Eurogamer Expo 2012 Roundup

I am currently on the train back from having a day out at the 2012 Eurogamer Expo in Earl's Court. The event seems to have become the big UK gaming convention and I have enjoyed going every year since its inception. Each time it is a good look around at the current state of the games industry and get a good glimpse at the games that are coming out soon.

All of the usual suspects were out in force and there is plenty out there already on most of these games. Here I will just give a bit of my own thoughts on what I saw and found interesting.

Ludum Dare #24 - Life Stream

This past weekend I took part in the 24th Ludum Dare game competition and it was a lot of fun! The theme of the competition was Evolution and I took it upon myself to make something a bit of a different approach with my game.

Take a look at my game Life Stream, which is available online here!:)

I will probably post a bit of a mini post-mortem at some point, as I learnt a lot from it. But for now, play it and the other Ludum Dare entries, as they are pretty good!

Astro Junk Release!

Today I am happy to announce that I have made a thing that I can release onto the Internet. Even better, this is a thing that you can play right now by clicking here!

Introducing... Astro Junk!

This is a game that I started working on about a month ago and I have been working on it for about half of that time. I did all of the programming and Clarissa provided a lot of the artwork for the game. The game is now in a state that I am happy to release and is something that can be played! Astro Junk is a more expanded version of the classic game Asteroids with the controls designed to invoke the classic Asteroids feel. However the main difference is that the asteroids drop resources when destroyed, which allow the player to purchase new upgrades when the player returns the base.

This LEGO Thing

Over the past few months I've rather gotten into this whole Lego thing. Somehow it never got it's claws into me when I was a kid, my brother seemed to be the one who was into the engineering aspect of it and he was the one who ended up with a lot. Apparently this love finally arrived for me about 15 years later and now I am officially an adult fan of Lego. I have been drawn to Technic, mostly due to the fact that I really enjoy piecing mechanical components together and seeing how it all works. It might not be pure Lego, but it sure is still a lot of fun.

Keep on truckin'!
This monster has fully functioning battery powered crane. The gearbox required to make it work is Lego wizardry.

Gaming Archive: Ballistics

Here's something different for you and most likely something you have never head of before. When people come up to me and say "Hey, F-Zero / Wipeout / Some other sci-fi racing game is super fast" (a surprisingly uncommon occurrence if I do say so myself) I say "clearly you haven't seen Ballistics!"

It is at this point I receive a blank stare, to which I respond with:

"Read my blog, I will tell you all about it!"

2D Tile World: Part 2

This whole blog thing is going terribly! I haven't updated in like two weeks! This may have been because I have technically been working the past two weeks, but that's not the point. The point is, it's time for a new blog post!

Today I have taken it upon myself to get some stuff back on track with the tile project and the results are good! This morning I started with something not far off the program mentioned in my original post, however I have since added a lot of features.

A lot of these are hard to show off, so instead I will provide a list:

• Mouse support
• It is now possible to move the camera around by holding the mouse near the edges of the screen
• Right-click scroll/dragging the view is also in.
• Zooming with mouse wheel
• Click to place blocks
• Middle-click to remove blocks
• Weather
• Clear
• Rain
• Storms
• Snow
• Lava Rain!!!

This mouse support is a pretty big deal, this program now feels really nice to move around in, compared to before where I had to use a keyboard setup that just functional and not hugely pleasant to use. Also as part of this it is now possible to modify the generated world. To make things like this:

The ability to modify the generated world brings us things like... this? The bridge breathing dinosaur rock castle!

 I feel so proud of my bridge breathing dinosaur. Also note, water is currently falling from the sky in a rain-like fashion. Currently elements like water, lava and snow still do not react with each other, which is next on my list of things to change.

Zoom levels! Higher detail dinosaur!

I am pretty happy with this thing, apart from the fact that I still haven't managed to turn it into anything that even remotely resembles a game. That's also one of my next steps that I need to work out... maybe in the next post I will have worked out something!?!?*

*seems unlikely

2D Tile World: Part 1

I have been a bit quiet on here recently, but this doesn't mean that I haven't been hard at work. I have spent some amount of time creating a projects page on this blog which I will attempt to keep updated with the notable projects I have worked on. I have also spent some time tidying up one of my older projects, Anaconda, which I will probably talk about in another blog post at some point.

However, most of my recent time has been spent with a new project. This one is making use of my previous work on value noise (the technique that was used to calculate the 3D terrain in Project Alpha) but implementing it in a 2D environment.

I decided to do this as I wanted to see how versatile this technique truly is, also a 2D world will be easier to turn into an actual game. So far I feel like I have had a lot of success in producing an interesting looking world and I have a very basic feature set in place.

As a picture paints a thousand words and I can't be bothered to write thousands of words, here are a few pictures that show what the project currently looks like: