Tag Archives: Games

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

Abandoned: My Ludum Dare #21 Entry

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Splash screen for Abandoned

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”. Continue reading →

Silver medal at Android Hackathon

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I participated in Android Hackathon this weekend, where the goal was to build a game for an Android phone in one day – and the theme was retro (8-16 bits).

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.

Ghost4Koin – a game in less than 4 kb

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In 2009 I gathered a team of co-workers from Isotop to enter a competition where you were supposed to build a game with a final result of less than 4 kilobytes.
Since I’m both interested in game development, optimization and low level actionscript this competition seemed even more compelling to me.

The game is released over at Wonderfl (http://wonderfl.net/c/7uqT), although it’s so optimized that it’s more or less impossible to understand anything =)

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