Ripple Dot Zero gets a release date!

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If you missed the announcement-trailer you have to check it out immediately! Yes now! Do it!

In game screenshot from Ripple Dot Zero

Today is a big day for me. Today we announce the official release date for Ripple Dot Zero, my long ever-lasting game project together with Simon (you can find more Ripple info on our Pixeltruss-blog), but right now I just want to share my personal view.

A super early brainstorming sketch for our - back then - yet unnamed game

I wrote the very first line of code for this project in February 2008, that was for our custom made level editor, and started working on the game engine shortly thereafter. That is more than five years ago!!!

At first we were aiming for a much smaller game, but the editor turned out to be very powerful and Simon started doing more and more impressive and complex levels.

Me and Simon had a very good setup from the beginning. We were both using Subversion for version control. Simon would sit in his home, work on a new level in our level editor (which we named Saled). When he was done he would check it in to subversion and call me up, telling me about his new level – and usually add “wouldn’t it be cool if we had this and that feature, I’ve already made the graphics and added it to the level”.
At this point I would check out the new level from subversion, try it out, write the code for the new feature and check it in to subversion. All Simon needed to do now was to check out the engine again and his feature was in place – fully playable.

This is how it went on and on. Slowly growing the game world as we progressed. Constantly inspiring each other with new features, game engine tweaks and graphics.

But now its finally time, its the end of an era. And by June 28, 2013 I hope you will enjoy this game as much as we enjoyed making it.

Kind regards
/Tommislav

Supernova

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Supernova is a Slot Machine from Quickspin, where you can multiply any wins you get with the amount specified in the two right-most reels (by most you can get x10 + x10).

The game gets pretty intense if you get really high wins (as this video below shows).

For the most part of this project I was the only developer. I was also Scrum master. One of the two artists working on this game together with me was actually Simon, who made all graphics and level design for Ripple Dot Zero and Metro Siberia.

Big Bad Wolf

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Big bad wolf is a slot game with a nice twist. If you get a win, all symbols involved in that win will be removed, and new symbols will fall down – meaning that a win can trigger another win, chaining together huge combos (like bejeweled).

I was lead developer (and scrum master) on this game, which was produced by Quickspin.

Preparing for Ludum Dare 25

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I spent one day to warm up before Ludum Dare 25. I did this by trying out my entity system I’ve written a couple of months ago in haXe. Just wanted to get a feel for it, and to make sure I was up to date with 2d-rendering, keyboard input, sounds and performance. Worked really nice (read the whole post to see the example) Continue reading →

My first steps towards game programming

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A few weeks ago I read a blog article called I need practice programming, 49 ideas for game clones to code, and as I read through it I realized just how many of those games I have actually cloned myself as I learned to progam. From that list I have cloned at least 13 out of 49, and then they do not even mention Pac Man or Punch Out (which I think should also be on that list).

Anyway, since then I’ve been digging around in my archive trying to find those really old projects and experiments of mine – only to realize most of it is gone.

I did however find a few ones, and boy did they make me nostalgic! The games below are some of my very first experiments in game development from about a decade ago. They are far to ugly for me to put in my showcase, and still they are far to lovely not to show at all.
So to hell with it! Take a deep breath, here we go… Continue reading →

Actionscript: Vector Short Hand Notation

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I can never remember the short hand notation for Vectors in actionscript 3, so I write it down here once and for all. Hopefully it might even help someone else.

You can declare and instanciate a new Vector by typing one of the following:

Another thing might worth noting is that even though the Vector-class is missing a sortOn()-method like array, and only provides a sort()-method (which accepts a reference to a comparison-method), you can actually pass in the same bitwise flags you could have used if doing a simple sort on an Array!

Preparing for Ludum Dare! Haxe, NME, Entity systems and semi-isometric projections

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I have started looking over my toolkit for the Ludum Dare 23 contest that will take place April 21-22. This will be the third time I participate in this contest where the goal is to create a game from scratch within 48 hours. You are however allowed to use frameworks (or even Game Maker, but from a programmers perspective that is taking all the fun out of it) as long as it’s open sourced and declared in advance.

I know that I want to use some kind of Entity System, and that I want to create it myself. My last entry (Abandoned) was created using a game framework called Push Button Engine, which is using the basic priniples of an Entity System, but not strictly speaking. I’ve been curious about entity systems for quite some time now, and I have been trying to imagine how I would have used it if I had made Ripple with such a system.

I’m most probably use Haxe/NME as programming language and I’ll build for the flash player. There has been a lot of buzz around NME the last couple of months since you can deploy your games to Flash, Android and desktop (…and iPhone, although you need a mac/xcode to get the game on to an actual device).

I have also been wanting to make something in some kind of semi-isometric perspective (y-axis is isometric, x-axis is regular top-down) for quite some time. This will make the game a little easier to control since the controls are always flipped 45 degrees in a regular isometric game, which does not map very well to a keyboard, but still give that nice, retro fake 3d-feeling =)

Well, have a look at my initial semi-isometric projection written in Haxe and published with NME =)
Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabled

Check back before April. I will probably do some kind of live coding, and I will post more details
/Tommislav