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 =)

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

I have been working on Isotop for over five years, and it has been a great time. During that time I have been working with several large companies and projects such as TV4 and DICE. I have learned so much during this time, and I have gotten lots of great friends. I wish them all the best in the future.

Ahead of me I have some new and very exciting times, developing online gambling games. I’m sure it will be a great time, and I’m looking forward of being a part of Quickspin from such an early stage.

But before I start at my new job I have two weeks of free time (starting today). And that means I’ll be able to focus full time on Ripple Dot Zero.
Exciting times ahead indeed.
/Tommy

Play the game over at the ludum dare site.

Note: This game was created as an entry for the 21:st Ludum Dare competition, where a game has to be created from scratch within 48 hours. All graphics, sounds and code has to be created during this time, and every participant has to work alone (no teams). It is permitted to use existing frameworks and personal code libraries if these are declared and shared before the competition starts (I used a slightly modified version of the PushButton Engine). The theme for the competition was “Escape”.

When making my entry I wanted to make my game as creepy as possible. Since the theme was ‘Escape’ I was going for a world you probably don’t want to stay in
As art/design isn’t really my strongest side I went with the sketchy look. Its a style I call “Fulsnyggt”, when it looks so ugly that it actually looks good.

As game engine I used a framework called PushButton Engine. I’ve actually been curious about it for the past year but haven’t found the time to actually dive in to it (until now). The engine don’t seem to have any support for tiling/scrolling backgrounds, so I had to modify it a bit before the competition started, but luckily that’s allowed as long as you share the code before you start. I will give my impressions about PushButton Engine in another post, but briefly I have to say that I really love their component-based concept. Expect more on that topic!

To create the levels I used a bitmap, where I mapped a color to a specific tile. In that way I could just “draw” my levels in photoshop. This is the actual level (its pretty big), and each pixel is translated to a tile which is 32×32 pixels.

I have to say I’m satisfied I managed to get my entry submitted, given a completely new game engine, although I did create the level very late (just a few hours before the deadline) so the game did not really turn out the way I had in mind. The passages should have been a bit narrower and the enemies should shoot more often. As it turns out you can just simply fly past the enemies…

But it was a really fun competition, and I will definetly participate again!

Edit: The result from the competition was released today. It shows that my game got at an honorable 98:th place (out of 509 entries).
What was even more surprising to me was that the game was rated as number 9 in the graphics category!!! :-O. Amazing!
This has been really really fun, and I’m really looking forward to participate again!

This is the final result:

For those of you who don’t know what XNA is: its a framework for making games, developed by Microsoft, and its main advantage is that you are able to deploy your game to the Windows, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 – platforms without having to maintain three different code bases… code once, deploy for all (of course you have to consider screen sizes, input methods and hardware, but they have really made it easy to do so!). And yeah, you use C# as your language =).

Why is this so interesting? One word: JOYPAD!!! I would so much love to write a game where you played using your Xbox360 controller. It’s also easy to distribute your games on Xbox Live Arcade Indie-section (and at the same time make it available via STEAM on pc for all you non-xbox guys).

So, here is a really crappy video of me starting the game on the xbox (and showing the same game on my PC). I will try to upload a better video very soon!
/Tommy

## Checkout ##
You might need to add your public ssh-key to the repository (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)
git clone {url} [folder]

Check the url to the current repository:
git remote -v

## Adding, committing, rolling back ##

Add all removed files to your staging area
git add -u

Add all changed files to your staging area, both added, changed and deleted
git add -A

Revert to your previous commit
git reset HEAD^

Revert all files to the state of the last commit. Unstaged files will be lost!
git reset --hard

Compare your commited files to the files on a remote:
git log origin/master..HEAD --name-only --pretty=oneline

## Brancing ##
git fetch [remoteName] (will download all branches into special read-only branches called [remoteName/branchName], you’ll need to merge manually)

Get list of remote branches
git branch -r (or -a to list both remotes and local branches)

Create a new branch that tracks remote branch “origin/dev”
git branch -t [localBranchName] [remoteBranchName] (e.g. git branch -t dev origin/dev)

Make an existing branch track a remote branch
git checkout {yourBranchName}
git branch --set-upstream "origin/dev"

Get a list of all branches, and see which branch is tracked to which remote branch
git branch -vv

If you create a new local branch, and wish to add it as a remote branch on your server (or github). The -u flag makes your local branch track the new remote branch.
git push -u {remote-name} {local-branch-name}
Where the remote-name probably is “origin”. You can set the remote branch name to something other than your local name with:
git push {remote-name} {local-branch-name}:{remote-branch-name}

## Logging ##
If you need to see which files were modified for each commit:
git log --name-only (exit list with “Q”)

If you also want to know what the modification for the file was:
git log --name-status

To only see the last three (change the number to any number you want):
git log -3

[as3]
// declare xml
var xmlList:XMLList = new XMLList( ‘

‘);

// Example 1
var name:String = “SimpleRectangle”;
trace( xmlList.(@xmlElement == name ).toXMLString() );// nothing

// Example 2
var temp:String = “SimpleRectangle”;
trace( xmlList.(@xmlElement == temp ).toXMLString() );// works
[/as3]

First example worked in flexSDK 3.x, but stopped working when compiling with flexSDK 4.1. Changing the variable name seemed to do the trick…?!?

My plan was to make a game similar to Metro Siberia since I think that it fits very well on a phone with only a touch screen. Limited time and limited experience with Android forced me to abandon my plan of using ‘real’ levels and instead use randomly generated ones.

Still it turned out to be pretty good, and was voted as the second best game in the competition! This was even more honorable since the other entries were very well made and the competition was really hard.
Thanks everyone who participated, and thanks to Bwin, Stockholm Google Technology User Group for arranging such a great compo!

My entry (filmed with a crappy camera). Music is made by Simon Stålenhag and taken (with his permission) from our common hobby project Ripple Dot Zero.

This was the scenario:

• * Embedding fonts using the [Embed] meta tag
• * Applying font using TextFormat (don’t know what happens if you use CSS, my guess is that it won’t work either)

Quick fix: note the “embedAsCFF”

[Embed(source="font.ttf", fontFamily="x", mimeType="application/x-font", embedAsCFF="false")]
public var FontClass:Class;

What is this?

I used the Font.enumerateFonts() to get an array of my embedded fonts (my font was there, but still not visible in my textfield).
Check the fontType-property. Here I found that it was “embeddedCFF” instead of “embedded”. What is the difference?

“embeddedCFF” is a bit more lightweight, but can only be used with the new text engine (flash.text.engine.*).
“embedded” is an embedded font, but can only be used with the older flash.text.TextField.

Since the SDK 4.1 it seems like fonts are embedded as CFF by default, which breaks all the fonts in TextFields if you have coded with an earlier SDK before.

Docs about this: Livedocs about FontType.

Hope this helps. Good luck.