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Steal This Game Design
April 6th, 2008

I've been thinking of this game design for a while, and I think its got lots of potential. It's also lots and lots of work, and will require lots of testing to see where the fun comes in, but.. it's cool.

Groundhog day - the game

While the game idea pretty much springs from the movie, there's no real reason to tie it in - the same concept could be used in different scenarios. Closest thing to what I'm trying to describe that exists today (as far as I know, anyway) are the Thief and Hitman games.

So basically: sandbox game, heavily scripted, resets every 24 hours game-time (what that translates to in real time requires testing). Only thing that stays the same is the player's experience.

Additionally, it's kind of billiards with people. This is where the heavy scripting and lots of work come in: You talk, in the evening, with someone, who's had a bad day, because they didn't get any food in the restaurant, because the waiter did not show up to work, because they did not get a ride to work, because you stole the car keys. The complexity could be this high - or it could be milder (like in the Hitman series).

So the game would progress so that the player finds out stuff, sees what different people do, and try to figure out how to make certain things happen. At the end of the day, the player would get a score card on how the day went (as opposed to if the player had not done anything) - some things go better, some things go worse; the result is some kind of score. Additionally the player's character learns stuff. Maybe learn some French poetry, maybe learn what the key code to the bank vault is - these kinds of things will stick, while all the physical world resets.

Solving the game would mean to collect enough karma points during one daycycle - and to get the girl, naturally.

I really think this idea could be used to spring up several different games, and I'd love to see them happen - I might experiment on this myself at some point, but I don't see any reason to keep this idea a secret either. =)

If this gives you a spark and you want to talk more about it (I've spent some time thinking about it), toss me a mail!

Bachelor's thesis
April 4th, 2008

I believe that's the biggest image I've used on this site up to date. =)

The PDF version of my thesis is available here, and the slides of my short presentation as well, assuming someone is interested in those.

Like I said before, still one exam to go, which basically tests that I've done the thesis myself.

Recent search terms
April 2nd, 2008

I realized I haven't done this for a while. Here are some picks of more-or-less funny search terms used to find this site. No real gems this time, but some are somewhat amusing..

"5 bit binary list"
- 00000 00001 00010 00011 00100 00101.. you get the picture.
"64-bit hexadecimal fill pattern"
- 0xffffffffffffffff
"640 bit programming"
- Whoa.
"8 bit to 32 bit operation c example"
- char my8bitvalue = 0x3f; int my32bitvalue = my8bitvalue;
"altering the graphics card color look up table"
- I think this question was relevant a decade a go or so.
"c bit manipulation 512 bits"
- Split it in 32 bit chunks and you're nearly there.
"c++ number-guessing game with switch"
- Homework?
"can u do a quake source mmo"
- Yes. But why?
"change color while the ball rotate"
- Just do it..? I can't see what's difficult in that..
"change icon in an sdl application"
- This comes in two parts. First is to change the app icon, which is platform-specific, and the second bit is that you can change the running application's icon with a simple SDL call.
"compiling drivers for gp2x tutorial"
- Don't see any reason why you'd need to compile drivers for the gp2x..
"cosine for game programmer"
- Hint: it's exactly the same as the cosine for other people.
"d.a.r.e.- what stuff does alcohol cause"
- Hard to say, considering that I don't drink.
"definition "content-driven projects""
- There's projects that are logic-driven (or code driven), like tetris or minesweeper, and then there's projects that are heavily content-driven, like all MMORPGs, etc.
"dev c++ lowercase to uppercase tutorial"
- char foo = toupper(bar);
"generate rare name"
- I guess if you take a bunch of random characters, you'll end up with a rather rare (and unpronounceable) name..
"help to make bcd and binary up and down counter using 4 bit binar adder and a register"
- Why would I help you do your homework?
"housekeeping graphics"
- What?
"how do big companies make mmorpgs?"
- With big piles of money.
"how i want to make stuffs"
- I wouldn't know.
"integer division with boolean logic"
- Have fun =)
"koala painter for windows"
- I planned this kind of program long ago, but found better uses for my time.
"looking team for mmorpg making"
- I'm pretty sure you can buy one from China, or India. The team, I mean.
"make a huge mmorpg"
- No.
"make old 8 bit graphics gfx game"
- That's more like it!
"site:sol.gfxile.net awards"
- Unfortunately, nobody has given my site awards (that I've taken seriously, anyway).
"sol writing games"
- Mostly at Ludum Dare.
"survival do nots"
- Don't die.
"symbian pause millisecond"
- Good luck.
"triangle strips to render n-sided polygons"
- Try fans instead.
"veggietales theme teachertube"
- Who to the what now?
"what are exceptions in 8051"
- Do yourself a favor and find the data sheet.
"what is 0xff as an unsigned integer"
- 0xff.
"what mmorpg developers need to create better games?"
- Stop making mmorpgs?
"why we should lock vertex buffers before writing in it"
- So that the driver knows that you're changing the data. Too many cooks and all that.
"you want"
- Funnier search terms =)

Prey
April 2nd, 2008

Prey was $5 on steam last weekend, so I figured I might as well buy it. The graphics are decent, physics simulation more or less works (so that the one single physics puzzle doesn't irritate that much). The weapons are nothing really special, but have some nice tweaks like a gun which works in vastly different ways depending on the ammo you load in. The innovative game elements are portals (before valve's 'portal'), playing around with gravity (enter a doorway, gravity is sideways - that sort of thing), and the ability to "project your ghost" or whatever, in order to go where your physical body can't. These all work pretty well.

Spoilers ahead. I doubt that any amount of spoilers really worsens the game, though.

There are two major problems with "Prey", and some smaller ones. The first major problem is that the main character isn't likeable. He's a jerk. And this is a first person game, making the player a jerk. That doesn't quite work. If this was a third-person game, it would be different.

The second major problem is shooting little girls. Okay, they are evil ghosts.. I don't have anything against that as such, except that it's entirely out of place. You walk into a room and suddenly without pretty much any preparation you're attacked by a bunch of little-girl ghosts that want you dead.

With proper set-up and explanation (say, "Cradle" in thief 3) this could be made to work, but not like this. Eventually you find a school bus that the aliens have harvested, and have to fight the ghost-girls again, for no reason whatsoever again.

For the story that it tells, the game is too long. I spent three evenings on it, which was at least one evening too much. The player's motivation is vague at points. At first, it's clear that you have to save your girlfriend - a process that takes way too long, as in many of the levels in this process the player's motivation gradually degrades from "have to get there to save her" to "okay, what do I need to do to get out of this level?". You lose focus on why the heck you're doing this thing at all..

Later on, the game's passive-aggressive arch nemesis shows a holographic map and where the player is and where girlfriend is, hinting that it's futile and so on. After this you get to drag yourself towards the goal again.. except that due to constant portaling from one place to another and way too many levels in between you quickly lose focus on what you should be doing, how you're doing, and so on. And you're back to thinking "okay, how do I solve this level". This isn't a random puzzle game - there this would be okay, but here it just doesn't work.

In one of the levels you need to start some complicated machinery and use it to get through a door. This is so far beyond the focus loss point that the story itself doesn't really matter. Suddenly the arch-nemesis says to the player that he's not going to be able to sneak in, he's seen all the time.. to which the character answers "oh shit", hinting that the player was supposed to be thinking of sneaking in.. somewhere. To me, this was a "wtf" moment.

After some plot twists the game changes the rules of where the player character is in spirit and where he's in flesh, although since it's probably the only truly surprising twist so I don't go there, but I just mention it because I think it's a bad idea to change the rules in such a way - the little immersion that was left was pretty much shattered. The ending is pretty predictable, and naturally there's a deus ex too.

Many of these problems should have - and probably did - show up in testing. Too bad the writers messed up the otherwise promising game.

But yeah, I think it was worth the $5.

Whaz Happenin', End of March Edition
March 30th, 2008

I wonder if I've ever been this busy. I'm buying an apartment - been renting so far, but finally taking that step. The cost of renting in the area where we're moving next is about as high as most of southern Finland, but the apartments are relatively cheap, so it makes sense to take that big loan and buy the damn thing.

On top of that I'm finishing off school - one final test to do - as well as adding little touches to Atanua, which was my final year project. I've posted the project report on the Atanua site as well, and tried to spread the word about it in various places, but getting the word to the people that matter - teachers of electronics, binary logic, and so on, is a bit difficult. I'm open for ideas.

And no, things haven't been too quiet at work either. =)

Hobby-wise, I've been working on a small racing game for the gp2x:

The complexity of the project is somewhat higher than I originally expected. I'm not rushing on that project though, so it may take some time.

I bought 'The Longest Journey' on steam and have been playing it, trying to figure out why it got such rave reviews. Haven't figured it out yet. We'll see if I do.

I've just about finished reading "His Dark Materials" trilogy, for which the first book was filmed as "The Golden Compass". I really want to see the sequels as movies, as I can't imagine how on earth they will manage it. The books have so much material.. and ignoring Christianity on some of them is all but impossible. The books also get much, much darker than what the first movie was.

GP2X
March 7th, 2008

After getting Atanua in some kind of shape I thought about playing around with some kind of a touchscreen device. I checked what PocketPCs cost (300e+), and compared that to GP2X F200 (175e), and decided to order one.

Whether I'll ever play with the touchscreen remains to be seen, but at least I made a port of orbital sniper for it. Thanks to Guyfawkes for some hints.

GP2X seems like a more or less decent hardware with more or less horrible software. All programs work in a slightly different way. Volume controls either work or not. Some apps can't be quit. Those that can, exit in different ways. Some hacks are needed to make software work as expected. Some developers seem to have a slight "linux attitude", so asking for help is not always too fruitful. Anyway, to follow suit, orbital sniper also works in a slightly different way (there's no pause, only quit) =)

It also sucks batteries like no tomorrow. I bought a wired power for it - otherwise software development would be horrible. Sure, I also have rechargeable batteries.

But those are the negative sides. On positive side, the GP2X F200 feels much sturdier than GP32 did, and it looks pretty nice. On the Zodiac, my hands felt cramped after a short game session. I haven't yet played a lot on the gp2x, so I don't know how well the controls work on it. So far it feels pretty good.

On other fronts, I figured I'd try to sell atanua on eBay. We'll see if there are any takers. =) If there's someone out there with a reasonable offer, don't hesitate to toss me a mail.

2d gl basecode release 2.0
February 19th, 2008

Released 2.0 of my 2d gl basecode. It's still not pretty, but includes lots of the code I've found myself rewriting for every single ludum dare contest. This is basically an update integrating changes, improvements and additions done while using this to build Atanua, like portability, IMGUI widget fixes, some simple collision checks, etc.

Dialogs of Madness
February 17th, 2008

I've been porting Atanua to other platforms for the past two days. Atanua is a rather portable SDL-based application with over 10k lines of code. The only platform-specific bits are:

- Dynamic DLL loading for plug-ins
- Platform-specific file open, file save and ok/cancel dialogs

Dyndll stuff sounds difficult, but it's pretty easy. Dialogs, on the other hand, are hard. Here's some notes on the trials I went through.

Windows
Windows was.. familiar. There are some tricks that you need to do to have the dialogs behave like you want, but after those it's pretty straightforward.

Atanua expects the data files to be in "data/", so the current working directory may not change. Plus, the current working directory had better be the same as where the executable is in the first place.

Finding the application directory and going there works like this:

void gotoappdirectory()
{
    char buf[1024];
    GetModuleFileName(GetModuleHandle(0), &buf[0], 1024);
    char *rch = strrchr(buf, '\\');
    if (rch == NULL) return;
    *rch = 0;
    _chdir(buf);
}

I do remember having to fight with windows for a while to dig that up when I first did a decade ago, so the above is definitely not "obvious". But like I said, it's familiar.

For the file open and save dialogs, I first store the current working directory with _getdcwd() and return to it afterwards. This is due to the fact that the file open dialogs also change the current working directory. I could have saved myself the trouble of saving the cwd and just gone to the app directory with the above function after the open dialog call, but anyway.

Asking the user for a file to open is a matter of filling OPENFILENAME struct and calling GetOpenFilename(). The call returns true if user pressed ok, and the name is saved to the buffer you declared in the OPENFILENAME struct. You can easily specify default extension, filters, default filename, and so on.

The ok/cancel dialog is a single call to MessageBox.

Due to the way the file I/O works in atanua, it's quite likely that it won't run from non-mapped network drives. I don't see this as a problem though.

OS X / Carbon
Whoo boy this was a mess. I chose to go with Carbon, mostly because that's what most of the google hits talk about when trying to make a file open dialog on OS X. If I had gone with Cocoa, I probably would have saved myself lots of grief, but on the other hand, my Obj-c is a bit rusty, and I'm not quite sure if calling Obj-c functions from C is as easy as calling C functions from Obj-c. But I digress.

Starting SDL development again on OS X was a bit bumpy. The way the SDL frameworks are used has changed a bit - the old way made starting to develop with SDL on OS X very easy, but made the release of SDL apps on OS X somewhat complicated. The new framework stuff requires a bit more work on the set up side, but helps a lot on the release side.

Porting majority of Atanua to OS X running on PowerPC was pretty easy - I found a couple of endian mistakes, a missing typecast or two, and one missing variable type which I assume visual studio just considered integer. Then the platform-specific stuff.

Going to the application directory was not necessary as it was already handled by the SDLmain.m, objective-c main class. I modified that to go to the app bundle's resources instead, as that's the mac way.

The open file dialog consists of defining a NavDialogRef, NavDialogCreationOptions, NavReplyRecord, plus several smaller helper functions / structures. First the options are populated by default values with NavGetDefaultDialogCreationOptions, dialog is created with NavCreateGetFileDialog, run with NavDialogRun, after which we ask for reply data with NavDialogGetReply. So far a bit clumsy but not especially difficult.

Next we need to extract the file name so we can feed it to fopen. Is this somehow in the reply structure, maybe as a simple asciiz string? No.

First we need to ask for the filespec from the reply, using AEGetNthPtr(). Information from the filespec is used through PBMakeFSRefSync (along with another structure to be filled) to get a FSRef. This can be fed to FSRefMakePath to finally get a path.

Afterwards, NavDisposeReply and NavDialogDispose are used to clean up some of the resources.

That wasn't so hard, was it? Ok, how about saving a file then. Save file dialog is created pretty much the same way, except that we're using NavCreatePutFileDialog instead. Getting the filename isn't as simple because the path will be just a path, and the filename is separate, and we need to extract it from the dialog response with CFStringGetCString call, which will probably blow things up if the filename has any non-ascii characters, but hey, at this point, we're not picky.

If any default extensions, names, filters, etc. were desired, callbacks, events, or some other would have been needed. After 8 hours of the above, I figured this is enough.

For the ok/cancel dialog there is a handy StandardAlert function. Only tricky bit there was that by default, even if you're declaring a caution alert, the dialog box only has an OK button. After filling out the AlertStdAlertParamRec structure things rolled along fine.

Building a release on OS X is somewhat tricky, but luckily I had tackled that long ago, and simply followed my own notes.

Linux
Before getting to compile stuff at all, I had to fight over half a day to get linux to work.

I first thought about running linux in a virtual box and save on the hassle of switching between monitors and keyboards, but since I needed OpenGL, this wasn't possible. There were some two year old discussions on adding OpenGL piping to Qemu, for instance, but no word on whether it ever got patched in.

I built a PC from some older parts that I had laying around, downloaded the latest Ubuntu ISO, popped it into the drive, booted, picked "run or install", booted fine, ran the installer, etc. Everything completely smooth so far. I've installed linux plenty of times, and the installation procedure has improved quite a lot along the years. I didn't even need to do anything to get the mouse wheel working!

After the initial setup the trouble started.

I'm skipping several little things that I don't recall anymore, but one specific thing was that the ATI drivers did not work with my radeon x850, which probably should not have surprised me. After replacing it with a geforce3, I had a (mostly) functional Ubuntu 7.10 box, which already proudly said on the top bar that my name was "No value has been set". There was the bit where title bars disappeared and consoles appeared as white rectangles, but this bit was solved by toning down the display effects. I guess GeForce3 isn't enough for GNOME.

After installing the 200-odd updates that were waiting for me after a fresh install of the OS, I spent time installing tons of packages just to get a hello world to compile. Granted, Ubuntu isn't exactly the software developer's distro, but figuring out which packages to install wasn't exactly straightforward.

I noticed that the handy find files widget did not find files. Getting smb share to work was painful. Ubuntu's helpful file sharing widget wasn't. I could find the machine from windows, but it did not accept my name and password. After using another widget found using apt I managed to get it working, except that it made all files copied over samba lowercase by default. After very nice help from folks at #coders I got over this one as well and managed to get the application to compile and run with minimal hassle, as long as the native functions were stubbed.

As someone mentioned, it's usually possible to work around the problems in linux. The point is, though, that none of the above problems should exist. Guess why I didn't mention the set up of file share with OS X above? Yep, it worked on the first try.

Next I started to look how to create a native file open dialog under Ubuntu. SDL gave me hWnd in windows, and it gives an X window handle under linux. I tried to find a X file open dialog example on the net, finding none. Then I figured I'd use GTK's GtkFileChooserDialog, as that seems the GNOME way.

After fighting with which packages to install, what include paths to add, what libraries to link to, and so on for several hours (with nice help from several folks on #coders) I managed to get the file open dialog to appear, based on the simple example here. Create a dialog with gtk_file_chooser_dialog_new, run it with gtk_dialog_run, check return code, use gtk_file_chooser_get_filename to get the filename, do some cleanup and you're done. Of course you also need to call gtk_init somewhere in your application before any of these. Did it work? Yes. And no.

I got the file dialog, clicked on a file, it loaded fine, but.. the dialog did not go away. Thinking in retrospec, I'm guessing the GTK main loop has to be run at some point in order for the dialog stuff to work. Why it even worked that well on that first try, I don't know.

I spent the next several hours trying to find alternatives. Even a file dialog done in OpenGL would have been fine for all I cared. In response I was accused of "not doing things the right way", which invariably meant not using Someone's Favorite Technology X. Should have used WxWidgets. Should have used Qt. Should have written a GTK application to begin with. Or KDE. This was a SDL application, and I liked it that way. Was a simple platform-specific dialog too much to ask? I was generally treated as an idiot, with a severe Not Invented Here syndrome. At this point I started wondering why the heck am I trying to support a broken platform where I'm not appreciated?

Anyway, after all this treatment DrPetter on #ludumdare mentioned that mjau had done a SDL+GTK port of sfxr, so I might want to check out the source code. Mjau had done pretty much exactly what I was doing, except for using a different dialog, in a very different way.

I modified mjau's code to use the file chooser, and found other bits around the net to make the approach work. Basically the dialog had to be non-modal, with gtk's main loop rolling, with a callback to terminate the main loop when the dialog was done with.

I did not notice any easy way to set default extensions, default filenames, or filters. I'm pretty sure there are some, set in some roundabout way. After this ordeal, the ok/cancel dialog was pretty easy to do.

At this point I had a binary ready, so I packed it up, uploaded to the site, and popped at #linux asking if someone could try it out so I know it works for someone else than myself. The only reply was an accusation of trying to get people run a trojan. Again, this should not have surprised me at this point.

In the end I didn't implement any code for changing to the application directory. Double-clicking on the application worked, as does running from the same directory. I assume that if someone knows how to make a shortcut to the application, he also knows how to make a shell script to fix it. Hey, it's the linux way!

I'm only releasing a binary build for linux for the time being. If it works, great! If it doesn't, well, I may be doing a source release eventually. At this point it doesn't seem like it's appreciated.

At least microsoft's platforms are defective by design..

Well, what the hey
February 10th, 2008

Pushing a one-line joke a bit further.

If you're telekinetic and know it, clap my hands
If you're telekinetic and know it, clap my hands
If you're telekinetic and know it, don't be shy, just show it
If you're telekinetic and know it, clap my hands

If you're pyrokinetic and know it, fry my hair
If you're pyrokinetic and know it, fry my hair
If you're pyrokinetic and know it, don't be shy, just show it
If you're pyrokinetic and know it, fry my hair

If you're cryokinetic and know it, cool my drink
If you're cryokinetic and know it, cool my drink
If you're cryokinetic and know it, don't be shy, just show it
If you're cryokinetic and know it, cool my drink

If you're telepathic and know it, guess my name
If you're telepathic and know it, guess my name
If you're telepathic and know it, don't be shy, just show it
If you're telepathic and know it, guess my name

If you've got precognition and know it, you saw this coming

On music
February 9th, 2008

I listen to extremely wide variety of music. I can listen to Britney Spears, or Rob Zombie. Sometimes in the same playlist. Sometimes I listen to classical music. Or some Tim Story. Or c64 remixes, scene music, kohina. Sometimes I listen some trance marathons, or even happy hardcore. Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream. Or some pop, jpop, kpop, or lots of different kinds of indie, etc.

However, my favorite kind of music is what I call (pardon my French) "weird shit". There's no specific genre that I know of that covers this category, but I'll give you some examples.

Vacuum (YouTube YouTube)
Velcra (YouTube YouTube)
Hooverphonic (YouTube YouTube)

In other news, I've done several new Atanua releases, and it's pretty much approaching finished state.

Full week of Atanua releases
January 28th, 2008

Since the last post, I've been making daily releases of Atanua. Since the first release, improvements include undo/redo, 7-seg displays, logic probe, 18 (eighteen) 74-series chips, flipflops, mux, dx, labels, window resize, and various bigger or smaller tunings. If you took a glance of atanua before, be sure to pop back again.

Oh, and I registered the domain www.atanua.org, so it's easier to remember where it can be found. I'm kind of running out of small things to fix, so send me mail with your suggestions if you have any!

Atanua revealed (0.5 released)
January 21st, 2008

My final project at school is Atanua, a logic simulator. Despite the fact that it's still under heavy development, it's pretty functional - please take it for a spin and give me feedback so that I can improve it!

2d gl basecode release 1.0
January 13th, 2008

Released 1.0 of my 2d gl basecode. It's not pretty, but includes lots of the code I've found myself rewriting for every single ludum dare contest.

Features include:

SDL/OpenGL base
Texture loading
Simple particles, "popup" texts (think '1up')
Sprites
Quick font
Angelcode font file loader and renderer
IMGUI widgets: button, scroll bar, text field
Mersenne twister c++ implementation by Jetro Lauha
Some performance monitoring

I've also included several different resolution bitmap rasterizations of the Bitstream Vera font as it has a pretty relaxed license.

The Angelcode binary font file loader has been written in a way that should make it relatively easy to support different byte orders.

To use this code you'll also need GLee, SDL and SDL_Image. Download here, about a meg, includes prebuilt win32 binaries.

TMDC over, other bits
January 12th, 2008

After discussing the matter with other folks at tAAt ry, we decided to stop organizing the pseudoannual text mode demo competition. The general interest simply seems to have fallen. To give the old war-horse (as abyss/fc put it) a nice farewell, I built a neat ISO image with all the entries from all the contests, along with the latest DOSBox and batch files that launch each of the the dos demos under DOSBox - no install needed.

So if you're feeling nostalgic, go download the image, burn it, and watch at your leisure.

We could consider burning a few hundred copies, print some nice covers and selling the collection, but we never asked for permission for such a thing from the authors of the entries, and contacting all of them at this point would be a herculean feat =)

In other fronts, I've made a couple of IR pens so that I can play with the wiimote. I did some tests with my IR webcam, and noticed that while the camera gives me a pretty good framerate, its feed pauses every now and then. Irritating, especially since it makes doing stuff like using the IR pens as pointers impossible. Oh well, there's always the wiimote..

Study-wise I realized that I "only" have my final project to do at school, and then its over. Now I just have to push myself to do said project, and try not to get distracted and build several other projects. And the clock is ticking.

Partycle Popper 1.5
January 1st, 2008

You can grab the post-contest version of Partycle Popper here

Changes:
- Pretty much recoded based on cleaned up basecode which was based on the contest version of the game
- The widescreen bug fixed

- Audio recoded using SDL audio instead of fmod to make porting slightly easier
  - Custom mixer for sound fx and midi instruments
  - MIDI player (only supports one instrument and note on, but hey, it works)

- Gameplay tuning;
  - Player�s bullets and bad pop bullets are faster, normal pop bullets slow enough to dodge around now
  - Scoring is slightly tuned
  - On player death, the same level is restarted with the same score as when the level started
  - Couple new hint lines, and couple informative printouts here and there

Postmortem moved to its proper place.

Ludum Dare #10 results
January 1st, 2008

I took part of the 10th Ludum Dare 48h game design contest with "Partycle Popper".

Full rankings;
Theme 2nd, Polish 2nd, Effort 4th, Graphics 5th, Overall 6th, Technical 7th, Audio 8th, Fun 11th, Journal 12th, Innovation 20th(!), Humor 24th, Food n/a.

There were 50 ranked entries. I did not strive for humor, but the 20th spot for innovation was a bit of a disapointment. Other than that, I think I fared quite well.

You can grab the (slightly buggy) contest version here - note that it bugs on widescreen displays. Launch with some parameter for windowed mode. There's also something strange in my basecode that causes it to be very slow on some computers.. which is odd, as I'm not doing anything complicated (it's practically all OpenGL 1.1 stuff!).

I'm working on a fixed version, and I'll be releasing said 2d-opengl base code at some point. There'll also be a postmortem on the game.

The main reason why I haven't been updating the site is that I've been working on too many things at once, and thus haven't got anything finished enough to a releasable state =) Stay tuned..

Older news have been archived here.