That means it’s time for one of those one-in-six-months blog updates.
And we will do that with style! Here it comes, the teaser for Jones change the world!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

On the last episode I said we were focusing on taking SGTAAFM[Haha] to iPad, and yes for a while we actually did focus on that! But the HaXe/NME development environment didn’t feel like my cup of tea so we decided not to take it the full nine yards.

We were also prototyping on our project Bloodformer trying to get the right gameplay going.

Since the last update Bloodformer have received a new name, new gameplay design and a brand new look and instead of using HaXe we are now getting our hands dirty with Unity3D and the 2D toolkit plugin.

It felt as a wiser choice since Unity have a huge and friendly community and a lot of 3rd party plugin ins are made for Unity and the chance of them popping up in the HaXe-universe are rather slim.

The project is now called Max Baxter and his rad ventures! We still haven’t gotten around to make a prototype to try out the new gameplay which could be called a platformer rougelike, somewhat similar to Spelunky. Something I don’t look forward to coding is the boss battles of the games, interesting bosses tends to break a lot of the ground rules of the game and be full of exception.

Hopefully we will be able to use the built in tile editor of 2D toolkit to minimize development load. We want every level to be built of pre-made rooms that are mixed with generated level pieces. Some of these pre-made rooms are supposed to be mission rooms and those are the ones you have to find and complete in order to advance to the next level.

We visited the Exile spring jam in Denmark and made a game in flash called Jones – Change the World. Salkin made a really really catchy tune, it was rediculus! In a fantastic way! Here we are copying the dance moves from the game, it’s a bit hard to get it right when you actually have bones inside your limbs.

We are now bringing the game to tables and it’s coming along really nice! The game mechanic is quite simple, all you have to do is find the object in the scene that breaks the pattern or looks odd.

Simon like this game because it’s almost impossible to take an ugly screenshot of it, and Erik Svedäng suggested we contact IKEA to make a new colection of bedsheets and shower curtains.

At the spring edition of the Media Jam in Karlshamn during the event Kärlek Ettor och Nollor we made an arcade style game called MRS.DAD. A huge inspiration was the game LAZA KNITEZ which we play a lot during the Nordic Game Conference in Malmö, Simon even became King of the LAZAVERSE. They game was so popular that Martin ‘Grapefrukt’ Jonasson and Salkin build a real arcade cabinet for the game!  A really pro thing with the game is that it has attention sounds if it is left on the startscreen for to long.

During the Nordic Game Conference KnapNok Games recieved some funding for a Spin the bottle game for Nintendos next console Wii U, we were up on stage with them since we are going to be part of the development of that game starting sometime this fall!

Below is a picure from Malmöfestivalen with some kids playing MRS.DAD on the arcade. We really wanna make another arcademachine so that we can play more! We have been thinking of porting the game to XNA and release it for XBLIG but that is a bit in the future.

Together with some danish people, Tim Garbos and Julie Heyde, we hosted a gamedev unconference called Burning Bridges, or #BRNBRGS for short. It was great fun! We played games, held lectures, ate pizza and visited the danish space program. And not to forget the world famous BRNBRGS BBQ!

It will most probably going to be an annual thing some plans for next year is not to have things schedueld early in the morning and add a release party night were everyone that has release a game during 2011-2012, but not had a proper party can join in and celebrate the release of their games! I’m thinking of holding the event in Sweden next year, maybe Malmö or Karlshamn.

Later during the summer we went to No More Sweden, this year back in Malmö. We decided to build another title for the arcade. This time around we made the game Wolfmans!

The biggest problem in the making of this game was that we had huge problems with to much keyboard input, the arcade has four joysticks and eight buttons, with people mashing the machine the controls get really unresponsive. This problem should be fixed thanks to the people a Fabriken STPLN now but I haven’t tested the game since. Wolfmans is very actiony where you jump around and shoot at each other and swithc gravity and all kind of madness along with a super hyped power up!

The makers of hit game LAZA KNITEZ (http://www.facebook.com/LAZAKNITEZ) liked the name Wolfmans so muck they asked us if they could adopt the name as their team name, previously they were called Team Buttfighters, so I understand that they wanted to change it.

Three jam games, one concept, one conference and our first iOS title in the making, well the second iOS title in the making, but the first one that we’re more likely to release. Not bad!

There will be great things going on like The Worst Game Award and Hottest Nordic Game Developer – by Booth Babes with Brainz.

The whole idea is to create a place where devs can meet outside of game jams, and now we will see if all of us that are attending the conference can entertain each other during the weekend.

See you on Friday!

The evaluation method that will be used is the very common method called The good, the bad, the ugly.

The Good.

The best part of making the plan was that we got a very sophisticated todo-list. When all the tasks were written down we saw the scope of the game and also a lot of design decisions were brought to our attention and either we decided how something was supposed to work or at least we knew that a decision was heading our way.

I highly recommend everyone to buy colorful pens and thick, nice quality, blank paper. Grab a pile of papers and write things with colorful letters or draw pretty pictures!

The Bad.

A big miss was that the alpha was supposed to be ready when Simon came back from India and that I thought it would be a ~three month period but it turned out to be more of a three day period. The next time I set a deadline I’ll probably use a more consistent way of measuring time, I’ve considered to base the system around the time it takes for a potato to grow mold.

Apart from being not having a rock solid deadline another thing we missed was to plan the time when we were supposed to work on the project. In the beginning we were very good at taking one or two nights every week and sit and work in the project and during those weeks we made a whole lot of progress. But as other stuff was piling up we had to prioritize them and we came out of the routine of working on the project more and more.

The Ugly.

When we had the plan and saw the scope of the project we got a bit scared about the size of our first project, was this really the first thing we wanted to focus on?  Coming from a background were the longest project we’ve been involved in was about 4 months this project felt huge! And we wanted to get on track and actually release a game.

So the ugly truth is that the planning didn’t help even though we had the very nice software from Fogcreek. I think we can learn a bit about why it didn’t help, let’s take a look at our team right now:

Olle: Working full time at Gameport trying to tell other creative people to have good planning and to get their games to the market.

Roger: Working full time at Blekinge Institute of Technology planning classes to teach the developers of tomorrow. (Yes, he actually has a dinosaur that big tattooed. Design by Olle)

Simon: Part time employed as our designer/art director, part time hippie trying to become one with the nature and walk around in his brace trousers.

Salkin: Sound designer that isn’t that involved in this project yet.

What we did instead.

Instead of continue working on project Viva Nook we did make our first award winning game, Simon Gustafsson’s Two and a fjers men [Haha], it’s made in flash but we’ve just started to port i to iPad. This will be done using HaXe and the NME framework, huge thanks to Martin Jonasson for helping me get started with the new language!

We (and by we, I mean Simon) have also helped making graphics for Lau Korsgaards game Who took the apple, a mindfucking card game that is played backwards in time (And it probably got us thrown out from a bar during GDC since you appear much drunker when you walk around with a bucket containing some printed cards and an apple).

Our focus switch from Project Viva Nook to the project Bloodformer, a game that from the beginning was supposed to be a platform game but that now has an uncertain future. We might turn it into some kind of randomly generated collection game, but nothing is decided yet and we continue to work on the prototype.

But that’s not all! We also took some time to teach the game developers of the future and there were some really neat projects!

The very bright future.

From here on we (Simon) will probably work together with KnapNok Games on one of their upcoming titles, and then we will focus on bringing SGTAAFM[Haha] to the iPad and hopefully we find the right gameplay for Bloodformer.

If you want an update on how things are going, do as Julie Heyde did and complain of facebook!

Everybody was happy and we started working a little now and then. If Project Viva Nook would’ve been Simba in The Lion King this was supposed to be the part in the jungle when they sing and walk on the log over the river and by the time the reach the other side Simba is grown up.

The only thing that would differ would be that in our version of the movie it’s only Timon and Pumba that gets older, Simba stays a child and has only learned a couple of words but is nowhere near ready to battle Scar.

Below is a numeric list where I list why Simba didn’t grow up.

Top one reasons why we missed our deadline
1. We had no planning what so ever.

Sebastian over at Noumenon Games told me about this great planning/bugtracking tool called Fogbugz by Fog Creek, so I decided to give it a try.

I signed up for an account and started adding features to implement totally at random (moved over the things from our google-spreadsheet), I did spend about half an hour doing this until I realized how much there was that wasn’t designed yet.

So instead of answering the question of how long a rope is I decided to break down the game in some major chunks and then pinpoint what was needed in the different parts.

I called Simon to tell him that we really need to make some decisions and design features!… But he didn’t answer. I called Niklas to check if he knew were Simon was and he told me that, Simon was at his place but that he was going to India for three months the next day.

This shock some things around, now I needed to design the game to start with and then later change it if Simon wanted to AND I found the perfect date for an Alpha.

The Alpha would be ready when Simon came back so that he could just replace the temporary graphics and with fancy new designs and the use our amazing tools to create the game world.

To get my mind around what we needed to complete I grabbed my most colorful stabilo pens and started to draw all screens of pieces of paper, defining the major chunks. I even used a different color on each piece of paper.

This was last Thursday and this Sunday, suddenly a wild Simon appeared! Apparently he didn’t like Delhi that much so after spending just one night there he decided to go back to Sweden again, that is a 16 hour flight, so yes, last weekend he did spend more time in the air than in India.

Anyways Simon’s trip to India was a sidetrack but it got me to do some basic design and to set a date for the alpha.

So once again we have a date but the last three hours I’ve spent planning the project and when all of us have made our time estimates and planned how much we will work on the game in Q1 we will see if that date is realistic or not.

Another feature of Fogbugz is that you can track what you are currently working on so that you know if something takes more or less time than you estimated.

I should probably write some update post during Q1 2012 so that I can evaluate if we are making better progress with a plan, hopefully we do and Project Viva Nook is the last project we work on without a plan.

So we ended up not being talon FC after all. No worries. The ashes haven’t cooled before we rise out of them in the shape of redgrim.

Rock will be played. Parties will be held. Games will be made.

Welcome.

The car will also contain 1 Sebastian from Noumenon Games, 1 Mario from 2Play, 1 Calle from 12 O’Clock, 1 Marcus from CoastalByte and 1 Robin from Forgotten Key.

For more info about the conference visit: http://www.tgin.se/about-sgc

Then Simon realized the Codeathon should be read as co-DEATH-on so I made anot
her one.

Update: Alexander picked the first one but wanted it a bit clearer so I uploaded that aswell.

Related posts: [Using it, Compound Menu, Understanding it]

Example game.

I’ve used the menu system to make an example game called Hunter Mac where you hunt unicorns.

Related posts: [Example Game, Compound Menu, Understanding it]

To use the menu-system

• Create a MenuHandler
• Create your menues
• Add the menues to the MenuHandler

import com.talonfc.menu.MenuHandler;

private var _menu:MenuHandler;

package com.menu
{
	import com.talonfc.menu.Menu;
	[Embed(source='../../../lib/MenuGraphics.swf', symbol='ExampleMenu')]
	public dynamic class ExampleMenu extends Menu
	{
		public function ExampleMenu(main:Main)
		{
			super(main);
			SetStart(new Vector3D(-180,0,0),new Vector3D(0, 0, 0),new Vector3D(.5,.5,1),1);
			SetMid(new Vector3D(0,0,0),new Vector3D(0, 0, 0),new Vector3D(1,1,1),1);
			SetEnd(new Vector3D(180,0,0),new Vector3D(0, 0, 0),new Vector3D(1,1,1),1);
			UseTweenMovement();
		}
	}

}

There are some important things in this class, I’ll go through it line by line.

• Line 1. It’s good to organize your class-files in folders so here I have created a folder called com and in the a folder called menu, this is where I will save all my menu files. So you should have the filestructure “ProjectFolder/com/menu”. 
• Line 3. We import the Menu base class from the package com.talonfc.menu.
• Line 4. Embed the graphics, to access a symbol in an exported sfw-file you must give it a linkage name in the properties window. 
• Line 5. If you make your menu in Flash and create buttons that you want to access by their instance names the class needs to be dynamic. Also it extends the Menu class which we imported earlier.
• Line 7. The constructor, here you supply the reference to the Main class where the MenuHandler instance is created. 
• Line 9. Pass the main instance to the super class constructor.
• Line 10. The SetStart method takes four arguments, rotation, position, scale and alpha. The first three arguments should be in the Vector3D format since we can modify x, y and z values of those three, and the last alpha is a single Number value ranging from 0 to 1. In the example above we specify that the menu should start with a x-rotation of minus 180 degrees, position we leave at 0 on all axis, and we set that the starting x- and y-scale at .5 which means that the menu should start at 50% of it’s original size, we leave alpha at 1 at all times. 
• Line 11. The SetMid method, same as above but we have changed the rotation to 0 and alpha to 1, so that there will be no rotation on the menu and it will be fully visible. The mid position is the state as the menu will be shown as the user interacts to it.
• Line 12. Then we have the SetEnd method where you set the end rotation, position, scale and alpha and all we do here is changing the end x-rotation. 
• Line 13. Next we set up the movement type, the system supports three different movement types, Tween, Wobbly and Static, we’ll look into that later.   Now we have an example menu so the next step is instantiate the MenuHandler, add our menu to it and then show the menu. This is done in the Main.as class.

_menu = new MenuHandler(this);
_menu.Add(new ExampleMenu(this));
_menu.Show(MainMenu,_canvas);

When you create the MenuHandler and ExampleMenu you provide “this” which is the instance of the Main class as an argument. When you call the _menu.Show method you provide two arguments, the first is the classname of the menu you want to show and the second is the DisplayObject that you want the menu to be added to, for simplicity here we add it to the Main class itself. You can provide an extra argument to the Show method that is at what depth to add the menu, the default vale is -1 and will add the menu on top of everything else in the container. Setting up the movement behavior. The three movement types, UseStaticMovement, UseTweenMovement and UseWobblyMovement should always be called after the super statement in the constructor of the menu as shown in the example above. The UseStaticMovementmethod takes to arguments, the first is how many frames it will take the menu to go from the start position to the mid position, and the second is how long it will take to go from the mid position to the end position. This method will make the menu move at a constant speed.

UseStaticMovement(numberOfFramesToShow:int = 15, numberOfFramesToHide:int = 15):void

The UseTweenMovement method also takes two arguments, the first is how many percent of the remaining distance from start to mid it will move each frame and the second is the same but for moving from mid to end. This method will make the menu move at a higher speed at the beginning and slow down towards the end.

public function UseTweenMovement(showTween:Number = .7, hideTween:Number = .7):void

The UseWobblyMovement method takes five arguments, the first two are for the start to mid distance and the next two are the same but for the mid to end distance. The two pairs are acceleration (showAcceleration and hideAcceleration) and slowdown (showSlowdown and hideSlowdown). The last argument is the vectorTolerance, this is how much two vectors can differ but still be considered equal. This method will make the menu shoot over its target position and then wobble back and fourth until it has slowed down to a stop.

public function UseWobblyMovement(showAcceleration:Number = .7, showSlowdown:Number = .5, hideAcceleration:Number = .7, hideSlowdown:Number = .5, vectorTolerance:Number = .5):void

The characters in this game are made out of 24 pieces of graphic! You can change your left shoe, your hat, your right shoulderpad and everything!

It was very satisfying to see the result when we loaded the graphics and everything worked as intended.

Altough we haven’t made so that enemies are put together with random parts so below s a screenshot of me fighting an invisible enemy called Jimmy.

I’ve also worked some on the sorting so that the player can walk behind trees and other tall stuff. I thought I had the solution, everything was fine and dandy and sorting right.

But then I changed map and all of a sudden the player decided to walk under the ground tiles. I have no idea why this happens because as far as I can tell it just randomly sorts stuff wrong.

At least I’m on to something and it’s just a matter of working through the code and then I’ll probably find the line that is causing this “random” behavior.