I got an idea and developed this “game” all in the span of 10 minutes. And then I made this blog post.

Have fun.

Play here (Flash)

I’m proud to announce that “They Need To Be Fed” has won the first prize in the YoYoGames “Design a handheld game” competition! This is indeed the second time I become first. I’ll have to stop joining to give others a chance

Together with YoYoGames we’re going to try and get this actually running on PSP (as well as many other great entries). I personally recommend Ninjammin Beat-jitsu which placed second.

If all goes well They Need To Be Fed comes out on PSN as early as this summer.

Here’s a very nice review of the game.

After a year (years?) I finally updated my website! I’ve created a tag based system for my work, so it’s easy to find and categorize stuff. It should also be easier now to update my site with new games. Design wise, everything is now integrated with each other to ensure a consistent look.

Hope you like it, any tips welcome.

There won’t be a new prototype this week, but instead I present you “Shoot Stop Lollipop”!

I made this game together with Joel Nyström during the Global Game Jam in Denmark.

“Shoot Stop Lollipop” is a physics based puzzle platformer game. Make stuff fly all over the place, and then you stop the time to create your own level design, allowing you to reach the exit. The game is still a prototype, and we worked on it on and off after the Global Game Jam.

The game is made in Unity 3D and is playable in your browser. Here!

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In other news, I’ve been interviewed twice recently. One was for an interesting article titled “Suicide in videogames” on GameSpy. I recommend it! The other interview was for HugePush, about Frozzd and other things.

This week’s prototype is made in Flash.

It’s a simple game, a simple test. I had little time this week to make something bigger, since I had to learn a lot about Action Script 3 and integrated a data tracking API. Flash development is pretty new to me, but I want to do more with it, and am currently looking into great tools such as Flixel and Flash Punk.

Like my previous prototypes, this game makes use of data that is shared across all players.

The variable that is shared this time is the monster’s HP. So essentially, there’s (really actually) 1 monster with just 1 life. If he dies he’s dead and that’s that. No one will get to fight (or feed?) it again.

The idea of player’s actions having influence on the whole, on other people, and maybe also being influenced by others before that is something that intrigues me. This prototype is far too simple, but I hope to make something bigger where your actions truly shape the game.

Play

New week new prototype.

“Everybody Play & Edit” is an experiment in collaborative gameplay. Simply put, it’s a platformer game in which everyone plays and edits the same level. Just like my previous prototype it makes use of an online database. Fans of my work might recognize some graphics and ideas from Deaths.

Play Mode

Edit Mode

Here are some special rules that make it interesting:

• Editing the level costs money
• You can only get money through other players
• You can place traps
• When someone dies on your trap, the spot gets marked

Download (.zip, 1.29 MB)

Current version: 2

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Reflection on Treasure Island Online

Treasure Island Online (the prototype of 2 weeks back) was a successful experiment. It was simple, but it worked pretty well and I had some fun play sessions with people I know and people I don’t. However the space of possibilities is really small and the game got boring fast. The decisions in the game (mainly the position of your dig) don’t really matter. I hope Everybody Plays & Edit addresses this problem. It allows for an endless amount of level designs, puzzles and clever traps.

The next step

I’m not sure what’s gonna happen with this game. It’s an experiment. I think right now it’s kind of sandbox-y. The next step could be to have more expensive objects you really need to earn money for. It would also be interesting if you get score or bonuses for killing as many others as you can. Or maybe I should make a totally peaceful collaborative game?

Please tell me if you have any ideas.

See you next week!

A new game and it’s very “gamey”. I think I’ve finally found a way to make a 2D 360 degree gravity platformer *fun*. I tried this with Maru, but it didn’t really work out. “2d 360 degree gravity platformer”, a new genre?

This is an entry for the YoYoGames “design a handheld game” competition. (It’s not an actual PSP game though). It’s amazing what a competition deadline can do for my creativity. I started the game less than a week before the deadline (of course I’m re-using a finished engine, but still, doing actual game design is the important work) and finished 30 minutes before it passed. Haven’t worked so hard in ages. Working at this speed really requires quick decision making and being creative. It turned out much better than I thought it would.

They Need To Be Fed is a casual platforming game with original mechanics. There are 5 worlds with 7 levels each. Please enjoy!

Download link (.zip, 8.22 MB)
or play at YoYoGames

Screenshots:

I’m going to try to make a prototype / small game / something each week.

This week I present you:

Treasure Island Online

This is a small game I made within 2 days. The rules are simple:

• There is one treasure chest on the board
• Click to dig somewhere.

Treasure chests give you an amount of gold (around 25 more or less), but digging also costs 1 gold. So far it sounds like your typical casual game. The twist however, is that everybody plays on the same board.

Similar to one of my previous games “Deaths“, the game uses an online database to save and load variables (to determine the board layout, in this case). So, if you dig a hole somewhere, everyone else that’s playing at that moment also sees that hole appear.

The strategy then, is as follows: Do you just go digging? Or do you wait till others have spent some gold digging holes, and then go for it with higher chances of finding the treasure chest?

Download link (.zip, 1.77MB)

The game is no fun playing by yourself. It works best if you get someone else to play on another pc, or invite someone over chat, etc.

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The game is simple, and in fact too simple. In practice it relies too much on chance and not enough on strategy. This means the game gets boring after a while. Nonetheless, for a quick prototype I’m very happy with the results. I want to do more with this idea in the future. I can imagine interesting results if you give players different abilities, or when players need to rely on co-operation, etc. I feel there are a lot of possibilities I’d like to explore.

I hope to have something new next week!

Update 2:
I’ve uploaded a slightly updated version with some bugs fixed (I think).

I’ve made a small change to the level order in Maru. The game’s ending is now actually at the end (that is, in level 7 instead of level 1). It’s also impossible now to mess up the first time so you should be able to finish it easily in one go. It makes much more sense now and I’m not sure why I did it the other way in the first place.

Same download link

Hopefully this clears up some confusion people have had. Overall I’m quite happy with the responses. I’ve made some weird design choices but they should be fixed now.

Maru Engine™

The engine I used for Maru is actually different from Frozzd. It’s very smooth (in contrary to Frozzd’s) and allows for things such as moving planets, rotating planets, and other dynamics. What you see in Maru only partially shows the features I built into it. I think it’s the first true 360 degree gravity engine. I’ve seen some others but they were either not smooth or very static. Since it doesn’t use built in Game Maker functions such as “solid” and “gravity” (which Frozzd did) it should be easy to remake this engine for other platforms such as XNA. I have no plans for that yet but there are some interesting options. The main challenge however is to figure out how to make a fun game with it!

Later on I might release the source for the engine since it could be interesting to see what others come up with. In fact, send me a message if you’re interested.

Game Developers Conference

I could go to the GDC this year thanks to Cactus (so awesome, thank you!!) who won the Nuovo award at the Independent Games Festival. It was great to meet some other indie developers, try some new technology at the show floor (mind control, 3D TV), and follow tons of lectures. I got a lot of new inspiration! I hope it’ll turn into new great games.

I’m also busy with my graduation project currently, I’ll post more on that later. Thanks for reading, will be back with new game(s)!

Download link

The game is fairly short, but you might need 2 or more tries to succeed. Please enjoy!