Danik Games DevBlog

Aether

Danik — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:58:48 +0000

Another Ludum Dare is over, number 23 to be precise, and my game is submitted. It’s called “Aether” and is a mix of an explorer platformer and missile command, where you have to run through a landscape to reach a mountain with a secret weapon, while at the same time fighting off alien spacecraft.

You can play it here: Play Aether. Have fun!

PyxelEdit LD version

Danik — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:23:40 +0000

Next weekend Ludum Dare happens for the 23rd time, and it will be the ten year anniversary of the competition!

As you might know, I released an early version of the pixel editor, now called PyxelEdit, for the Ludum Dare community. Even though it is far from complete, I wanted to share what I had because I think it’s cool and could be useful for making quick graphics for LD.

I have not yet decided exactly what to do with the editor. Right now I’m refactoring the code because there is a lot of prototype code in there, the data and representation is not fully separated etc. This will make the code much easier and faster to work with in the long run, but it also means there won’t be any updates for a while (more than small fixes to the LD version if needed).

In the mean time, you can get the LD version of the editor here: http://danikgames.com/stuff/pyxeledit/

Here is a demo video (sligtly outdated):

Unnamed pixel editor

Danik — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:20:46 +0000

This week I have had a lot of free time, so I started working on a new project. It’s a pixel editor inspired by Pro Motion and Pixothello with some special features to make the process of making pixel art more streamlined and fun. Some of the features can be seen in the screenshot below. The basic editor is working pretty solidly. I plan to work hard on it the coming days adding animation support and probably a lot of other stuff. In the mean time, enjoy this screenshot.

If you have any name suggestions I’d appreciate it. Pretty much anything with “pixel” seems to be taken.

Spot The Odd One running on Blackberry Playbook

Danik — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:39:29 +0000

I made a game called Spot The Odd One, to take part in Blackberrys free Playbook offer. I just want to share this image of the game running on the actual device. It’s really exciting, as I made it using the simulator. It runs pretty much the same, just much smoother. I have realised some of the colors are almost impossible to tell apart though, like the purple and blue in the image, so I will fix that in the next update.

If you have a Playbook, you can get it for free in App World. Let me know if you have any feedback.

Simple profanity filter in AS3

Danik — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:23:24 +0000

I needed a profanity filter for the highscores in an app I made, but I couldn’t find anything free that worked the way I wanted, so I made a simple one myself. It’s pretty basic but someone might have use for it.

You need a list of lowercase words to filter for. The one I used is far too big to paste here, but you can find one by searching for “bad word list”.

private static const badWords:Array = ["lots","of","bad","words"];

// Returns a profane word if found, else ""
static public function checkName(text:String):String {
text = text.toLowerCase();

for (var i:int = 0; i < charReplacements.length; i++ ) {
var ra:Array = charReplacements[i] as Array;
text = strReplace(text, ra[0], ra[1]);
}

for each (var w:Object in badWords) {
if (text.indexOf(String(w)) != -1) {
return String(w);
}
}
return "";
}

The function will detect character sequences that look like some other character, to make it harder to bypass the filter. For example, 1 becomes i, û becomes u, |\| becomes n etc.
In this way “Fuc|<” would be detected for instance. The sequence replacements can even be used to identify inappropriate symbols like “(.)”, by converting them to (in)appropriate words if you like.

private static const charReplacements:Array = [["@", "a"], ["0", "o"], ["1", "i"],
["2", "r"], ["3", "e"], ["4", "a"], ["5", "s"], ["7", "t"], ["8", "b"],
["9", "g"], ["|<", "k"], ["|\/|", "m"], ["|\|", "n"], ["ä", "a"], ["ã", "a"],
["â", "a"], ["ä", "a"], ["á", "a"], ["à", "a"], ["å", "a"], ["é", "e"],
["è", "e"], ["ë", "e"], ["ê", "e"], ["§", "s"], ["$", "s"], ["£", "l"],
["€", "e"], ["ü", "u"], ["û", "u"], ["ú", "u"], ["ù", "u"], ["î", "i"],
["ï", "i"], ["í", "i"], ["ì", "i"], ["ÿ", "y"], ["ý", "y"], ["ö", "o"],
["ô", "o"], ["õ", "o"], ["ó", "o"], ["ò", "o"], ["(.)","boob"]];

You will also need this helper function for string replacement:

// Helper that replaces all "find" with "replace" in the given input string
public static function strReplace(input:String, find:String, replace:String):String {
while (input.indexOf("find") != -1)
input = input.split(find).join(replace);
return input.split(find).join(replace);
}

It works quite well, let me know if you found it useful or have any suggesstions.

LD nano – 48 minute RTS

Danik — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 11:31:47 +0000

Sos at Ludum Dare arranged nanoLD - make a game in 48 minutes. I got the theme RTS and made this. (the theme was random each time you loaded the page but I didn’t realise that until afterwards)
I spent an extra couple of minutes fixing a few bugs afterwards, so maybe 55 minutes in total.

48 min RTS

GGJ12 – Planet of Yrwys

Danik — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:55:55 +0000

This weekend me and about 10000 others around the world participated in the annual Global Game Jam, the largest game jam in the world. The theme was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros. Me and my team made a game called Planet of Yrwys (You Reap What You Sow) featuring a hungry harvesting robot:

The game is about a robot, endlessly walking on the surface of a small planet. To survive you have to plant seeds, which turn into plants that you can harvest for more seeds, and so on. To make the task more complicated, you keep going faster and faster, and there is a hungry Capybara eating any of the plants he comes across. Colliding with the Capybara or a plant that has been left too long and turned into a thorny dead bush will make you drop all your seeds!

Each time you complete a circle, you need to eat one seed for energy, and if you pass the flag without any seeds you loose.

I made the graphics and music and a little bit of the programming. Andreas Bjerkeholt (Harteex), Disa Faith (Disaia) and Robert Edström (Legogris) did the programming, and we all made the game design together.

You can find out more, and try the game here: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/planet-yrwys. To run it you need Windows and the XNA runtime, but that should download automatically in the installer I believe. You can also use an Xbox controller if you have one.

LD48 Ravenwood

Danik — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:34:28 +0000

I entered the Ludum Dare game making competition this weekend as usual. The theme was “Alone”. I didn’t have any immediate ideas, so I began by making the basis for a platformer with the theme in mind. Then it sort of evolved as I came up with things I thought would be cool to add.

PLAY

The tools I used:

Flashdevelop (IDE)
Flashpunk (Game library)
Photoshop
Audition (sound editing)
Cubase (music)
Chronolapse (timelapse recording)

I decided early on to make it atmospherical, and I put a lot of focus on the effects, sounds, music and animation.

Continue reading for more info and a post-mortem.

What went wrong:

My computer kept crashing throughout the weekend, I think it crashed 8 times in total, which was really annoying. Fortunately I didn’t loose much work.

I waited far too long to implement basic things like getting hurt, dieing and winning, which meant I had to rush that in in the last couple of hours. The basic gameplay challenge when fighting the ravens is not that hard or fun, I should have worked more on that, as well as added more kinds of enemies, and perhaps a boss. It would also make the game more fun if I added some sort of progression, like new abilities.

The story is intentionally vauge, but only because I didn’t have time to flesh it out. It might add to the mystery and mood, I’m not sure. I would really have liked to have time to add a proper ending.

If you miss one of the spheres, you have to go back and find it. I wanted to have some sort of checkpoint, where to pass you would need to complete the part of the game behind you, but I didn’t get around to it. This also means you can win the game in different places, which is maybe cool, but…

What went right:

I think the strongest part of the game is the atmosphere. The rain and lightning effects really add to the mood. I’m also happy with the graphics, and especially the animation, considering I haven’t done that much before. The music is simple but effective, I didn’t go crazy despite listening to it for 10 hours straight.

The player physics feel pretty good, although the attacking part can use some more work. I’m proud of the healing mechanic although it isn’t used to such a big extent.

The camera doesn’t follow the player all the time, instead it snaps to 32×24 tile screens. This was an experiment, and I think it turned out ok. Because the screens are predetermined, you have more control over the scenes the player will see, and can tailor each scene to look as best it can. Of course, it’s also a limitation, and can be irritating for the player when navigating small passages for example.

I made the level as one big png-image in photoshop, where each pixel corresponds to one 10×10 pix tile. This made it really easy to edit, and because it was one single big image, I could quickly see how the whole world looked together. In order to see where each screen in the game was positioned, I just filled the image with helper rectangles. It worked suprisingly well.
Here is the final world image scaled up a bit (Warning: SPOILERS!): world.png

The auto-tiling was a thing I threw together in a hackish manner, but it worked really well too, and supports additional tilesets easily given an offset to the base tile (solid tile).

Summary:

I’m happy with the result. The graphics are simple but effective, the atmosphere is good, sound and music works, the gameplay could be better but is ok, and it’s a completed game! I focused on stuff I usually don’t, and think I learned a whole lot. If you haven’t played the game yet, you can try it out here: http://danikgames.com/stuff/LD22/index.html!

Here is the entry page on the Ludum Dare site.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=2311

Coin Runner post-LD screenshot

Danik — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:32:17 +0000

I’m have been working on Coin Runner since Ludum Dare 21. Here is a screenshot of how it looks at the moment, although a lot of it is still placeholder art. As you can see, there are now achievements.

It plays a lot better than the compo version!

There’s also lot’s of new items and skills you can buy. More info coming soon!

Ludum Dare 21: Coin Runner

Danik — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:51:19 +0000

I participated in last weekends Ludum Dare 48 hour game making competition again. This time the theme was “Escape”, and I made a game where you run from enemies and collect coins, called Coin Runner. This time I focused most of my efforts on the gameplay, hence the squares for graphics. You can try the compo version here: Coin Runner compo-version. I’m continuing to work on the game, so stay tuned.

: Coin Runner

Cross posted at the LD site:

Waking up at 1:30 PM in the day today with aching fingers, I felt happy.

The game is actually pretty fun to play, and not too badly balanced. There are three zones of different colors, and each zone get’s a bit harder. The enemies get a little too fast and jumpy after a while though.

I don’t regret using Flashpunk this time, it really makes everything so much easier than using just as3 like last time. I spent many hours on a stupid bug though, and realised Flashpunk tilemaps do not actually clear tiles when you call clearTile() on them if the clear tile (index 0) is transparent. That was annoying and made me loose a lot of time.

I think the leaderboard can add a lot to the game. Sadly Playtomic has disabled it’s leaderboards due to some problems, but it should be working soon again.

I didn’t really make any graphics at all, but focused on gameplay instead. I think that was a good idea, but the game could really use some better graphics. The music and sound effects could be better too, but they do the job.

A breakdown of the time spent in different applications (tracked with ProcrastiTracker):

Flashdevelop 13h
Chrome 6h
Flashplayer 4h
XChat 2h
Photoshop 2h
Cubase 1h

In total 28 hours!

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2311

Timelapse: