they'll show you what they want; but when I did figure things out myself it felt really great.
Still the game is charming and definitely unique; it has a nice story and some great music, but it's very hard to play after having been spoiled by games that constantly tell you what to do

Merry christmas to me

2010-12-20T10:30:00.004+01:00

I've just ordered my christmas present; a Wacom Intous4 A4. I really miss my old tablet PC, which broke down this year, and my old wacom board is ridiculusly tiny and crappy. I've started sketching a lot in the past few months and I'm also interested in learning more about painting digitally and drawing textures.
Unfoutunatly there are not a lot of mid range products available so I had to buy the top of the line, super advanced Intous4, even though its features and prize far exceeds my needs and my budget. But what the heck, it's christmas and after a year of no pay and eating egg sandwiches for lunch I deserve a fancy toy.

Normalmapped pixel graphics

2010-12-05T10:29:00.005+01:00

This is an idea I've been meaing to try out for quite a while and last night I finally took the time and made a quick test.The idea is to make pixel graphics with dynamic lighting using normal maps, but still keep the hand made, low res pixelart feel. I figured I'd have to use a a small palette for the normalmap as well. So here's a test I did with the character bengt from an old 2d project of mine.

I used a 25 color palette for the normals; it's a bit much but it was the easiest way to do it (5 values for x and 5 for y). As for the results; I'm not really sure what to think about it. It doesn't look quie as bad as I had feared but somehow it feels more like a super pixelated 3d render than a 2d sprite, though maybe it would look a bit better if I made some tiles as well and rendered in his native resolution rather than having him walking around in a 3d world.

2010-12-04T18:20:00.002+01:00

After another week of manic coding and 3d work I think I'm slowly starting to run out of creative energy, and maybe I'll be able to resume some structure in my life; hopefully even get time to go out and buy some food.
I haven't really achieved a whole lot this week though, nothing quite as epic as the pants-removal system at least. I have worked on a lot of small stuff though, and some pretty valuable improvements to the engine. I've improved the shadow system; so shadow rendering will be disabled for all the lights off screen and only be rendered once as long as there's only static objects casting shadows. I've finally rewritten the exporter so I don't have to manually convert all the files to xml after they're exported, and added support for scaling joints in the animations and multiple UVsets.

Clothing deformation

2010-11-28T19:32:00.003+01:00

So I'm continuing working on completely random and meaningless stuff and I started thinking about the best way to animate clothing, and then started implementing what might just be the worst way possible.
I wanted to make a system where the clothes could have their own rig and their own animation, but could easily be linked to a chacter and follow his movements. Then I got a crazy idea that instead of just linking the rigs, I would skin the clothes dynamicly to a character; that way it would actually be possible to make a character visually undress or get dressed.

So I skinned the clothes to a simple rig, then I created a skinweight map for the character, and used that to find out what joint in the players rig to connect each vertex to based on their current position.
Getting this to work on the pants went well enough but it turned out that taking of a shirt is a lot more complicated. Obviously he had to raise his arms before I could animate the shirt, but the shirts animation had to be relative to the bind pose. The problem then was that if I raised the shoulders in the bindpose, somehow the animations got screwed and the shoulders looked slightly off when in their normal position. I tried a lot of different ways to transform betwen the different bindposes, but nothing really worked. In the end I used a very ugly compromise so the shirt uses the matrices based off the normal bindpose whenever it's in it's default position, but as soon as a it starts moving it uses the other bindpose.

I'd probably be able to make it look a bit better if the exporter supported scaling joints or if I make a more advanced rig for the shirt. Anyway heres the result. The clothing items has a simple animation when he takes them off; basicly just moving up or down and squeezing a bit, they are then dynamicly skinned to the character every frame (all in the vertex shader).

While it does look quite horrible and half broken; I still can't help feeling that it looks absolutly awesome somehow. And of course, with a system to animate people taking their clothes off, I'm one step closer to achieving my lifelong dream of creating the ultimate porno game...

Working like crazy on useless stuff

2010-11-25T15:54:00.003+01:00

Life away from work agrees with me almost a bit too well. I've become completely engrossed in what I'm doing, to the point where I forget to eat and hardly leave the apartment; though I have now replenished my cookie-supply so food won't be a problem anymore.

I kind of feel that I ought to be working on some epic project, or at least a small one that I'll be able to show someday, but instead I keep doing a lot of completly random and useless things. I've been working mostly in maya lately; doing some animation, tried making a simple facial rig and modeled some random stuff. It's nothing that's really worth showing or that will be usefull in any real project, but it's relaxing yet fulfilling, which is exactly what I need right now.

It's been pretty much decided that I'll be returning to work in january now, so we'll have to see if I run out of random ideas before then and start working on something more substantial, or if I'll just relax and eat ice cream.

Therapeutic Coding

2010-11-18T19:54:00.006+01:00

After a long period of rapidly increasing bitterness I have decided to take a time out from M&D. It feels weird to leave the other guys in the middle of everything but I need to focus on combating my bitterness. I have devised a strict plan comprised of lots of icecream, nougat and coding.

Yesterday I felt a sudden urge to play around with some rendering code again, so I booted up my old shooter project and started tinkering on some water effects. After a lot of experimentation and eventually some googling I think it's starting to look somewhat decent. It has reflections, refractions, waves and some dynamic ripples when you're moving around in it. The code is of course ugly as sin, but what the hell; I'm off from work now.

Now I just need to figure out a game concept with a pool of water (the water ripple system only works on a small, limited area right now).

to blog or not to blog

2010-06-18T23:33:00.004+02:00

Ok so the blog has been really dead for I while now and I'm not sure whether I should just let it stay that way or if I should bother trying to revive it. Originally the idea was to post stuff about my coding and game development, but soon after I started the blog, the ball started rolling with Might and Delight and I lost all motivation to keep working on my own projects. So basicly I just posted random stuff for a while.

Then of course I started working full time with Might and Delight, which I can't really talk about all that much. All the official news about M&D can be read on the company blog (which no one updates either), and I don't really want to write about anything related to the company behind the other guys backs. However, as most of my worries and hopes are centered around the company right now I don't really have a lot of other things to share either, so this blog is feeling a bit redundant.

Of course I can always keep posting stuff about Doctor Who and various video games (Kirby's Epic Yarn looks amazing by the way )
Anyway... I'll see if I'll bother to keep up the posting in the future

Running a company is exhausting

2010-04-23T00:03:00.002+02:00

It's been about a week since we announces the existence of Might and Delight and the announcement has been a really big success. We've recieved a lot of attention on the internet and gotten a lot of positive emails from old BCR-fans, from the press and even from a few publishers. Overall things are moving along a lot faster than I had anticipated. But it's also really stressful, even though we haven't really started working a whole lot yet. We're mainly answering emails and doing some planning so far, and I'm hardly working full time, but I get increadibly stressed whenever I talk business.
Next week I'm going to Malmö for the Nordic Game conference and some pretty important meetings; I'm already extemely nervous and I think it will only get worse the closer we get to the conference.

Might and Delight

2010-04-16T23:10:00.003+02:00

So now it's official. I'm now a co-founder and part owner of Might and Delight AB and our first press release is starting to make it's way through the internet. I'll refrain from writing any personal thoughs about it just now but here's our brand new website that went online today: MightAndDelight.com

Doctor Who

2010-04-05T22:05:00.004+02:00

Maybe I ought to explain a bit about my previous post and my Doctor Who fandom as the show isn't really that well known around here or in most of the world. Basicly it's a british science fiction series that has been on the air since the 60s. I didn't really know much about it either until a few years ago when I decided to look it up after seeing some references where I felt my geek knowledge was a bit limited. Even though it's a bit corny and low budget and mainly aimed at kids I instantly got hooked when I started watching; it has a lot of british charm that's just irresistable to an anglophile like myself.

The story follows an alien time/space traveler called The Doctor, who picks up random british people (mainly pretty girls) and travels the universe/time vortex with them in his space ship/time machine called the Tardis which looks like a phone booth from the 60s. Also in order to keep the show going for decades, the doctor's race has the ability "regenerate" (change actor) which is what happened in the new season when the tenth doctor, David Tennant, got replaced with Matt Smith (who I must say fills the shoes very well).

I'm really looking forward to the rest of the new series. I still have about 15 seasons of the original series to work my way through though, but it feels a bit ancient at times.

Exterminate!

2010-04-04T00:55:00.003+02:00

Today begins the new season of Doctor Who. Though David Tennant will be missed I 'm eager to see how the series will evolve under the supervision of one the most brilliant men in television: the writer of Coupling and Jekyll; Steven Moffat.

Let's Play High School Reunion

2010-03-30T01:58:00.003+02:00

This weekend I was down in småland to attend a junior high school reunion. It was pretty interesting even though there weren't a lot of people from my old class. I hadn't really talked to any of them since graduation, and not even seen most of them, but I was kind of surprised by how little people had changed. Also I can't help feeling a bit competetive when meeting people from the past, but I think I ranked pretty good; I have a somewhat decent career in a field that I'm passionate about and even though I haven't had much success in relationships or have started family I'm happy with being single for the moment. Also most of the people at the party still lived in the same area where we grew up, which somehow feels a bit weird to me; I'm not really sure why, but it just seems natural to me to include a bit of physical translation in life's journey, then again I have a lot of friends around here that has barely moved away from home.

On a completly different note I have found a new guilty pleasure called "let's play" videos. Basicly it's a youtube phenomenon where soomeone plays through an entire game while filming and commenting the whole time. Of course, watching it might be one of the most unproductive and patethic things ever but it can be surpisingly addictive if the player is fun to listen to. And in my defense I usually just have the video on in the backgroud while doing something else or watch it when I'm really tired/bored/hung over. It's also a decent surrogate for playing through a game yourself if you can't find it or if the gameplay sucks but you want to see how the story unfolds.

...

2010-03-22T17:27:00.004+01:00

I haven't been very productive lately, but as the documets are signed and the money is invested to start the company I'm not feeling much motivation to continue working on my game. Also I still can't get over how brilliant the story in Shattered Memories is, so I've been playing through (or in some cases youtubing through) most of the old silent hill games. I was definatly right in thinking Shattered Memories is different from SH1, in fact it's very different from all the previous games, but I like it a lot more. I really recomend it to everyone, it's also available on PS2 and PSP; I don't know how good those versions are but the story ought to be the same, which is the important part.

Best name for a remake ever

2010-03-18T02:19:00.005+01:00

I played though the new Silent Hill game today. The only memories I have from Silent Hill 1 are from a demo and from the movie though so there wasn't that much shattering going on, but I believe it has very little in common with the original or any other game in the series for that matter, though I've only really played SH2 before.

However I must say I really liked the game and the story was quite brilliant;
the ending left me speechless and after reading some forum discussions about it online I'm actually temped to play through it again for all the stuff I missed and didn't think about the first time. The ending really makes you re-evalute the whole story.

From a gameplay perspective it suffers from some usual problems in survival horror games though; namely that there isn't that much gameplay. However one thing that I really like is that they have dared remove the awful combat, instead youre just running from monster's occasionally. While I can't really say that the chase sequenses are that much better gameplay wise it's refreshing to see a game without a crappy combat system crammed in there; I can think of a handful of other series that really should cut the combat system (Prince of Persia for example).

It's a shame the game is getting so little hype. I'm not sure if Silent Hill puritans would like it, and most people probably doesn't even know it exists as the series has been on a steady decline ever since SH3, but personally I think it's just as good as Silent Hill 2, if not better.

GMC speedrun

2010-03-16T02:34:00.007+01:00

So I'm still a bit anxious about the future and the prospect of starting to work in Stockholm and somewhat disillusioned about my own game and lacking motivation to work on anything at all. Then I stumbled upon this and I felt a bit better.

When some poor soul bothers to post a speedrun (not a very good one though) of an unfinished, unknown homebrew game on youtube, I've got to have done something right haven't I? Though it probably says more about the people on youtube than about the game.

For those who doesn't know, Project GMC is a project I worked on for a while in early 2009; I was kindof hoping to make it into a Wiiware title someday, but when I got the job Pieces Interactive and it was becoming apparent that nothing would happen with the project I released what little I had done so far on the Wii homebrew scene. GMC is short for Generic Megaman Clone btw.

_publishedGames++;

2010-03-11T22:02:00.006+01:00

Just found something funny while doing some random googling; apparently my name is in the credits of an obscure Symbian puzzle game.

Back in 2003, just after graduating from highschool, I was doing some freelance pixel work and somehow got in contact with some obscure company that was going to port some obscure fighting game to the Sega GameGear. While I obviously though this was very strange, I still wanted some cash so I agreed to do the work. Basicly my job was to redraw all the sprite animations in a much lower resolution and a very limited (and quite awful) color palette. After the job was finished I kept looking for news about the game for a while but never heard anything and just assumed they were just crazy people.

However it seems that in december 2008 my sprites found their way into an obscure puzzle-spinoff of said obscure figthing game for SymbianOS mobile phones. Here's the game on mobygames with my names in the credits: www.mobygames.com/game/super-fighter-block-battle (I've done the sprites in the top of the screen; not my best work but I blame the horrible palette that was forced on me).

It also seems that the company has now released games for Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and Atari Lynx so maybe the GameGear thing wasn't that crazy after all... just very strange. It would have been a lot more fun to have a GameGear game in the CV than some lame Symbian tetris clone though.

Commuting

2010-03-09T05:12:00.002+01:00

It's finally starting to hit me how inconvenient it is to start a company in Stockholm (still no plans of leaving Skövde). First of all I'm starting to run out of SJPrio points so I'll have to start paying for train tickets like normal people again soon. Obviously I'll have to buy a one year traveling card if we actually manage to sign a deal and start production; but that's still quite a some time away and the card costs nearly 40k SEK so it's a pretty big gamble to buy it before we know if we'll ever get any money. However before that there will be a number of meetings and a period of working on pitches fulltime, so even in the absolute best case, and if I sleep on a sofa for a week in a row while working on the pitches, I'll probably have to spend 5k on train tickets minimum, and maybe 15k in the worst case; if we make large number of pitches and then give up. I'm not really sure if it's possible save money by buying the tickets though the company either.
Also I can assume that it's pretty hard and expensive to find an office as close to the central station as the old Grin office, so I'll probably need an SL-card as well which is another 700 SEK per month, and it will probably add another 15 minutes or so to my two hour commute. While I'm hoping to be able to have a bit more flexible working hours and do some work on the train, I'm not really sure if that's possible as I'm sure we'll all be pretty damn busy. Also I'm not sure what kind of salary we'll be able to give ourselfs, but I doubt it will be that high to begin with, so right now it feels like all my free time and all my money will go to travels. And that's if things go well.
I kept a brave face during my time Grin as the extreme commute was my own choosing and I felt it was worth it in the end. But right now it feels a bit overwhelming to spend all that money (I haven't even mentioned the 33k I'll be investing in the company at startup) for the chance of working my ass of and spending 4-5 hours a day on a train/subway... but I guess it could be worth it in the end as well...
Anyway... now I'll be heading to the train station...

Insomnia and late night gaming

2010-03-09T04:26:00.006+01:00

I couldn't sleep and I have to go up at 6 am to catch a train to Stockholm tomorrow so I decided to stay up and then sleep on the train instead... we'll see how that goes.... Anyway I turned on the Wii and realized that Megaman 10 has been released in europe now. I guess the proper thing to do would be to make some remark about how Capcom are starting to milk the franchise again, but I find that I don't really mind. I'm not looking for any ground breaking innovation in a pseudo-NES game and I'm perfectly fine with getting a new Megaman every other year or so; they still feel more fresh than a lot of games trying to be ground breaking in today's market. I'm not enjoying it quite as much as MM9 though, but I can't really point to any specific reason, other than the music being slightly less awesome. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood; I am pretty tired and still not quite sober, so this might not be the ideal state to Megaman. I'll play it some more on wednesday; now it's almost time for me to head to the station. I'm temped to try and squeeze in an hour of sleep first but I'm not sure if I dare risk it

Attack of the giant heads

2010-03-08T00:09:00.002+01:00

A little texturing exercise

2010-03-07T18:05:00.005+01:00

I stumbled upon a pretty neat texturing tutorial yesterday that and decided to give it a try today. Basicly you create a few different UV-layers and project different photos to them, then you use the warp image function to convert the images to fit your real UV map and then you combine them in Photoshop. It's a lot easier than trying to use liquify tool to fit photografs to a UV-map directly in PS. Anyway here's the result:

I think it turned out pretty decent; though I was a bit sloppy when projecting the images and of course the 3d model wasn't very pretty to begin with (or the actual model for that matter). Also I really need to figure out a way to render hair other than just a solid textured surface. Not sure if I'll use this for anything (maybe a cameo in my shooter) but it was fun to try and I'll definatly use this technique in the future.

Multiple shadows and a multitude of shaders

2010-03-06T13:07:00.005+01:00

Last night I finally touched the code again after a week of extreme unproductiveness, and started playing around a bit more with the shadow rendering. The plan was to setup a system that could render a shadow map per light. However I realized I had totaly forgotten to add a proper projection matrix to the shadows, which worked decently with directional lights but of course didn't work at all with spot lights, and I had a lot of problems with getting that to work.
I got it to work in the end though but the system isn't quite finished yet, there's still some hard coded stuff and the code really needs a clean up. My big dilemma now is how to set up my shader library; as every object can be affected by a variable number of shadows and lights it might be a bit to expensive to process all lights and shadows for every object, but from I've heard if-statements might be even more expensive so the most optimised way would be to create different shaders for every number of shadows and lightmaps that affects the mesh. Even if I don't create seperate shaders per number of shadows it's starting to get a bit out hand to just copy paste my shaders whenever I need a small change somewhere so I really need someway to structure up a proper shader library.

Ace Attorney Investigations

2010-03-03T17:47:00.005+01:00

Ok I don't want to turn this into a regular gaming blog but I felt I needed to wright something about the awesomeness of the new Ace Attourney since I mentioned it in my Heavy Rain post. One of the biggest differences from the previous games is that they've switched to third person view in the investigation scenes, and the sprites are absolutly gorgeous. If there was anything that could make me love this series anymore it's a 16-colors, 80 pixels high sprite of Edgeworth pointing his finger.

Epic phone conversations

2010-03-02T20:01:00.005+01:00

I recieved some updates about the company today. It seems thing are moving forward; next week I'll be going to stockholm again to discuss the formalities and the bureaucratic aspects of founding the company and then we'll start contacting publishers as soon as possible. Also I had a phone meeting with Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, today about the cost of licensing the Unreal engine. It was pretty scary, as I get really nervous by telephones in general and don't really have much experience of talking with higher ups in the game industry, but it went pretty well; he seemed like a nice guy and I got a lot of good information. Of course we're still far from deciding anything about an engine... I'm still kindof wanting to go with my own engine even though it's definatly not a very good idea.

Heavy Rain

2010-02-27T11:54:00.004+01:00

There hasn't relly been much progress on my game lately unfourtunatly; mainly because I haven't been working very much, but also because stuff takes time.

Anyway, I played through Heavy Rain yesterday. There are a lot of nice things you could say about the game; the graphics are really nice, the story is intruiging, the production values are excellent and I definatly like the lack of aliens, zombies and superheroes. However, as a game it fails miserably; for the most part it can be described as watching a decent crime drama while someone is constantly pressing pause and hiding the remote... and sometimes beat you with it. The gameplay very heavy on quick time events (as well as not so quick events where you just have to do a weird button combo to move on) and when you're actually moving around freely the controls are just painful. As for the choices it's hard to know exactly how much you are actually affecting, there are a couple of branches in the storyline, but most of the stuff seems pretty isolated.

It has a couple of technical issues as well; I got three crashes during a single playthrough and when I tried replaying the last chapter to get a better ending the game won't load. Also the game isn't very kind to us SDTV enthusiasts; when you're making choices it's really hard to see the button icons that corresponds to the different alternatives so I had to guess a lot of the time.

Next I'll be playing Ace Attourney Investigations for a very different take on the Crime genre.

The adventures of Lolo

2010-02-25T17:15:00.002+01:00

I finally got around to playing the first Lolo game for the NES today (another excellent excuse not to work on my game). It's been on my todo list for years as I've never really played any of them. It was actually a really fun puzzle puzzle game and a decent challenge towards the end; though parts of the ruleset felt a bit arbitrary and illogical at first, and the music is really annoying...

Buy Fret Nice!

2010-02-23T21:14:00.009+01:00

Apparently Fret Nice is finally released on XBLA tomorrow. Woho! So go ahead and buy it, but don't even think about using the guitar controller. While it's unfortunate that the main gimmick doesn't quite work, I still think we did a pretty nice job, given the circumstances and the short development time.

So anyway; I tried doing some optimisation today and implemented some simple profiler tools, but it's really painful to do profiling on PC; the framerate fluctuates about 30% even when I don't do anything. I still managed to find a couple of things to fix, but I'm still worried about how many enemies I'll be able to have, especially if I want it to run on any computer even sligthly older than mine.

Also the plans of starting up a company are moving forward. I'll be heading up to Stockholm again soon to meet with the old engine guys from Grin and have a look at their new engine. I also recieved a mail from Mark Rein, the president of Epic Games, today and I'll have a phone meeting with him to discuss licencing the Unreal engine. It's pretty scary actually; I was just expecting a generic reply from their sales division...

Getting tired of art

2010-02-23T01:58:00.004+01:00

After my failed attempt at designing an enemy and my general unhappiness with my enviromnent art I felt the need to do something really straight forward today, so I modeled some fruit. All games need some collectable oversized fruits. Some of the textures aren't really finnished and I'm a but worried I made them a bit too low poly, but it'll do for now. I think the normalmaps should be fine even if I add some more polys so it's no biggie.

Also today was the first time in ages that I actually did some gameplay code (I made a simple pickup class for the fruits). Even though it was just a tiny bit and really simple and I was still a bit drunk from the monday beer, I realized that I kind of miss it and I'm getting tired of spending so much time on art, but I don't want to work with dummy art either. Even though I really enjoy doing everything myself, it's just so frustratingly slow sometimes.

Attack of the Mecha Giraffes

2010-02-21T16:39:00.007+01:00

So I got bored with environment art and wanted to do something a bit more silly, so I started working on a mecha giraffe to use as an enemy. Unfourtunatly the design, which was really awesome in my head, looked utterly crappy when I started modeling it... I guess I really ought to start doing some concept sketches before I model stuff.
Anyway, here's an army of half finnished giraffes in game. It'll be the last you will see of them though.

Awesome self discipline

2010-02-19T21:23:00.003+01:00

So this was supposed to be the week when I started working seriously on my game, eight hours a day with a fixed schedule. This worked out great on monday, less great on tuesday and since then I haven't gotten any work done... Somehow I've just been too busy; playing Tatsunoko vs Capcom and making kroppkakor are valid excuses to skip work right? Oh well, there's always next week; it's not like I have a deadline.

Environment Art, Engines and Stuff

2010-02-19T01:42:00.001+01:00

So I've been trying to do some environment art lately which is slow and painful work and I really suck at it. Somehow I end up doing what I hate in other games, relying way too much on normal maps and specular which makes everything look like wet plasic, but it's the only way I manage to make anything that looks even half decent. I don't really have anything new to show yet though.

Anyway I was in Stockholm yesterday, talking with some old co-workers about starting up a company; it looks like things are moving along a bit faster than I anticipated. Among other things we discussed what engine to use. I had to advise against trying to use my engine, as it's nowhere near ready to be used in a commercial project. However afterwards I started regretting this as I'm falling a bit more in love with it every second and I really don't feel like spending lots of time getting familliar with a fancy licenced nextgen engine that. So I'm currently trying to look into the cost of licensing different middleware engines, but I'm secretly kind of hoping they'll all be too expensive so we'll be forced to go with my engine in the end.

Introduction...

2010-02-16T01:42:00.000+01:00

Okay, so now I have a blog and hate myself ever so slightly for it, but as I'm working alone on this project and there is no one to witness the progress, I feel the need to document the development somehow, and thus I've started this blog. I'll try to update as whenever I have something new to show or whenever I feel like it.

So anyway, I guess I should present the project a bit. Last year, before I started working at Pieces Interactive, I played around a bit with some OpenGL code and made a simple 3D engine. After some short, half finnished projects I put it on ice but have just picked it up again. Apart from the very basic engine I'm also making a game; as I've made a lot of platformers in my days, I felt an urge to try out a genre I haven't had as much experience with, so I'm making a simple third person shooter. The plan it to keep it as simple as possible and really keep the amount of content down to a minimum. So expect a few constantly respawning enemies in a fixed area, but I hope I'll be able to add a bit more crazyness to it than that. I don't really have any grand plans or hopes that this will become the next Halo, or in any way a commercial product for that matter; I'm just hoping I'll be able to create something fairly decent and learn something from it, while enjoying myself at the same time.

Anyway, I haven't gotten very far but here is an early screenshot of a character, a half finnished house, some nice lambert gray and some bloom