How does the world work?

Posted: May 8, 2013 in Blog, Experimental Game Play, Game Dev, Ludum Dare
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I’ve been working on Pimps vs Vampires for about 8 months now, alongside Thomas Noppers. The next version is scheduled to be released somewhere next week, bringing a few new weapons, a crazy bat sidekick and a multi purpose bubble-gum weapon (won’t spoil it for you guys). What puzzles me is that even though most of my twitter followers (or awesome peeps, as I like to call them) played and tweeted about PvV most of everyone I met have almost no idea about PvV’s existence. Instead, I meet up with a few folks from Bucharest that, once I told them my name, recognized my blog (this blog). The funny thing is they also knew about my last LD entry (Minimal Interaction Warfare) and congratulated me on finishing a game in 48h, though I’m sure they only played the after-jam version. Thus, I got a bit puzzled so I decided to google both of my games. There are more mentions about Pimps vs Vampires yet what tingled my kringle was that MIW got hosted on Softpedia.

MIW is no-where near a finished game, with only a couple of units and 3 different tile sets. It is only hosted on LD’s page and on Gamejolt. PvV has a page on indieDB, on FTJ’s page and got a few mentions on other blogs. My question is HOW and WHY, did MIW get chosen and hosted by Softpedia?

 

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Ludumdare 26 – Minimal Interaction Warfare

Posted: April 30, 2013 in Experimental Game Play, Game Dev, Ludum Dare, My games and experiments
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As some of you may know, the 26th edition of Ludumdare took place last weekend and boy was it fun. A wooping 2345 (nice number eh?) games have been developed in less then 72h, thousands of lines of code have been written and industrial quantities of caffeine have been drank. The theme for this edition was Minimalism , a theme with so little, yet so many, interpretation. Some entries focused on having minimalistic graphics (color scheme, elements, basic primitives), others had simple interactions and gameplay. One guy went the extra mile and made his game minimalistic by all possible definitions (graphics, design, executable size) and added a bit of maSOchiSm to the equation. My interpretation of the theme? Minimal interaction during the Action Phase of a game.

Minimal Interaction Warfare

Minimal Interaction Warfare - Post Ludumdare Edition

Minimal Interaction Warfare – Post Ludumdare Edition

When I first started MIW the goal was simple: A 2D war fighting game in which the player placed his troops, issued orders and sat back to follow the outcome. I guess I can say I succeeded as my entry featured all the above. The down falls? No sound, over powered player units and little-to-no-polish. That’s why I decided to release a second, post-jam, version with a simple Main Menu, more maps and balanced gameplay. The game still has no sound effects and music because, well… um, I have little-to-no talent in that area and I wanted to keep things in the spirit of Ludumdare where all the assets are created by me. Maybe in another version, when things settle down (I still have to release another Pimps vs Vampires version this week, and I also have some freelancing work to attend). Read the rest of this entry »

Pimps vs Vamps – Postmortem

Posted: November 21, 2012 in Experimental Game Play, Game Dev, Linux, My games and experiments
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Most of you know that I picked up jamming as a thing a few years ago, and used it as a mean to hack-away a game prototype, with low expectations, trying to mine for “gold”. I feel that with each jam game the quality of my work has evolved. What started in 2009 with “Grandpa told me” and “Contrast Survival” became a “thing” in my daily activity. For me, game jams are a great way to throw dust particles in the air in order to see if they float. Last week I took part in another game jam, an offspring of Rami Ismail and Fernando Ramallo, called “FUCK (or F*ck for those who find the letter “u” offensive) this Jam“.

While scouting my mind for ways to cheat around the restriction imposed by the jam (“to design a game in a genre I hate/despise or usually ignore”), I decided to attempt a collaborative jam. Thus, I’ve sent a tweet out into the wild. The wait was not long, as I soon got in contact with Thomas through a match-making service powered by FTJ’s twitter account. Thomas decided to join my party in this 1 week quest. [he also wrote about the jam experience, so head to his blog to read the other side of this story]. Read the rest of this entry »

Reset, play and continue

Posted: October 18, 2012 in Blog, Game Dev, My games and experiments
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A couple of years ago I made a post about living my childhood dream, the dream of working in the industry as a game designer. That dream still stands, high, tall, and proud, ignoring the flow of time. One thing changed since then, me. My persona, my being, my thoughts and ideals have developed, evolved and became something new. Well not actually, I just switched jobs.
Working for Gameloft has been fun. Heck, I might have even spent the best days of my life there. It took me two full weeks to get over not having to dress up and go to the office. For a few weeks, I moved back into my hometown to take care of my mother, who was extremely sick during that time. I’d wake up at 10 am, get dressed and walk for a few minutes, until I’d remember I’m not even in Bucharest. Now things have gotten better. My mother is well, I’m back in Bucharest, in my new apartment, crossing one more item out of my bucket list. During the time I’ve spent in my hometown, I received an offer that I just could not refuse. There are many things I strive to accomplish till I’m 30. And up till now, “everything went better then expected”.

My Career ToDo list
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[Blazejam]: Tools and Software

Posted: July 5, 2012 in Blog, Experimental Game Play, Game Dev, Linux, My games and experiments
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The first step one must take in order to win a battle is to prepare, to prepare mentally, physically and tie his shoe laces. You can’t just win a battle if your pants keep falling or if your horse was kept unfed for a few weeks! Thus, in order to spare to some time and avoid running into certain problems during Blazejam, I decided to prepare myself by selecting the tools I will use this weekend! After pondering for a while, it all came down to this:

LOVE2D
LOVE is a framework for making 2D games in the Lua programming language. It’s free, powerful, with a good amount of documentation and a great community. It’s also cross platform and can be deployed as a .love package (.zip->.love) or as a binary for Windows and Linux. There are also a few community projects that focus on deploying love binaries for the Android, Pandora and even a JS interpreter which allow the game to be played inside a browser (JS + HTML5)!
Project homepage: Love2D.org

Lua Development Tools by @koneki
I’ve been using LUA for my game-dev projects for a few years now. I remember first starting with LuaForNDS, then embedding it in my own games and applications. On Windows I used Notepad++ for my little scripts but not long ago, I moved all my machines to Linux (Ubuntu to be precisely). I’ve tried several text editors (EMACS, GEDIT and even Sublime Text) but I felt that they lacked the feel of an actual ide. This is were @Koneki stepped in with it’s eclipse based IDE for Lua developers. Besides the usual Syntax Highlighting, LDT offers a wide variety of features like “error marking”, “code folding”, “code templates”, “code formatter” and last but not least, a Debugger! It’s fast (feels lightweight) and the key bindings are made in HEAVEN! If love at first sight would apply to software and tools then that would be my first impression towards LDT!
Project homepage: eclipse.org/Koneki

GIMP
There’s just one thing I miss about working in a Windows Environment: Paint.NET! I’ve spent the last 3 years working with it daily, doing schematics, drawing ugly concepts, making placeholder textures or just fooling around in it! It’s ease of use solved allot of headache’s for me. I’ve tried looking for open source/paid alternatives but nothing came close to the real deal. I’ve tried using PINTA, a drawing application which tries to replicate the functionality of Paint.NET but I couldn’t get used to it. So I decided to try out GIMP! The work-flow is quite different from what I’m used to, but luckily for me, there are hundreds and hundreds of articles and tutorials out there to help a beginner get used to GIMP.
Project homepage: gimp.org

Ubuntu 12.04 and a virtualized Windows 7
I’m a big fan of the Ubuntu movement! I first came in contact with it in 2006, with version 6.04 (if I’m not mistaken) and since then, I always had at least one machine running it! It matured allot since then and I now use it as my primary Operating System. The entire game I’m making for Blazejam will be developed on Ubuntu. Windows 7 will run under VirtualBox in order to build a Windows executable for the game.
Project homepage: ubuntu.com
Virtual Box: virtualbox.org

SFXr
SFXr first caught my eye while reading a few posts about Ludumdare. A huge part of the LD jamming community was using it for their games and they were all pleased with the results. It’s a simple tool, made by DrPetter specially for Ludum Dare which generates random sound effects which can then be tweaked through an old school interface. It’s simple, reliable and FUN!
Project homepage: drpetter.se

Making games for charity – BlazeJam

Posted: July 3, 2012 in Blog, Experimental Game Play, Game Dev, Linux, My games and experiments
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BlazeJam
Well, it’s certainly been quite a few months since my last (and first?) game jam. Now that my schedule is more relaxed I can focus on what I like to do most: make games (and drink beer). And what better way to relax then by spending some quality time locked in my lovely apartment, drinking coffee and giving my best to help others through my creations. In fact, one of the reasons I love working in the industry is based on the idea that I can help/inspire other people through my work. What better opportunity to do this than by making a game for a noble cause?

This weekend (July 7th) I’m going to participate in BlazeJam, a 48-hour game jam and auction to benefit the victims of the Waldo Canyon Fire. The theme will revolve around “Fire Fighting”. I’ve got a few ideas for it, but truth be told, I’m aiming for a more romantic approach to this theme. Right now I’m setting up a decent framework to use (on top of Love2D) for the jam, but I’ll try to keep it fair, so I won’t be designing anything beforehand.

The event will be live streamed, so expect to see me grunting at my monitor and drinking industrial quantities of caffeine during this event! Till then, I invite you guys to read more about it and wholeheartedly recommend to either participate or at least donate, if not money, at least some of your free time, into promoting it.

[5 minutes read]: If I’d go to war

Posted: June 14, 2012 in Blog
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If I’d ever have to go to war I would probably be the first one to die. At least that’s the first thing that went through my mind after I got “shoot” at Airsoft. You know how in most FPS games your character is a badass warrior that takes down entire plutons, headshots all the enemy snipers and “neck-stabs” every living being that’s colored different from him? Well, you can forget about it! My experience was the exact opposite! At Airsoft I felt like everyone was a Protagonist while I was the only NPC, one under powered non-playable character. Forget about rushing head-on, doing summersaults or dashing towards the cover! Going commando doesn’t help either. Stealth tactics? Unless you get some Crysis-like gear you can forget about it! Everything I tried seemed to fail! Things only turned out to be a little brighter when I decided to hide between two walls and started praying that an enemy would walk into my sight, trip and fall on one of the Balls I scattered there.
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