Noise Tool part 1

So, basically, I got a bit carried away with LibNoise when I discovered it's capabilities. Using a 3rd party GUI solution called Squid (not released yet, see: http://www.ionstar.org/), I just kept adding features to my tool. It's now completely graphical, you simply drag n drop the modules you want to generate noise with (as opposed to before when I had to make changes to the code to edit the result). Once placed, you can hook up different modules with lines to "chain link" them together to get just the result your looking for. By changing a parameter either by entering a value or dragging a slider for example, the image changes immediately making it straightforward to tweak the result in an intuitive manner.
It's not a completely finished tool, you can't save and load hierarchies or the final image just yet (Won't be hard though), also the lines connecting the modules are drawn underneath the windows which is just a minor annoyance. And some parameters doesn't show up yet in some modules. But all in all, the functionality is there and I'm going to enjoy using this tool for my procedural generation needs in future projects.

Make some Noise!

Recently downloaded LibNoise for .NET and it was surprisingly easy to get started with.
Just had to write a conversion utility to convert the data to a Unity3D texture.

Here are some example screenshots:

Here's the link to LibNoise http://libnoisedotnet.codeplex.com/

Inspiring reads

Continuing with the third kind of inspirational source.
Here follows a growing list of well written articles that I like.

Superbrothers - Less Talk More Rock - http://boingboing.net/features/morerock.html
Jonathan Blow Interview - www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer


Here's a list of blogs I follow:

What Games Are - http://www.whatgamesare.com/
 Programmer behind Fez - http://theinstructionlimit.com/
Jonathan Blow's blog - http://the-witness.net/news/

Inspiring talks

Here's a growing list of recorded talks that inspires me.


- Anything by Jonathan Blow!
Design Reebot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0kup_anLeU&feature=player_embedded)
Conflicts in game design (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGTV8qLbBWE&feature=related)
Video Games and the Human Condition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU)
State of Play (http://stateofplayshow.com/)

- Game developer interviews by Design3 on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/design3channel)

- Bret Victor - Inventing on principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366)

- Juice it or lose it - A talk by Martin Jonasson & Petro Purho (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg&list=PLD6B601C5A010327A&index=1&feature=plpp_video)

- Game Design with Will Wright
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CdgQyq3hEPo#! 

Inspiring indie games

This post will only be a simple listing of indie games that have made some kind of impression on me and that I get inspired by. It can either be by amazing gameplay, style/graphics, or uniqueness regardless of the games fame and success. Anything that sparkles the minds imagination really.
I might update this incrementally as I stumble on new cool stuff.


- Liero

- Soldat (http://soldat.thd.vg/en/

- Link Dead (http://link-dead.thd.vg/en/)

- King Arthur's Gold (http://kag2d.com/)

- Cortex Command (http://www.cortexcommand.com/

- Terraria (http://www.terraria.org/)

- Minecraft (http://www.minecraft.net/)

- Cobalt (http://www.oxeyegames.com/cobalt/)

- Stealth Bastard (http://www.stealthbastard.com/)

- Braid (http://braid-game.com/)

- Revenge of the Titans (http://www.puppygames.net/revenge-of-the-titans/)

- Bastion (http://supergiantgames.com/?page_id=242)

- Machinarium (http://machinarium.net/

- Overgrowth (http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth)

- Natural Selection 2 (http://www.naturalselection2.com/

- Sword & Sworcery (http://www.swordandsworcery.com/

- Fez (http://polytroncorporation.com/61-2)

- Spelunky (http://spelunkyworld.com/)

- Teleglitch (http://teleglitch.com/index.php?page=full)

New year's resolutions, and going indie!

Alright, time for another blog rant.

My professional carer as an casual iPhone game developer has taken it's course and actually ended right before christmas. The  last 6 months was spent in Vancouver, Canada which was my first move to another country. The studio I worked at called Deadbug, shipped 5 apps in total, 4 of them is completely programmed by me alone. As time progressed, the games became gradually more casual and although overall quality increased, gameplay became gradually dumbed down (in my opinion), so after roughly 3 years of full time employment I decided it was time to switch things up a little!

Now with 3 years working with Unity Iv'e grown extremely close with the engine :)
I've put together a big framework (still being developed and added to) that's growing by the day.
It's feature set includes:

* Complete Sprite system
* Full of math, vector math, point (voxel) and geometric extensions
* Complete Xml classes with serialization capabilities that can be used for automatic game save & load functionality for example.
* Extended debug drawing functions
* Object pooling
* Particle system pooling (perfect for one-shot effects)
* Audio management for one-shot sound effects (includes a basic realtime mixer, random pitch shift and pooling of course)
* Tween classes for simple animations
* A global variable database for sharing global values and easy live tweaking
* A "pixel converter" that easily converts between world and screen units (fast) for orthographic cameras, includes screen anchoring methods and aspect ratio related stuff.
* Input extension classes
* A great set of extending classes to build upon
And more!

Some features are more complete than others, but are getting incrementally improved, and Im quite confident it will grow into something shareable at some point.

There is also the vastly improved tile engine, but that's not really part of the core framework.
Im looking forward to showcasing all of these in the feature, because now that I am unemployed, I suddenly have massive amounts of time being put into all these things.
Although they probably will appear in a game before anything else (like the asset store).


There, now that we got all the personal stuff out of the way we can get down to business. As the title of this post states, I have decided to go completely independent, making games from my bedroom essentially. I have given myself one year to this endeavor, but might extend that time period depending on if I can acquire help in the graphics department.

This has to be the end of the rant - until next time I feel like clearing my head :)

Summer update

Finally got some time off from work (summer vacation!) and life in general, so I thought I'd make a little update on what's going on.
As usual work is taking up most of my time so unfortunately I haven't got a lot of news about my RTS project, but a couple of little things.

I hit a major road block when I delved into making a unit movement system, looking at both new and older games to try and figure out some of the techniques used behind them.

For starters I found an article over at gamasutra, written by the guy who made the movement system for age of empires 2. Really interesting, using techniques such as a collision prediction and a solver to work things out between units.
link

Also found an interesting topic at gamedev.net
Flocking + a good collision system seems like a good way to go.

Lastly I tried integrating RVO (Reciprocal Collision Avoidance) and it totally work almost straight off the bat, but I found that RVO pretty much brakes down with many units in confined places so I might not use it in the end.

I might try to combine some of these techniques, but we will see.


Also, here's a couple of screenshots on my cliff building algorithm progress: