Tag «itch.io»

bloed

I like blocky graphics. Pixels, voxels, square tiles, grid-based walls - keep them coming! I guess this originates from my Lego-heavy childhood, and also from old computer games, where you could clearly see the tiles the game’s world was made of. And while I never was into Wolfenstein3D, I recently created my own grid-based ray-caster just because I do adore the aesthetics.

rc-test, a ray-casting engine

The same with Minecraft - it’s a game that is an inspiration even though I didn’t play it much. The blockiness makes the virtual world instantly more organized; it’s like you can play around with its pure atoms. Blockiness empowers - not only is it fun to be creative there (because the interactivity is rewarded with reactions from the game’s systems) but as a game creator myself I instantly “get it” and - leaving out the grindy details - want to try my own variation of the structure functionality.

Wunderworld, a game/editor I made for Ludum Dare some years ago

This is why I wanted to go with block-based levels for Behind Stars And Under Hills. For me it also fit with the premise of the game - an Ultima-Underworld-inspired dungeon crawler should have visible floor and wall segments, and pixels too. So I created my own in-game level editor for Behind Stars - because, maybe, other people want to make worlds with this too...

An early version of Behind Stars, made with bloxels

Of course trapping a level editor inside a game that is never released makes the endeavour less than pointless. So last year I went and put some time into changing the code to work inside Unity itself, as a plugin, which was for some parts easy thanks to the extensibility of Unity’s editor, and for other parts hard because of nasty serialization issues. Nonetheless, bloed - short for “bloxel-based level editor” or simply “block-based editor” as “bloxel” probably won’t catch on - slowly came to be and is now available on itch.io. I wanted to use it for a Thief-like game, working title “Demon Thief”, and for that it worked quite well. (Though I scrapped Demon Thief in favour of our next game project.)

A level from Demon Thief

I nicknamed the blocks in the editor bloxels because originally, in Behind Stars, I called them voxels and that didn’t quite fit. I use complete meshes for the blocks (made with Blender), and they can have any shape actually, as long as it fits inside 1x1x1 units. It’s also possible to do some more creative texturing by having UVs smaller than 1.0, which means they can span over several bloxels, to break up noticeable tiling and add more variation. It’s also possible to assign each side of a bloxel another texture (inspired by David Pittman’s NEON STRUCT dev blog). Naturally you still can manipulate the bloxels during runtime, so it’s possible to have something like destructible environment.

All my “additions” to the voxel formula makes the bloxels rather unfit to optimize though. Of course I segment the created geometry into chunks, and the textures are merged into texture atlasses. Still, draw calls are high and need to be reduced with optimizations like static and dynamic batching, occlusion culling, baked light maps and so on. Downsides aside, I am proud bloed supports arbitrary transforms and prefabs, and the optional noise factor can look nice too. These are things the ingame-only Behind Stars bloxels didn’t have.

Will the development continue? I hope so - especially if a few more people are interested in it (i.e. buy it) and post their creations made with bloed. Right now I don’t use bloed for a personal project, although I have some ideas and plans for that. So its future might be a bit hazy, but in general bloed is usable already, and I certainly will react to any bug reports. If you want to talk about bloed, you can also do it in our Discord!

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!

TRI – new update

141004_08

We published an update for our game TRI: Of Friendship and Madness! The new version 1.1 got the codename "QuadraticTriangle" and as usual contains some minor bug-fixes and changes to the game. Here are the more important improvements:

  • Added Finnish language for in-game texts
  • Added Polish language for in-game texts
  • Removed warning about not supporting Intel graphics cards, as it was confusing
  • Added bindable key "Menu" - this is what happens when you press ESC to call the pause menu. (The ESC key will always do it, but now you can add another binding.)
  • Removed some wood surface in a location in Chapter 15, to allow coming back to one of the hidden idols by creating triangles

Bug fixes include:

  • Fixed initial resolution fullscreen change
  • Fixed level timer not resetting
  • Fixed Monk talking through the ceiling in Chapter 13
  • Fixed potential bug with some Steam achievements not unlockable
  • Fixed potential bug with not working door in Chapter 12 - needs level restart (minor fix)
  • Fixed bug with quality settings - low shadow settings would also lower quality of characters

If you find any problems with the update, please leave us some feedback and refer to this older announcement on Steam on how to send us relevant crash logs.

If you own TRI on Steam the game should update itself as soon as you restart the client. If you have the game DRM-free on any other store, you will need to download the package again. At the moment, HumbleStore and itch.io already have the latest version, while GOGcom and IndieGameStand will follow soon!

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