I bring you our (mine and Pineapples) studio;
It’s even a .com and all!
Lunnye is also released, but be sure to check the system requirements! It’s in the showreel vid on the homepage.
This will also mark the end of devlog stuff on this blog. I’ll still waffle on about games and stuff but I’d like to keep this for ramblings. Which probably will involve lots of me getting annoyed at Tormi or whatever. Have at you! Again.
Monday! (if my domain works by then, which it will!)
I’ve not forgotten about yawl. I’m doing mad scrambling dashes to get the game done and dusted. Both me and Pineapple did a spot of testing last night and found a plethora of bugs, but they’re easily fixed. I’m also working on a website for our studio, it’s all very spiffy and modern (putting that degree to good use!). Just another day or so now! (but didn’t I say that last week?)
And this! This could be important depending on whether or not you liked Sam. That above shot was taken from New Sam running in a new MMF2 build with HWA. Visually it’s no different from the original of course (Sam was invisible when I took this pic), but it’s the performance and bug fixing that I can now do. So a proper 2009 update of Sam will be developed shortly.s
The game itself is finished, I think. I’m now composing the music for it.
One of the early ideas for the OST was to have one level song, but with 4 variations played at the same time. The volume of each variation would be affected by the players X and Y positions. So whilst the melody and chord structures would be the same – the lower left area (mines) would have a very different sound to the upper right area (mountaintop).
The only problem there was composing a full length track long enough that didn’t get repetitive for the amount of time it would be played for. Though this would give a good indication of the players position.
So now I’m using a system that occasionally plays a song based on the area you’re in. This means more music for me to compose but ultimately it sounds better through less repetition, though it also gives a good indication to the players location if they get lost. But because the music isn’t constant it means the ambient sound engine (ripped from Tormi) gets highlighted. Currently half the areas have songs.
And that’s the music!
Gameplay wise I’ve been tweaking the engine some (it’s now half the size of the Tormi one) to make it more efficient. It’s very almost done… Again!
There are no enemies, there are obstacles, there is no ground on the bottom of the level, there is lava, there is lightning, you can’t die.
Almost finished up work on Lunnye. I’ve more or less been working flat out on this since it’s conception on Friday. So it’s currently 6 days old and almost finished, not been in this situation in years! Just coding in the ending, then it’s onto music* (still not sure how I’ll implement it) and testing. It’s actually grown a lot bigger than the original idea but because I’m working with an already built and fairly capable engine it’s just really easy to make. I’ve been able to really up the weather engine too – raindrops are now streaks instead of square pixels, which rotate depending on windspeed. Unfortunately I can’t put that into Tormi because of performance stuffs. But maybe later.
This will also be the first game under our studio name, which will all be announced alongside the launch of the game. And as well as Tormishire and Lunnye, New Sam will also be getting a full update too (it’ll still be freeware) which will see an end to the performance problems and bugs from the original. So there’s all that to look forward to. If I can make it HWA too… Heh. There’d be no stopping it! Except for the lack of a DirectX9 graphics card.
*But speaking of music I want the OST to be something special too. My normal gestation period for a song is a few hours, but I only get smacked by musical creativity once every 6 months at the current rate.
I’m not going to be releasing Lunnye until Friday at the earliest. It’s going great though, just threw another whole day into it. I still need to finish off the map though and write the soundtrack.
I haven’t played through yet but there’s probably an hour or 2’s worth of gameplay and plenty to explore (the 2 people I showed the map to said “What the hell, that map is huge” or something. And it won’t be free either because I need fundings, but it’ll be cheap. Like £1 or something.
More details later.
Oh actually lets do one now – The whole game is a puzzle. The player starts off knowing nothing except the controls, there’s no text and there’s a bit of puzzle and mystery solving to do. And a heaps worth of effects and exploration using a modified (and DirectX 9 version) of Tormi’s engine. So keep that in mind! It needs DirectX 9, but it runs much better than Tormi (60fps with 300 objects without vsync, opposed to 60fps with 1300 objects with vsync).
In a nutshell it’s pretty much Tormishire redux.
I’ve been so engrossed in making Lunnye that I skipped breakfast and dinner and just ate cereal bars, I’ve probably had about an hour so far (I’ve been awake for 12) away from this game. But it’s been a little problematic.
At the moment the level has 2130 background objects, and that is with only 25% of the map ‘decorated’. There was a huge slowdown so I’ve switched to hardware acceleration mode (DirectX 9) and bloomin nora, it goes like a mad leopard now! I’ve updated all the effects to support HWA features too. But I’ve had so much fun making this. If it does well then I’ll definitely turn this into some kind of series using the same formula.
It’ll be out either tonight or tomorrow night unless I hit any more problems.
The intro and menu are done. The whole game with menu is contained in 1 frame. Just sorted out the engine to work with it and now it’s onto the level design. Should be out in a week at most.
A chunk of today was spent travelling to and from my girlfriend’s university graduation show. I spent a lot of time thinking with some good music on and I’ve started work on a short exploration game.
It’s Russian for moon damsels and inspired by a Mumiy Troll song of the same name.
It’s going to use the Tormi engine and really basic graphics. It’s my weekend break from teh big game.
There is a remake of one of my unfinished games also planned.
Back in 2007 I added a little beta stuff to Tormi which recorded the frame, player position and cause of death whenever the player died. Which is then saved to deaths.ini for later evaluation.
Originally this was super coo but as these records grew I needed a way to interpret them quickly.
So I made this!
It’s a small app in 18 events that plots out a graph of where players die.
This one being mine, going back to 2007. 
This one being Piney’s going back to 2008.
So what’s this in aid of? It lets me see which levels people mostly die on so I can go back and adjust them. Though this will be much more important once the game is nearly finished and in testers hands. Ideally I’m aiming to get both our graphs flat on release so it isn’t too hard.
Might ship this with the game if anyone would wants to see their DEATH-O-METRE.