I participated again in Global Game Jam. I made plans with a friend that we would make a game with some of the same restrictions as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had.
I programmed a simple map editor in Lua using the Love 2D framework before the jam so that we could then use it to make a game suitable to the theme.
The theme was Repair and the intro video had a lot of machines and footage of falling buildings being played backwards. But I had been waching the Yuru Camp (Laid back camp) anime recently and I wanted to to do something again that would have cute animals.
So I suggested we do a game where Animal Crossing meets Yuru Camp and pitched that with my friend. To my delight three more people were interested. And they had such pixel art skills that the game became really cute. Actually the only problem was that there was more art and animations than I had time to add support for, but I finished the game on the following weekend and made this blog post.
I am so happy that I was able to make a game about cute animals and could just put the cuteness as the main priority.
Lepus Minor is a demoscene production that I created with 3 of my friends and entered it to the Demo competition of Instanssi 2019. You can watch the demo from Youtube or download it through Pouet.net and run it on your Windows machine.
I took many screenshots while I was programming the demo and the renderer and thought I would make a Making of post and here it is :D
The first idea was that in the demo the camera would follow a glowing crystal bunny through a forest so that the bunny would disappear and then reappear further away, leading the viewer to a hilltop, where the Monolith would appear and display the greetings and credits.
While the demo progressed, the bunny and Monolith stayed but practically everything else changed and it became a homage to the movies 2001 A Space Odyssey and Contact.
First order of business was to create the opening scene with a mountain range under a night sky. I needed the sky to rotate and first idea was to create a sphere of stars, that would then be rotated.
The mountains were created with a fractal algorithm, that I found thanks to Skrolli-magazine.
The first implementation had a bug where the stars would get smaller higher up, but that was because I took a certain dot product after setting the distance.
Next I needed text to show the greetings and credits. I did a simple bytemap-font rendering system where a letter was translated to texture coordinates and each letter was drawn with a quad. That was simple enough and I found a simple pixel font generation program to help with that.
Next was water for the ice planet. Originally it was intended to be moving and to have waves, so I made a displacement map and a shader that would adjust vertices according to that and that worked too eventually and I had a kind of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) put together on 5.1.2019.
Then I also wanted the water to reflect the stars above and for that to work I needed the sky to be a cubemap instead of a sphere made of stars. I had lots of trouble making the skybox work, because for that the texture coordinates work differently than the rest of OpenGL for some historical reason. But with patient debugging and using the Konata test image, it started to work. At this point I started thinking that the konata.png was a kind of a lucky charm, because setting it on things made them work <3 This image was taken on 16.1.2019.
The reflection from water proved more difficult. Or rather, reflection was easy, but combining it with a rotating skybox and waves was not.
I eventually found out that it would not work without proper normal maps, which would need cotangents and all that stuff for which I did not have time to get into. So I scrapped the waves and decided that the sea would be frozen instead and the planet would be very blue and cold.
Next big thing was the bunny and the space warp sequence. I wanted to give the impression that the constellation would light up the bunny model from inside. Just flipping the normals for the light calculation would have worked but I wanted actual refraction. And for that I needed a touch of raytracing. Luckily I had been doing it for a school assignment years ago so I thought it would be simple to add.
Turned out I did not remember things that well, but luckily I found Raytracing in one weekend which helped to get the formula right. And lo, the light was born. In the end I decided to combine the Phong lighting and the ray tracing, because it made the bunny look more like frosted or scratched crystal.
It was a beautiful moment when it started working.
Last part was the Ice Planet. I made a blue planet for the skybox using just a gradient in Gimp and generated a second mountain range and placed that so that peaks would be above the water level. And it looked fine.
The above image was taken on 15.2.2019 so there was still about a month until Instanssi. The rest of the time I mostly spent on tweaking colors, code and syncing everything together using Rocket. Ijoro made a beautiful skybox to replace the placeholder I had done.
I made a quick sketch of the bunny and Ninzo made a 3D model from that. Then I just had to reposition the lights. There was no graphical editor but atleast I had had the wisdom to make the demo load values from a config file and being able to reload the values while running saved so much time.
Last thing I did was to add support for controlling the lights at Instanssi using UDP-packets. I had never done that before, but C# made it easy. Or should I say too easy, because I did not realize that not finding the effect server at adress "valot.party" would prevent the demo from running :I
Windytan was making music while all this was going on. Their computer would not run the demo, because Mac OS does not support OpenGL or something. But I took a video and they timed the music to that. Here you can see the work in progress versions of the demo with music, first one is from 8.2.2019
And the second from 27.2.2019
Finally the demo was ready during the event when Windytan sent me the final edition of the music. It was a really magical feeling seeing it all come together and again seeing it on the big screen. I was super nervous and I was trembling all over. I haven't gotten such a feeling from any other creative endeavour I have undertaken so I think I'll continue to make demos <3
(And after the party I fixed the host not found -bug and added Naudio library to get Ogg Vorbis playback, but that broke linux compatibility. I quess like other art, demos are never really ready.)
The Finnish computer magazine SKROLLI organized a party for the staff and writers but also for anyone who submitted an entry to either Wild or Realtime Compo, so I decided to make one.
I used Processing which I learned during Assembly 2018 and thought to make a summery demo about going to the beach. The first idea was to have a camera flying from midst of city over a forest, going towards the beach and sea. But things were harder than I thought and in the end I just had the sea and clouds.
My friend said that the clouds could smile like the ones in Super Mario games and I thought it looked cute. Then I wanted to add greetings in the form of boxes floating across the surface, but in the end made them jump out of the sea instead.
Biggest difficulty was to get the faces to show on clouds. Processing does not allow drawing 2D shapes in depth, which seems to mean that the depth is always 0, so I needed to make sure the clouds are further back, but not too much because then the face would be offset from the cloud because of the perspective projection.
Syncinc was also difficulty, mostly because I did not choose my parameters well and the default Rocket editor is so clumsy to use.
I made the music using Beepbox and discovered new features from it. I really like it because it is restricted by default, but allows for customization. And it is easy to share a song link.
I worked on the demo for 5 Saturdays and one Sunday, about 20 hours in total.
For the next time I learned to:
Leave an empty measure in the beginning of the song. It leaves space for transition and makes capturing and editing easier.
Choose colors and interpolate between them instead of syncing individual color components.
Generate random things in relation to previous result. That way I could have made sure that the cloud balls don't spawn inside each other and that adjacent greetings would have different colors.
Randomize width and height related things between 0 and 1 and then multiply with actual screen dimension. In this demo I took a random number between 0 and width, which meant that even when random seed was set, the result was different depending on the window size.
Try to have everything depend on time. In this one only the boxes are, but the clouds and waves always keep moving. This helps with syncing.
For the next demo I want to use my own renderer. I think Processing is very good for starting out and trying things, but I came to feel that I want more control over things.
You can watch the demo over at Youtube and leave comments on Pouet.
I participated in a codebar gamedev meeting as a coach and helped others to create a flappy bird clone using Python and Pygame. I am not really a Python expert and so I practiced before the event and created a very simple version. I used the nice Python Game Book tutorial.
The event was nice and there was pizza. After the event I improved my practice game into a more refined version and added lots of comments so it could also work as a tutorial.
I attended Assembly 2018 and joined the Demo Programming workshop. During that I learned some Processing and made an entry to the One Effect Demo compo.
Lots of time went to trying to understand what Processing thinks about 3D coordinates, as I have used to OpenGL and that the center of the screen is the origo.
I created the music using BeepBox and Audacity. My friend helped with the bacground, which I made in Gimp.
I did not really have time to do syncing, but next time I will allocate more time for that :)
But I got a demo done and I was really happy. And it was very exciting to see my production on the big screen.
You can see it here, it is Entry number 11. (Skip to start):
This game was created way back for Ludum Dare 38. My friend emtastik made the graphics and I programmed the game using the Monogame framework, C# and Tiled.
The theme was "Small world" and so we made a game about how dogs leave messages to each other like in facebook.
Initially the story was supposed to be longer with multiple days and everything but both of us got a bit sick during the jam and had to cut it to just one level.
I created this game during the Christmas holidays of 2017. One of my relatives had an old Mac SE computer and had gotten hooked on playing the Daleks game on it (which is a clone of an older game Robots). They had to give the computer away soon and I said I would make a clone of the game for modern computers so they could keep on playing.
I made the game using FreeBASIC as I wanted to try making a game using it and it felt suitable for the occasian. I had used it once before, during Assembly 2016 to make a flying toasters screensaver (the source code to that is sadly lost).
FreeBASIC is simple once you find out the function signatures and very similar to C. It was easy to make the game and I think the best part is how simple it is to create an executable that is also very small in size.
You can dowload the game from my google drive. The source code is included, so you can port it to other platforms if you want.
I programmed a simple map editor in Lua using the Love 2D framework before the jam so that we could then use it to make a game suitable to the theme.
The theme was Repair and the intro video had a lot of machines and footage of falling buildings being played backwards. But I had been waching the Yuru Camp (Laid back camp) anime recently and I wanted to to do something again that would have cute animals.
Actually the only problem was that there was more art and animations than I had time to add support for, but I finished the game on the following weekend and made this blog post.
