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Assume server control

Rutch Race

Finally got around to working on the user interface on the operator side. This is a requirement that makes this project a little unusual in that most games have one user group which uses one UI. Since this is going to be an amusement park game, there are going to be people playing the game, then there are going to be people operating the game.

If the operation of the game is too difficult or unreliable, the game is just as non-viable as if it hadn’t been good for the people playing it. Therefore, it’s high time to start working on this aspect of the project.

Messing with post processing

Rutch Race

I have spent more time playing around with various post processing effects, very interesting stuff! I feel the game world have become something new, a more magical world. The bloom effect blends with the water shader, making it look like a glimmering, caribbean ocean. The color grading changes the temperature of everything, making it look warm. Apparently, the volumetric clouds now look toxic as well, but hey, it’s still work in progress.

Proto wheel

Rutch Race

The guys at Liseberg put together this sweet prototype so we can get a feel for what the game would be like with a steering wheel. I must say that I’m really positively surprised. Up till now we have controlled the game with keyboards. With this new setup I realize just how much the keyboard prevented immersion and how much this alternative controller adds. Now I really have a great feeling for where this game is going. The new setup really takes it to a new level!

Sneaky tweaky

Cosmic Fates

Found some time today to tweak and explore this prototype a bit more today. Looking much better if I may say so myself, and is much closer to what I imagined from a game system perspective. :)

Except for having tweaked visuals into a more coherent and attractive look and fixing bugs plus expanded on schedule functionality, the environment is much more like the real deal now. I have been basing a height map off a real map.

Post-jam research

Cosmic Fates

So the jam is over, but (especially given didn’t finish) the game i still twirling around in my head. We returned from Malmö to the island where I grew up and also the area I tried to create a simulation of during the jam.

Circumstances led to me visiting the new camping reception of where I once had a summer job as a kid. There I found a camping map, showing all the trailer and tent sites on the camping, a very similar map to what I used to show visitors back in the day. I took a picture as reference for the game. ;)

A wooping last place!

Cosmic Fates

NMS is over, but it was great! I spent a lot of time enjoying the amazing weather, eating good food and taking strolls in beautiful venues with the little family. I also got to hang out with some great game creators and got some decent hours into tinkering with my emergent murder mystery game. I named it “Cosmic Fates” and was soooo close to get the final core mechanics in ahead of the final submission time. Didn’t quite get there though, I blame this and lots of stolen content for scoring last place in the “goodness” based popular vote rating. :)

Jam page: No More Sweden 2018 at itch.io
Submission page: Cosmic Fates

NMS 2018

Cosmic Fates

Back at STPLN in Malmö, Sweden, and excited as always for this annual event; the game jam No More Sweden. This year I brought my family for a weekend vacation in the this, the third largest city of the country. As a result, jamming may come in second when prioritizing my time, but that’s fine as I’m mostly here to have fun.

I held a little talk, praising cardboard as a building material with my experiences from building and organizing the jams around Virtual Böj and Pick a Boog and there were also other participants holding great talks. For instance I was really happy to learn that Hempuli is the creator of BaBa is You, a really cool game I got word of somewhere on the Internet.

Anyhow, as per usual we wrote and drew inspirational cards at the beginning of the jam. I got:

  • Cosmic
  • Friendship
  • You are the boss

Since I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend more than half time on the jam I decided to work alone if an exceptional opportunity did not appear, I ended up working solo. I came to the jam with an idea of wanting to building something around simulation and emergent agent behavior, somewhat similar to what we did in TRIBE 2020. The idea quickly manifested as being a game where the player would overlook a camping site and its agent based inhabitants, being able to take direct control over a camper. Two campers would become “cosmic friends”, not knowing each other but sharing the same daily routines and attributes and one camper would become a murderer. The goal of the game, except for providing me with a case to fiddle with emergent behaviors, would be to unite the cosmic friends before the murderer takes out one of them.

Fitting images and galleries

zTinker Updates

So this is my third week of an unusually long summer vacation, six weeks all in all. I discovered that I had five or so weeks saved up as I dag around in our salary system, and since the summer is unusually hot and I now have a little family, I decided that this was a good time to use some of that.

Last week I decided to dig into the issue I’ve had for a while; having an easy way of displaying images and sets of images while also showing them in a formal, neat way on the site. I’ve used containers with a certain class for newer images for a while, but in order to let people see an enlarged version of the image each container needed to be enclosed in a link to their respective image. This meant that I had to write the address to an image twice every time I added an image, no good. So I played around with some java script libraries for creating slide shows and resizing images. I ended up using a modal container, the siema library and some custom JS script in addition to three container classes; one for images, one for a “slideshow” and one for “slides”. No links to images needed anymore as it will be resized in a modal view.

I’m currently updating all posts, filling in some blanks where posts never got posted, refining some project banners and making all images and image collections use my new classes. I should be done with the lot of them before long.