Delays for personal reasons

I´ve had personal issues the last couple of days that have had me re-evaluate where my life is going at the moment, if it´s going anywhere that is. I´ve been very depressed for reasons I don´t care to diverge. In any case, I will push back my schedule a week, to give myself some space. I know that being creative is what keeps me going, but first there are things I need to sort out, until then

hasta pronto.

AGS (Adventure Game Studio) open-sourced!

Well, that´s kind of a half truth, but anyway - it´s always better to see the glass half full, right?=)

After some heated discussion on the AGS-forum, Chris has decided to open up the editor-code for now, and depending on how that works, he might release the rest of the engine code as well (here´s hoping=) In any case, this is an awesome opportunity to make improvements to the editor interface, or extend it further than possible with the current limited plugin API. Chris will still control the official releases, but is looking forward to recieving some wellneeded assistance with bugfixes and cool features, with potential inclusion into the main branch.

A picture says more than a thousand words=)

Here´s the link to the AGS forum topic:

Kewl beans! I will follow this development with great anticipation!

Hasta pronto!

That´s it damnit!

I´m tired of working for other people. so I´ve better get started. Instead of being the usual perfectionist, I decided to just scribble something down on canvas and I´m quite pleased with having actually started, even though it looks like crap=P What´s significant is that this is actually the first design work done for the game. No matter how crude, it still conveys pretty well some basic ideas that will be brought into the final version.


This will be the first scene. It´s actually a scroller, so we will start looking at the sky, birds flying around and landing on the rooftop, down to the name of the school and then to this frame (As the down arrow implies). The trees and bushes in the foreground I hope to make a parallaxed layer, but it depends on how much time I can afford myself.

So there you have it. Laugh all you want at the WIP crappiness - I´m the only one who can see the final product in my mind, and I assure you it will look pretty neat=)

Full, weekly, craptastic update on sunday, remember!;) Until then,

Hasta pronto!

Would I like to go commercial with my adventure game?

Maybe a peculiar question to ask oneself when I haven´t even got anything to show yet, but it´s still a question every game developer has to consider. And on a blog dealing with game developing it´s indeed very relevant, even if purely from a philosophical perspective.

Short answer, I would say at some point yes - being able to make a living from making games is an old dream of mine. The important question here is do I think I have what it takes to make people want to buy my games? I think yes. I can draw, and I know I can write an entertaining game. But I would give myself a year or so before I take that step.

With that said, I´ve made the decision to take a slightly different path than originally concieved. I was browsing through Dave Gilberts Twitter-page the other day hoping for some inspiration, and he tipped me of a blog that contained the article "15 tips for finishing a game", which was a great read, btw (added to the links). Anyway, I´m postponing "Positronic puppets", and will instead start with a game with a smaller scope.

I will set a clear limit for how big the game can be, and schedule "Milestones", giving myself some reasonable deadlines for achieving them. But most importantly - keep it simple stupid!

No unnecessary animation, simple perspective backgrounds, plan and execute the core of the game first, and then add extra gameplay and eyecandy as time and inspiration allows. This way, I know I will get started, and it will be the perfect way to develop an artistic style, and get into the game engine (I´m still not sure whether to go with AGS or Wintermute).I will be posting weekly updates on my progress every sunday, starting oct 31st.

So, to start things off, here are the restrictions I will work with - no more than:

• 640x400 (best compromise between 4:3 and widescreen)
• 10 backgrounds
• 5 main characters with animating portraits
• 5 cutscene animations
• 1 fourway walkcycle

That should give an hour or so of gameplay.

The milestones are as follows:

• Now - decide on main plot and milestones check
• 1st week - decide on background layouts and rough sketches.
• 2nd week - have a clear artistic vision for unified game design, with character concept sketches
• 3rd week - have a rough script finished, with main storyline and puzzles. Title for the game.
• 4th week - backgrounds lineart cleaned up, and initial work on character portraits. Announce in AGS WIP-forum.
• 5th week - rough character walkcycle. Begin incorporating into game engine
• 6th week - GUI mockup, go scream help on AGS forum to get help realising it=P
• 8th week - backgrounds finished
• 10th week- character portraits for dialogue finished
• 11th week- character walking animation finished
• 12th week- rough cutscene animation, begin coding dialogue and interaction
• 13th week- finish up cutscene animation, release short demo and ask for help with music/beta testers
• 20th week- release final version and relax
• 52nd week-release commercial deluxeversion with extended gameplay and voiceovers;)

Well, that´s roughly 5 months of work and clearly doable, I think=P In other words I should have a demo up end of january/beginning of february. As you can see, I´ve gone for the philosophy of spending about 60% on the first 90%, and 40% on the last 10%, finetuning, not rushing the final product until I´m satisfied. Now - to the drawing table!

Hasta pronto!

Plastic Animation Paper..

is the name of an animation software that used to be commercial, but is now freeware. It seemed interesting from a first look, and the pro version used to be 695 euros, so color me curious. Needless to say I downloaded and had myself a go. First impressions? A quirky, seemingly non-intuitive interface that took some getting used to. It didn´t help much that the program broke into a spasm as soon as I tried to maximize the window. However, first impressions aside, after going through the excellent tutorials I´m starting to grasp the basics, and the real power of the program becomes apparent. This really is a program best used with one hand on the keyboard. Once you get used to the workflow you´ll be churning out animations in no time!=)

Example from PAP tutorial

Features include

• Lighttable (or onion skinning)
• Sound import and playback
• Blue pen concept drawing
• Layers
• Cutouts (Easy moving/rotating/scaling etc of drawings or animation)

NOTE: This is not a paint program! It has basic sketching tools, but that´s it. It´s not really an end all solution, so expect to export your animation into another program (like The Gimp or Photoshop) to clean up and finish your animation. It is however very good at what it does, and I easily envision myself using this as part of my pipeline for walkcycles and cutscenes in the game.

Plastic Animation Paper can be found here! Tutorials here.

Adventure Game Studio goes open-source?

Well, a not totally unexpected bomb exploded today, when Chris Jones of AGS-fame announced (in this thread on the AGS-forum) that he doesn´t really have any time to improve his adventure game engine anymore. However he´s also not ready to let it just die, so he´s proposing one of two ways to move forward:

1. Recruit an assistant to help out with development, or
2. Go open-source and let the community step in and take over

So let me just give my 2 cents on the thing. Go open source! I´ve rarely seen opensourcing as a hurtful thing, more likely it´s bound to give a well needed vitamin injection to the project. There are a lot of talented coders within the AGS community that has all the love needed for this project to move on in safe hands. With their hands free, we could see an exciting future for AGS!

I also think alot of indie game companies would appreciate being able to hire a coder to do the changes they need and possibly give back to the community, for example.

Chris should always be the leader and have the final say in path decisions, but it´s only going to be easier when he doesn´t have to do all the coding himself.

Hasta pronto!

DAGE 0.5.0 video tutorials

A if the recent release of DAGE 0.5.0 wasn´t enough, Pauli - the main developer has released a series of video tutorials on how to use DAGE for your own 3d adventure game making! There are 4 tutorials, dealing with new features such as object anmation, the physics engine,stackable functions plus camera and scene hierarchy.

The videos can be seen below, or you can go to the DAGE blog entry for the downloadable files.

In other words, no more excuses - get cooking!

Hasta pronto!

MyPaint 0.9.0 official beta

Artwork by David Revoy (Deevad) in MyPaint

The new beta is up for grabs at the MyPaint website here (Windows installer and source code). For a changelog, for now you have to go throught the commit log.

For the lazy ones:

A lot of work have been done to streamline the application. Some brushsets were growing out of control, and you really didn´t need half of them. They will be downloadable still on the website. Furthermore, brushsets have been limited to 35 brushes, and Deevad´s is now default on startup. Related to this is the ability to import and export brushsets.

Apart from that of course the usual cosmetic updates, fixes and speedups. A lot of work has gone into improving the user experience on this one.

Keep up the good work, and

hasta pronto!

DAGE ups the ante for 0.5.0

"I Was a Las Vegas Showgirl" - by Ali

Truthfully, since I ditched my desktop and kept my netbook, 3D has been kind of on the backburner for me. As for DAGE (acronym for Dog Adventure Game Engine), I´ve always looked at it as promising, but it´s not really for netbooks. It was just too slow.

However, this is a site about adventure game developing, I should stop being selfish and look to the future as well. Furthermore, Pauli Suuraho has been working hard, and this looks to be a tremendous update, and a huge step forward in usability. It´s also more fun to report on a release that´s not just another bugfix release=P

What´s new and improved:

• Physics engine
• Unicode text (Hello Kanji and Cyrillic people)
• Object parenting
• Everything can now be animated
• Multiple camera angles

If you´ve used the engine before, expect your game to be broken, because so much has been changed internally. Now, Pauli also talks about ways to speed up the engine, but whether that is in this release is unclear right now. In any case download and play around with the new release HERE.

Once this engine matures, I´m sure we´ll finally see some complete games to showcase it´s abilities. Right now there are two games in different stages of development. "I was a Las Vegas Showgirl" (shown in the image above) seems to be the one closest to completion. There´s also a game in spanish coming up - "Las Muertes de Ciudad Luz" (though it might be dead since the blog is down). Seems I have to practice some more spanish with my girlfriend, then=P

Bueno, that´s all for today, so

Hasta Pronto!

Adventure Game Heroes: Al Lowe

Working for Sierra On-Line in the 80s and early 90s, Al Lowe, one of the pioneers in the industry, was responsible for one of the most renowned adventure game series ever: Leisure Suit Larry. It was about this middle aged loser trying to score with the most beautiful women he could find, no matter how much the odds where against him; but his toils would be neverending, and the women always came out on top in one way or another. All in beautiful, 16 colors of low resolution.

"Leisure Suit Larry" - The Original

What prevented it from being a sleezy lowbrow sexcentric game was the comic genius of Al Lowe. This wasn´t about sex, but pure plain and simple gaming entertainment with a cheeky flavor to it, the hot ladies were just the cream on top. Was it male chauvinist? Sure, but not misogynist in any way. For me, it was a revolution - a revolution that introduced me to the world of graphical adventure games. I would later play better adventure games, but I would always have a softspot for Larry.

Someone please remind me why I like this game;)

Al would later be involved in games like "Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist", and "Torin´s passage" which are a testament to his continued brilliance. Unfortunately, he´s no longer active within the gaming industry.

But what does this have to do with game development, you say? Well, you see Al has his own website, and has kindly invited us to view some of his design documents(!). Al never writes dialogue until the game is made, but the documents still let us get into Al´s mindset to see how he structures his games, with general design decisions, plots, character development, and even technical aspects. In short, it´s a goldmine of adventure game developing genius. The link for the site is below:

Al Lowe´s Humor site

The stuff you want is in the downloads section. Make sure to scroll down past the games.

Next time I hope to get some new sketches and designs up. Until then,

Hasta pronto!

Compiling your own preview of MyPaint 0.9.0

Getting a little restless waiting for a new MyPaint build, I did a little research into compiling my own, mainly because I didn´t have anything better to do. I found this link, where a MyPaint user called TumaGonx have put up detailed instructions for compiling the program, but not only that - he´s supplied an autobuild package that will pretty much do all the work for you.

So what do you need to do?

1. Download the autobuild package from here, and uncompress the archive in a location that suits you.
2. Download and overwrite the default ´mypaint.nsi´ from here.
3. Download the latest source from here, and copy the folder that contains ´build.bat´ into the ´src´-folder.
4. Excecute ´build.bat´. When finished, your MyPaint-build is situated in the Win32-folder.

Tada!

Now you too can play with the latest MyPaint 0.9.0 beta, and make ugly paintings like the one below;)

"Ugly Castle on a Hilltop"-sketch by me

If you find bugs, you can help out in the development by making a bugreport.

If using beta software is to hardcore for you, a final version will likely be out within the month. I will report the news here, and of course go more indepth on what´s new and what´s improved. until then,

Hasta pronto!