Is it just me or have the old pointandclick genre become too out-of-date for our new computers? I can’t remember the last time I played a pointandclick game that wasn’t from 98 and backward. Have all the puzzles been done or is it just not fun anymore to develop this kind of games? Everything isn’t always about how many physic-simulations you can put into a game, but the experience and the magic and the feeling and and and!!

Okey. Sam and Max titles are still being developed and that’s great! More of that spirit in todays industry could be appreciated. At least from my side. And then we have Penumbra and the Myst series! But my love still lies within the 2dadventuregames<3

There is an excellent post on Gamasutra about Toady Ones Dwarf Fortress.
If you don’t know what Dwarf Fortress is, or even if you do, I recommend you to read the article.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3549/interview_the_making_of_dwarf_.php

I fell in love with this game maybe 6 months back, I see it as a testement that good gameplay is not locked to a good renderer (even tough technicaly the DF render must be a mircale) but in good detailed gameplay, where you don’t have supreme godly control, but rather is limited to giving order about what needs to be done. The Dwarfs will only work if they are not occupied with other tasks, with a possibility to change active jobs on a dwarf you can manage the priority of some tasks, but not exactly what needs to be done, combined with the possibility to activate a more controllable military force, with weapons and armour and invading goblins, titans and dragons this game will stay in my heart for ever.

Get it at: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

As André mentioned in his previous post Tell’us won’t make SGA becouse of me working and thus gaining an unfair advantage compared to other groups in the contest who got paid PR and “paid rent” and can put full time into the contest. Even if SGA turned out to be a complete joke, this is not the end of Tell’us even if André went on with the 2D solution, Tell’us will return with a better 3D Renderer, better tools and more streamlined work and exporters for the artist thats going to do the 3D work. I just need to get my chair and workspace in order at home.

Jonas now works in England and Henrik is currently working on another SGA entry, so if we are going to get Tellus over the finishline I decided to continue this project by making a version of our prototype in 2D instead and add every gameplaymechanic in it. So even if it’s not a 3dgame anymore, the key elements should still be there.

Im speachless, I just saw the new released info about Valves Steamwork and Im stunned! Steamworks offers all the features that Steam have anti-cheat, auto-updates, voice chat etc and a bunch of developer tools! And what does all this cost you? NADA!

Valve is pratical giving away Steam for free, either they have gone completly mad or they have realized the value of supporting upcommers of the computer industry! Anyway thanks to Valve for that, i really think this could be the next big break through for indie game developers & other small developer teams to get there games out on the market without some big angry publisher. So check out the steamworks homepage for more info!

So what have i been up to latly then? First of all i had an telephone work interview with Free Radical Design, I think it went okey despite my nervous English, it was the first time I talked english to a real englishmen so i was i bit nervous.

Me and my friend Rickard are teaming up for this years Swedish Game Awards, the game is currently named “Pathfinder” and is a puzzel game about “Move things out of the way to open up a path from the starting point to the finish” as we describe it briefly. I’m currently working on the level editor for the game which is the “spine” of the game and i think its coming out pretty neat. I just finnished the whole level / tile system so now i easily can create different tile types based on xml files. So here is a little screen, dosn’t show much but as i said the base for the whole level system is done so now it’s the easy part left.

Today and yesterday I felt a little sick so I stayed at home and slept and played in photoshop a little. This is a concept that popped up in my head. Maybe the splashsceen for gnomeforest in an early state?

We are now in a time there almost every game released may be bought online. Either on the console in you living room or at the steamservice, gamersgate etc. at your local internets;) What’s everybodys opinion about this? I have thought of some plus and minuses about this that I thought I could write down.

Positve things: It’s there! On the internet! The digital shelf at the digital gamestore will always be filled and will never be out of stock. With a simple creditcardnumberpress on the numpad you can buy your favourite game ONLINE without even have to put your feets down on the floor! You will always be able to play them from whatever computer that are connected to internet. Just download and play. Simple and smooth.

Negative things: My first thought was: Nooooo what will happen to our beloved gameboxes that was standing on our bookcase collecting dust?! Do you still remember the feeling when you borrowed games from your best friend? When you opened the manual and felt the fresh scent of glue in your nose… ? Whats the value of a game if the stock is unlimited?

- “Can I borrow Armed Assault from you when you finished it?”
- “Yea here’s my useraccount. download it for yourself…”

- “Do you have your manual for it also?”

- “One minute, I’ll just send the pdf…”

This is the future? In that case. Take me back:( Sure it’s awesome with downloading games nowadays in a simple and legal way but I’ve always wanted the whole thing when I bought a game and not just a executable to play through. But hopefully the “boxdays” aren’t over and I can keep wandering around among the gamestore’s shelves turning and reading backsides of the boxes for the new games for many years to come!

Good night

I’ve now been philosophing about what aspects in a game that I especially fall in love with the first time I play it. Ranking in no special order

• Cute graphics. My first impression of a game lies within how clean and colourful the graphics are. This mainly affects the 2dgames out there. In 3d, graphics doesn’t really matter to me. I can sit down and play a 10 year old 3d game without a thought how crappy the lowres textures that passes by are. It’s more charmy when you think about it what the limits were for a computer game -97 and how much stuff you could press into it. Now we have almost unlimited with capacity on a bluray/dvd and all it’s filled with is graphics with higher resolution… Which in it’s turn means longer loading times. Thank god for dwarf fortress!
• Simplicity in GUI. One other thing that makes my senses go “Ohlala” is if the game is so simple it doesn’t even need a lot of stuff on screen that describes whats going on. Games like Aquaria, Black & White and Little big adventure is good examples of this. And by the way! One game that solved the ammoLeftInWeapon attribute on the HUD was Red Faction where the ammo left was displayed on the side of the weapon! brilliant! I think this was the first game doing this. Am I right? anyways…
• Background music. Games with a nice melody in the background that sticks to your head for weeks to come. Hate it or love it. Where is those melodies now?! I haven’t stumbled on a single AAA game in the past X years with a catchy tune in it! All mario remakes doesn’t count… Of course, some games may kill you from the inside if they are playing happy Banjo-Kazooie tunes when in the middle of a gunfight a’la COD4… but background themes are great besides that.
• Story. Some games need it. Others don’t. But if a game with a lifetime of 10 hours and with only one kind of gameplaymechanic, there must be something there in the end that will keep you going without taking a rest for the past 9 hours.. But some of the indiegames out there only need a good gamemechanic to keep me stuck for a looong time.. damn you bejeweled

 And now to the final question. Why isn’t there a game with the Gummi Bears!  Disney made a game of almost every movie in their repertoire but never with the bears… or Cinderella…

I’m having some thoughts about collision in big environments in a 2dworld. The two solutions I’ve discovered is either the tilebased solution or the polygonal solution( like elastomania). It seems that it’s much easier to build a world consisting of blocks with different graphics and just let the playertile collide with the perfect shaped rectangles in the world around him, but in a world much more organic where the graphic is the mayor part and the collision will be built around it, it just seems troublesome clicking out tiles to fill the object’s borders. When building a world in tiles the collision will be quite “blocky” and there may be hard to make smooth hills and bumps unless you have triangletiles or something like that. Otherwise it would be nice to in some kind of editor to draw lines around the contures of a object to make the hitbox for it. Is there some kind of api out there for 2dcollision besides box2D that makes polygonalcollision or is it even worth making? maybe the right way to do games in 2d is with tiles… *sigh*

I’m having some thoughts about a 2d game where you walk around in a forest filled with creatures from tales from around the world. The concept will be Knytt-like( if somebody played it?) where the world is huge and you can run almost everywhere. There will be some mini missions and encounters in it but the main focus in the game will be the feeling of wandering around in a deep forest with shy creatures sneaking around minding their own buisness. Some of the ideas will consist of time-synchronizing, weatherchanges, exploring and build things…

If you have a favorite tale feel free to comment!