Lost interest in the roguelike at the map generation stage.. so I'm starting on a new little project.
I always liked RymdKapsel by Grapefrukt, and I want to make a game like it. but since I have no idea about that game yet, I've decided to just make a clone of Rymdkapsel for the heck of it :)
Here's what I have so far

RogueLike 4 map generation

Messing around a little with Perlin noise and some smoothing to make some interesting organic looking shapes.. Don't know if I actually want organic or more straight walls though...

next step would be to gather all these blobs, choose one or several and try to add them to our map, kinda like Brogue does it.

Roguelike 3 lighting

I added a smoothing pass over the lighting calculation to smooth the lights of the current tile by looking at its neighbors.  this way you get a nice soft shadow instead of a hard one. I think it looks better. It's not perfect though. some corridors cast a darkness onto lighted tiles.. but for now this is fine.

Also limited the calculating of tile lighting to the tiles surrounding the player, not the complete map at once (2nd half of the video)
The players light is a bit less bright now,  so when you enter a room with torches, you notice stuff getting brighter and not just 'all tiles are bright now'

I wanna try and do some level generation for my next experiment..

Roguelike 2

Listening to some 'epic music' while coding to set the mood.

I've changed some bits here and there.. added smooth camera movement,  player can see a lot further, which looks nicer.
Added some really dumb monsters and created a raycast fuction that works with my grids.
So the monsters will check if player is in range and if they can see the player (walls block their view)

Roguelike

So I was without inspiration again and complained about it to a collegue of mine, he then suggested I make a roguelike game...

Ok, let's give that a try :)

here's what I have so far:

Got a little more work done on my platformer. Using a rigidbody. but i want to add some inertia to the walking... maybe gonna use a character controller... we'll see..
It looks like this now :)

Blazin' trails

Wow, over a year since the last update, and the worst thing is,  I haven't really done any work on the partygame..  sigh.

But now I'm working on a remake of the classic C64 title Trailblazer 

Today I've fiddled around a bit with character movement and animation for my platformer game.

I would love to have a character like in Tiny Open world  but alas, I suck at 3d modeling, so my basic characters will have to do for now :)

After the I made some simple animations for idle, walk, run, jump and doublejump,  I quickly setup the animator states and blendtree and added them to my (very basic) charactercontroller and lookie here, we have a little moving jumping guy who can also double jump :)

Redid some work on my character prefabs and anims. they now point in the actual transform.forward direction. So my rotations in game can be a bit more logical :)

Started work on a new game, but didn't have a lot of time for it, so I got as far as a simple setup with some players that can move around.

I'm thinking of making a coop platform or something? got inspired by the Game grumps playing Mario World 3d or maybe a shooter.. I don't know yet.  suggestions welcome :)

Now that I have more than 1 game, I've added a simple level select screen.
So you can go from character select, to game select, to game, and back to game select, yaay

I've also fiddled around a little with post processing for the reaction game.
Lets see if this animgif works

New Game

After years of having an inspiration block. I finally decided what game I want to create.

Now I've changed jobs since my last post and am now a Unity developer, so my next game is going to be a Unity game. It will be a local multiplayer partygame for PC's using controllers. I'm getting inspiration heavily from Fusion Frenzy on the Xbox classic and old atari and c64 games.

I'm making it for myself and my friends. No plans on going public or stuff like that :)

 The first minigame is an Atari 2600 inspired Combat game, and specifically the funnest level we always played.. level 7 (bouncing bullets) but this time with 4 players.

 

 The second game, I just started working on this evening is a reaction game where you need to jump over or duck under obstacles.

 

Interaction in unity3d with Google Vr sdk (google cardboard)

I'm putting this mini tutorial here because I keep forgetting each step to get stuff interactive in Unity3d with Google VR sdk
Install the Google VR Unity sdk ( https://github.com/googlevr/gvr-unity-sdk )
Assets - Import Package - Custom Package
locate the google sdk where you downloaded it,
select all and import.

Next delete the main camera from the scene.
Add the GoogleVR-prefabs/GVRMain.
Add GoogleVR-prefabs/UI/GvrReticle to the GvrMain/Head object.

Add a floor object. 20x1x20, give it a texture so you can see it better when moving.
Move the GvrMain up about 1.8 m

You can now look around and have a reticle.

Now we want to be able to interact with objects and have the reticle have a sortof 'mouseOver'-effect.
To get this to work we need to:
Add a Physics Raycaster component to GvrMain/Head/Main Camera.
Add ui/EventSystem to our scene.
Add GazeInputModule to the EventSystem in our hierarchy. Make sure to move this up so that its above the StandaloneInput module.

Now we add a cube to the scene, and add an Event Trigger component to it. (This is important, because without the eventTrigger (even if you dont have an event added) the GvrReticle will NOT ot respond when you look at the object)

Thats the minimum you need to get object interactivity.
You can now add a ointer click event for example and do some useful stuff there.


Next step, how to get the coordinates of the location you clicked on.

Iso map

I've been wanting to write an ISO game for a long time now, but I've never gotten my game idea straight.

Still haven't... so I decided to just start off with an ISO map routine first and see how well it runs on my Playbook.

Here's what I've come up with so far. not much functionality, but it works, and its nice and smooth on playbook. (Where we unfortunately can't use Starling because it doesnt support Stage3d yet :(

Click here (move mouse over screen to see it once loaded ;)

rcBoats

Our latest iPad game has been approved and is now for sale on the appstore!

rcBoats for iPad.

It's a fun little 2 player game where you can boat around in your own virtual pond.

Game idea, graphics, sound and programming all done by me :)

Don't forget to give it a (good) review if you pick it up ;)

Here's some screenshots:

Air for iPhone - loading external .swf files

If you are creating apps for iPhone with Air, you might have the need to load external .swf files.
In my case, it was the need to be able to have downloadable content.
I can't really think of another reason why you would want to do this, normally using .swc files is the way to go.

Anyways..

When you want to load an .swf file from an Air for iPhone application, there's some things you need to know.

Your .swf file cannot contain ANY actionscript whatsoever. Symbols in your library must also NOT be exported for Actionscript.

Adobe's documentation states that the scripting will simply be ignored, but that isn't exactly accurate.

If your .swf file contains Actionscript, the entire load will be ignored.
Which means you won't receive an Event.COMPLETE or even an IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR when you try to load the file.

So, with no symbols exported to actionscript, all you're left with is animation on the timeline.


But I wanted to use it like a kind of library, where you could neatly pack all your graphics and animations and sounds in 1 swf, load it, and use the assets in your main program.

I've created a basic class to help with this.
Download StageLibrary with example project (flashdevelop)

This also works for android, but you have to change the path of the swf file.
Convenient if you create apps for android and iPhone that use the same assets.. if you're only creating android apps, you don't have the .swf scripting barrier that Apple enforces and can use library symbols like you usually do.


To create a swf file that will work with this class, create a .fla file of 1 frame in size.
and place all the symbols you want to use on stage and give them an instance name.

If you want to create a soundclip, make a movieclip, keep frame 1 empty, and place your sound on frame 2, making sure to add enough frames for the duration of the audio. If you don't add the extra frames, you wont be able to detect when the sound stopped playing.

StageLibrary takes care of loading the swf and collecting all instance names and allows you to quickly 'grab' a clip from stage, to use somewhere else in your app. (You can simply addChild() a clip from the library to your own stage/displayobjectcontainers)
I've also added a function to easily play a sound clip, that also has a callback when the sound is finished.

You can't reuse an object though, you aren't creating new objects, you're just moving them from stage to your app.
You can put more than 1 instance of a symbol on stage though, just make sure you give them a unique instance name.

It is also possible to use more than 1 frame in your main movie, but this has the effect of killing all animation of your objects (except for subclips with animations)

Check out the example project. It should be self explanatory, I even commented the code!
If not, post your questions/remarks here and I'll see what I can do :)




Thanks to Renaun Erickson, Seb Lee-Delisle and Joe Chung.

Also check out Renaun's blog entry with another loading example which helped me figure out what was wrong here


And finally, for those of you who like to tinker some more:
I've found that you CAN create multiple copies of an object on stage by changing frames of your main animation.
get a symbol from stage, go to frame2, go to frame 1 again, now you can get that same symbol again, and now you have 2 yaay.
Unfortunately, it screws up the animation in your object, except for subclips. But it could be useful to know ;)

Happy coding!

Raceportal, our 2nd iPhone App

Hey people,

Another quick note to let you know that our 2nd app "Raceportal" has been approved for the appstore and is now available to buy :)

Check it out here : http://itunes.apple.com/app/raceportal/id396109306?mt=8

My first Iphone App

Just a quick note to tell you guys that my first Iphone app is now available for free on the itunes appstore.

click here to download

It's a webcomic reader for Dutch webcomic artists (some comics can be in English)

Artists can upload their comics on my website webcomicsnl.omg.bs and get their comics featured in the app :)

Hope you guys (those of you who have iphone/ipad's or ipod touches) enjoy it :)

Definefont error

Changing the look and feel of a game I developed in FlashDevelop, I suddenly got the following error when trying to compile the project in FlashDevelop:

WARNING: end of tag DefineFont3 is @55343, should be @58327
Build halted with errors (swfmill)."


To make a long story short, this was caused by a textfield that didn't embed any characters. Thanks to Philippe for providing the answer.

So, If you get this error (the numbers after the @ will probably be different) check your movieclips for textarea's without embedded characters.

And to make this short story a little longer: (for those of you who are still reading ;)
My problem in finding this was that I used 1 font library, and had all my textarea's set to use that as the font...
But I still had 2 buttons, with the same font, but not using the font library.
So the error occured when I changed the font in the library.
Now the 2 buttons didn't share a font that other textarea's used, and had characters embedded for them.

And due to the fact that it wouldn't compile, I couldn't visually verify all textarea's to be the same at runtime.

Click here to see my thread about it on Flashdevelop.org.

Lightning strikes!

I bought a Casio Exilim EX FH-100 camera a while ago because it could shoot video at highspeed.

Yesterday we had a pretty heavy thunderstorm here in the Netherlands, and it turns out that you can make some pretty nice video shots of lightning with the highspeed camera function. check it out : http://tinyurl.com/37gccks on youtube.

UPC Racing Game

Just a quick post today.

We've just finished working on a racing game in flash for UPC, a big Cable internet company in Holland.

Technically the game is a nice mix of optimization and user (designer) friendliness.

My Collegue Martin Strieder was responsible for all the artwork, and I did the all the programming.

It's Actionscript 2 code (Due to time restrictions and my relative noob-ness in As3)

The game prerenders all frames to bitmaps for the scenery at runtime during the 'loader' you see after clicking "start". So the artwork in the FLA file are just vectors, no bitmaps, and are easy to modify in the timeline. (which is good for re-use of gfx building blocks)
This gave us a BIG performance boost during the game.

The opponents have a simple AI to keep the speed up and only do basic avoidance of eachother and the player (if they're behind you)

Since this is a pretty cpu intensive game, I've also added a framerate watcher, which will turn down the renderquality of flash a notch when it detects a low framerate.

On my develop and testcomputer (which is a lot slower) this meant that I could keep playing the game at 30 fps.

Click here to play the game

Let me know what you think :)