Category «Videos»

Ray-caster – an experiment

I participated in a Kajam, which is an regular-ish game jam hosted on alakajam.com with different hosts. If you remember classic Ludum Dare, this is the equivalent to a Mini Ludum Dare, where hard rules like ‘everything must be from scratch’ or the weekend time-frame are much more relaxed. The theme of this particular Kajam, running the whole January 2021 and hosted by toasty, was “make a game based on ray casting”, and one could interpret this any way possible, but of course the basic idea is to get your hands dirty and actually try to create a ray-caster. If you don’t know what that is, the most prominent example for a ray-caster is Wolfenstein3D from 1991, back when there was no 3D hardware for PCs.

Wolfenstein3D, by id Software

My entry for the jam became a ray-casting engine with a very rudimentary level editor, or a sandbox if you’re generous. I had some gameplay ideas, but as I could not work fulltime on the project, and most of my experiments didn’t result in anything playable, the state for now is that there’s just no game. Yet for me, creating a ray-caster, based on tutorials on lodev.org, was a feat in itself, so I still wanted to submit it. With only one weekend left I decided to make it a “playful” level editor - meaning the editing (placing walls, changing textures, resizing the rooms, etc.) happens inside the “game” in first-person perspective. While this is actually not really an efficient way to create a level, it definitely makes it a bit more interesting and fun.

Textured walls, the first highlight

I utilized haxe, Kha and zui for this project. The first two I already tried for another software rendering project - the “Ray Tracing in a weekend” version I did 2 years ago. So I knew Kha could be used to just draw some pixels (probably grossly under-using this framework), and I like how it supports virtually every platform. The latter was a life-saver for me because the web version turned out to be not ‘compatible’ with my input method (as locking the mouse cursor always is a risk in browsers). But the Windows build turned out fine, after I had to fix a surprising bug which switched the textures’ red and blue channels. Zui, the go-to solution for tool GUIs for Kha, was relatively easy to understand (after quite some tinkering with the elements), but unfortunately it doesn’t feel as powerful and flexible as the Immediate GUI I know from Unity. Still, it was much better than nothing, and helped me to add edit functionality quite easily.

Final (jam) version of my ray-caster, with editor

Features of my ray-casting “engine” are, for now:

  •  textured walls, floors and ceilings
  • 3(!) block layers (bottom, center, top)
  • sprites (for the center layer only)
  • more or less correct display of infinite wrapping levels
  • collision with walls

It also supports different wall textures for each block side, but this feature isn't shown in this prototype unfortunately, because I had no time to add an editor mode for this. As I have a lot of overdrawing (mostly thanks to the top and bottom block layers) the performance is worse than it could be, and with infinite wrapping levels fps get low very fast as soon as you have a bit more sprites visible at once. Still, it’s good enough for me, because I do not target DOS machines like some of the more impressive entries of the Kajam do.


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Most pictures (textures for the walls, and five of the seven sprites) were pulled from textures.com. This is also only rudimentary, as there is no game; but I expected to use photos for the environment from the beginning anyway, for whatever game I would do; I am still inspired by Ultima Underworld II in this regard.

Ultima Underworld II, by Looking Glass Studios

While my use-case for the engine is not necessarily a dungeon crawler, I definitely would like to repurpose it for another jam game in the future. The biggest feature missing right now is level saving and loading, which I should add in any case. Other than that, the gameplay will probably decide what the direction is going to be.

If you want to try the Alakajam version of rc-test (I didn't have any use for a better name), don’t forget to read the control instructions on the entry page. And check out voxel’s excellent RAYKA!

Spielgefährten, now live and in color!

The corona virus affects us all, in one way or another. Although the Rat King is a small team and there is no need for us to work at home now, we still feel the effects of the lock-down. In order to get rid of the uneasiness a bit we dusted off our Spielgefährten podcast, where we talk about games and game design.

This time we did a (German) live-stream on Twitch about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen, a third-person shooter from 2000. We did a poll on Twitter beforehand, asking which character we should play (you can choose between Sisko, Worf and Kira). It was more popular that I'd thought it would be.

For over 2.5 hours we played as Kira shooting a lot of cardassians and talked about The Fallen, it level design, a bit of background, and other things. You can (re)watch our Let's Play here.


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A week later now we want to do another live-stream; maybe even making it a habit and doing it every Wednesday. In any case, this time we will play some multiplayer games, local coop to be exact. You can choose between Overcooked, Out of Space and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - but I am sure we will play more than one game. A bit of Spheroneers will be there to, probably.

So if you speak German and want to talk about games, visit our Twitch channel on Wednesday, 7pm (Berlin time). We also have a Discord!

Spheroneers

The Global Game Jam 2020 marks the seventh time the Rat King participated in this world-wide event of game-making and game-playing; and it is the second time we hosted the event in our home town; in the Designhaus Halle to be exact. (Before that, we took part at and/or organized the location in Leipzig.) So this is a sacred tradition for us, as game developers and as creative people in Central Germany, where unfortunately not a lot of other game studios reside. But maybe, peu à peu, we can change that this way.

Even though our GGJ location in Halle is pretty small - we had 13 jammers staying till the end - the six games made for this year’s theme Repair are all wonderful. I especially want to highlight FixItPainter, Interdimensional Matter, RoboRescue, SpaceBuddyRepair and Super Smudge! (The last one was extra special, as it became a game show with host and trophy in the end - another proof that not every team needs a programmer!)

Our own game, Spheroneers, is a local co-op multiplayer game where the players control two to four engineers; they have the task to find a sphere which contains an (embryonic) alien creature. Then they have to roll the sphere through the rooms, protect it from holes in the floor and from dangerous robots, and also use it for door switches. To ultimately win the game the group of spheroneers need to get to the final teleporter that sends the sphere home. We created a video that showcases the full gameplay of our GGJ prototype:


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As usual, not everything we envisioned got implemented (only 48 hours, after all!) - still, we are pretty proud of the end result. In fact, we think we want this to become a full game, as it was fun not only to play, but also to make. It became a very dynamic experience, as the players have to destroy and repair things (like walls, floor tiles, and of course the robots) all the time. The GGJ theme really upgraded the concept by adding a lot of interactivity and hilarity.

So if you have some time, and friends, we would be grateful if you could have a look at the game over at itch.io, and give it a test-drive. We eagerly await any kind of feedback, either here in the comments section (if this one is closed, use itch.io), or in our Discord. (If you don’t have friends, Spheroneers can also be played alone, but it might diminish the experience a bit. Find some friends!)

Behind High Five and Under Gamescom

Hey - long time no read! We're sorry for the lack of updates. (I bet you heard that sentence before.)

After months of finalizing and polishing Behind Stars and Under Hills' prototype, we pitched the project to several publishers. Afterwards we put the game on a temporary hiatus, so we can pursue other projects for now. Behind Stars is still highly active in the back of our brains though - more about that in later posts! Meanwhile, a few atmospheric screenshots from the current state of the game prototype:

To earn some money we currently design and implement a mobile game for local animation studio MotionWorks - it's pretty cool to collaborate with creatives working a few streets away for a change! Unfortunately we can't tell too much about the project yet, but the setting will be the Bronze Age, and the game itself is embedded in an interactive app about the Nebra sky disk. It is co-funded by the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung and the Investitionsbank Sachsen-Anhalt.

In April we visited the Reboot 2018 in Croatia, together with our good friend Björn. The Reboot itself was a very cool 3-day event within a luxurious hotel lobby with lots of games, food and talks! But we were also mesmerized by the beauty of Croatia and Dubrovnik, and the bombed hotels along the coast line...

A short time ago the summer semester of our former art school ended, which always concludes with the annual summer fest together with an exhibition of all the students' works. As our office is part of the incubator Designhaus which is directly tied to the university and thus does an Open Day during the exhibition weekend, we were obliged (and happy!) to also show stuff we made. We decided that Behind Stars and Under Hills would not work for the audience of people mostly interested in the finer arts (and their young kids), so instead we created a small game specifically for the Open Day.

We also were adamant that everybody would be able to play the game. But from former experiences we knew that some visitors even have reservations against using a mouse or keyboard. This is why we got a Makey Makey and made a game you would play with high fives only: High Five Romance Race! Later on we also presented the game at the Talk&Play in Berlin. We can say without shame that this simple endless runner is one of our most popular products now. ;)

Of course we will visit the gamescom this year again - we won't showcase anything this time, which is actually a good thing because it gives us more leisure to have a look at all the great games presented at the Indie Arena Booth. Just today their line-up was revealed, so have a look!

INDIE ARENA BOOTH trailer 2018

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Are you going too? Tell us via Twitter - or even better, join us on our new Discord server and talk directly to us! :)

bpb game jam 2018: Hugs & Kisses

Just like in 2016, we were invited to a local game jam in Remscheid, Germany, hosted by the bpb (the German Federal Center for Political Education) to make a political statements through game concepts and prototypes. As such, the theme was a bit different than the usual jams: "Discimination, ostracism, radicalization".

Our own entry is a bit more game-y then we would have wanted; but after not being able to find a more meaningful idea (and message) for nearly half a day, we went with one of the earliest concepts we had. So we created a 2-player co-op game about cats and dogs, and about working together to keep all the citizens happy. We called it Hugs & Kisses.

The world map is divided in three zones. The dogs' zone (blue), the cats' zone (red) and the neutral zone between them. In the dog country are mostly dogs and only a few cats, and vice-versa. The neutral zone has both species equally. The gameplay is simple (and inspired by Overcooked): you have to feed the cats and dogs in your country, otherwise they get unhappy. So if there's a cat in cat land craving for fish, the cat player goes to the fish spawning point and carries the fish to the hungry cat.

Only when there is a cat in dog land asking for fish it gets interesting, because a player cannot enter the other player's zone, so they have to work together and trade the fishes and bones with each other by throwing them around.

bpb game jam 2018 - Hugs & Kisses

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And sometimes, a community member gets sad and needs to be hugged. <3

In any case, should the needs of a citizen get ignored for too long, they become mad - i.e. they explode and take parts of the level geometry with them. Discrimination has a fatal impact in this case indeed.

You can try our little jam game on itch.io (Windows only). It's best played with two gamepads, but keyboard is fine too. Be aware that it really is a prototype, so there is no real lose or win condition. But see if you can beat the game without anybody blowing up!

By the way, if you are interested in the development of games, you might want to read a short article about Hugs & Kisses on my own blog - it mostly describes the process of creating the level for the game.

Of course it was also very nice to meet many teams from all over Germany and Austria at the jam, seeing their games come to existence during the three days, and of course having a good time together. If you want to find out more about them and their games (and speak a bit of German), click your way through the bpb game jam wiki and have a look at their projects!

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