Kloonigames

Lucky me, in a couple of hours I’m off to the Game Developers Conference. I should probably sleep, but I can’t. I’m too excited. Not that much about GDC, but because I have two new games on my computer that I can’t really play until I get back from San Francisco. The first one is World of Goo’s Chapter One and the second game is Audiosurf. I pre-ordered both of them and they both were released right in the middle of this GDC travel mess that I’m trying to sort out.

If Kyle and Ron had released all the chapters to World of Goo, I would have probably just said “Screw GDC, I’m staying home playing World of Goo and Audiosurf”. Lucky for me they didn’t.

Anyway if anyone reading this will be at GDC, come by the IGF booths and say hello. I’ll be there playing World of Goo and Audiosurf. I also have my own game there that I’m supposed to be demonstrating and representing. But to be honest I’d rather just surf through my Fantomas collection, which I’m planning of installing on Dylan’s computer as soon as he moves away from it.

Oh and didn’t get the Grammar Nazi update done in time. I blame Tim and his interview!

In the middle of this GDC travel shenanigans I ended up chatting with Tim W. of IndieGames.com. We chatted about things and then end up doing this quick informal interview which can be read here: Interview: Crayon Physics Developer Petri Purho.

And it’s also worth nothing that if it wasn’t for Tim’s interview you would probably already be playing the new version of Grammar Nazi (not really). But hopefully the Grammar Nazi update is done by today. Also happy Valentine’s day to you all!

I have nothing against mods, but “Nomination and Interview” is so much better than “A Mod and an Interview“.

• Crayon Physics Deluxe has been nominated for the Wizards of the Coast’s “Gleemie Award”. Being an old Magic: The Gathering player (I still have decks somewhere), it’s an honor to be nominated as one of the seven finalists in this category. The winners will be announced next week at the IGF award ceremony. (Thanks to Justme for letting me know about this )
• Entar interviewed me over at Games Fascination. It’s a short interview, but he asked all the though questions. Like when is Crayon Physics Deluxe going be released.
• A comic about game industry. I know it’s old, but it’s so true (via TIGSource forums)

I’m sorry that I ended up spamming my RSS readers with tons of posts.

But I had some trouble with my ex hosting company (referred from now on as Beelzebub), so I switched companies. After reading about different hosting companies I came to the conclusion that they are all inherently evil, spawns of Satan and their only mission is to cause hate and sorrow in the world. In this regard I consider Beelzebub to be one of the best.

Problem is that Beelzebub doesn’t want to give me access to the contents of my blog. I’ve been asking them (politely) for about two weeks now and I haven’t heard any kind of a real answer from them. Actually all I’ve been asking for is a shell access (which I used to have), but it seems like it’s something they really don’t want me to have. So I ended up doing this MacGyverish hack to get my content back, using an old SQL dump, google reader’s cache and some php magic.

In the process I lost all the comments between September 14th 2007 and January 23th 2008. I’m terribly sorry for that. But Beelzebub is holding them hostage and I’m still waiting to hear what they want for them. Could take a while since, well since everything Beelzebub does takes a while.

I made a New Year’s resolution to update this blog more often and with more meaningful posts. Ironically this blog posts marks a very special occasion, it’s been 18 days since my last blog post which is officially the longest I’ve gone without updating this blog. So I’m off to a flying start this year

Anyhow, I wanted to point out that John Walker over at Eurogamer wrote a preview of Crayon Physics Deluxe. Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

Most of all, even playing this in-progress build, what’s clear is quite how lovely Crayon Physics Deluxe is going to be. It’s a warm, cuddly experience, but also a fantastically well-designed one. The puzzles start off simple, and introduce new concepts matching the difficulty curve.

Sweet.

M3 - Molesting the Match-3 Market is this month’s game. I sorta published it a bit earlier because I participated the Ludum Dare with it. Sorry for mixing up the day counter.

But Happy New Year everyone!!

Few blog posts ago I mentioned that I submitted Crayon Physics Deluxe to the Independent Games Festival (which is like the Sundance equivalent of games).

And Crayon Physics Deluxe is in! It’s nominated for the Seumas McNally grand prize in the main category. And it’s nominated for the Best Student Game in the student showcase category. I’m totally blown away by all of this. It’s awesome and exciting. Congrats to all the other finalists. Which by the way you should check out, because they are just awesome.

This is the problem with making games extremly quickly (in less than 48 hours): you miss some obvious stuff. Thanks to Hamumu’s (aka. Mike Hommel) suggestions (over at the Ludum Dare site) I made some changes to M3 - Molesting the Match-3 Market.

The most drastic change is in the way the checking for matches works in the game. Now the game lets everything fall down first and then checks for matches (as suggested by Mike). I also changed the colors of blocks so that the contrasts between them should be higher now.

You can download the new version from here: M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2).

Continuing my Ludum Dare progress report.

4 hours to go: So I ended up implementing the animation system. It turned out to be a really good thing. It helped me out a lot… I even managed to constrain myself from over engineering it.

Overall things are looking pretty good. I have still some small things to do (tutorial screen), but I could probably “ship” the game as it is. Some more polish would be nice and sounds would be really cool (I’m looking at you SFXr) . I’ll probably have to sacrifice a hour to add them. It’s really hard for me to say how well the gameplay works. It’s interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s compelling enough. And now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else came up with a very similar game mechanic…

Here’s a shot from the current build:

The game will be released couple hours… If you’re in a hurry you’ll probably download it faster from the Ludum Dare blog as it will take me a little while to add it here…

And now for something completely different… I ‘m taking part in the 10th Ludum Dare competition. It’s a 48-hour solo-game-development-challenge-competition-thing. And here’s a little progress report on my game.

Now it’s the beginning of the second day. Morning so to speak. I still have something like 15 hours to go, which should be plenty, if I don’t end up wasting it by doing something idiotic. Like starting to build this elaborate animation system, which seems really tempting… I sense the presence of a Programming Succubus.

Yesterday I got off to a really slow start. I over slept and lost something like 10 hours. But I got a lot done. The gameplay is pretty much there already (little tweaks here and there) and today should be all about the “polish”.

Here’s a screenshot of the game in action…

Yeah, it’s a color matching game… I feel so ashamed.