Lack of Love

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

...

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

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

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++;

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

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

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

A little texturing exercise

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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...

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