My plan was to have come much further this weekend, but it simply wasn’t one of those productive periods it seems. I had a lot of fun though, meeting two cool girls from South Korea who have been studying in Sweden, going on a masquerade with a tiger pelt, doing some hangover rope way with a good friend and finally getting some curtains for the new apartment with the same.

In the end I only managed to make the minimum update to the inventory, now you can actually buy things for your coins. The purchases are saved, but there is no way to use the bought items yet and more of them needs to be designed.

Coming up is a start scene and really neat new interface centered around the tower. : )

I had the opportunity to finish some issues regarding the monster movement in relation to the difficulty multiplier today. I now have pretty good control over when to make it harder (faster) and how to work with the speed in relation to the user experience.

I wasn’t to lively yesterday after this weekend, but our local game prof. eventually managed to drag me along to an after work with the indie game scene of Gothenburg. I was happy to find an old indie friend there from a tiny Christmas jam from maybe 1.5 years ago who had managed to progress a lot with a side project he was working on already back then.

In general it was nice to show the current build around and that gave made me consider adding controls for dropping along the tower again. Next thing will be to fix the store so that you can actually buy things though.

Finally a weekend during which I can concentrate on some sweet computer lurking, or so I thought. Turns out there is socializing activities to be attending these days as well (in very good company, but nevertheless) and I will probably not be as efficient as I hoped.

I have however been able to start working on a variable which functions as a multiplier for the difficulty of the game. This multiplier goes up as the player climbs the tower, making it harder and harder to reach higher heights. In order to do this well I had to redesign my core slightly to give a higher resolution of position updates and time steps. I did not get everything working today, but I did make good progress. The climbing goes faster and faster as the game progresses. The speed is reset on restart and generated obstacles and the monster movement is all in relation to the multiplier.

Off to the forest park with me.

It’s been a busy week but today is a Swedish holiday. I’m going over to a friend’s for barbecuing later, but I have still had some time for game dev. I started implementing the store system which of course facilitates one of the core mechanics for replayability which in turn is perhaps the most important aspect of the game.

It is still not possible to buy anything, but there is a system in place so that I can easily add new items and most of the interface is there for the interaction.

Today I made some lava fall traps for the game. I initially had some issues getting the lava to understand which virtual angle it had spawned on if I spawned more than one statue at a time but now it should be fixed.

I should probably continue to add little things like these, because they keep my interest high. I will eventually have to tie it all together though. : )

I had to work a little more than I planned to get the AI chasing working. It turned out I had been hacking the game together a little to hastily (never happened before right?) so some things had to be switched around to make the planned solution work.

I have also thrown in some nifty rotation of sprites that are attached to the tower rotation as well as some graphics for the first monster. I also have a lot of ideas for how to tie it all together design wise now. : )

The fair where me and the rest of the team participated (and some of us partially organized) wrote an article about the event:

RSM Game Jam 2014 – Här är vinnarna!

I was away with some friends for the Mini Maker Fair in Stockholm this weekend. It was really intensive, meeting with lots of cool makers, presenting for visitors and hanging out with good friends whom I don’t meet too often. We went to Stockholm by car and I was hoping to be able to get some work done on Solid Jumper during this trip. Alas, I never found it easy to work in cars or buses. One thing I did get though was a solution for how to implement the monster AI chasing the player, so even though I never got it working during the trip I’m confident I will get it going soon. : )

I have been presenting the maker space Collaboratory which I am a member of in Gothemburg’s annual science fair this year. It was working at a few tables in the city’s largest mall and was hopefully able to learn some of the visitors something about tech, electronics and game design. There were a lot of crazy children though, some wild little creature almost managed to poison itself with plastic fumes when he decided it was a good idea to solder on a pot handle. When I was going to show him how to use a breadboard he had already managed to glue all the boards together with a glue gun. He used the same tool to quick fix the speaker of a Drawduino into not working. : P

I did make some progress on Solid Jumper in the chaos of all this (during the calmer periods), however I forgot to save most of it. Anyway, making games is partially design and this is something I saved in my head. : )