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!