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.

Feb 6 2008: This is what I posted while the site was down. And yes, I’m still waiting for the shell access rights from my old hosting company…

I’m still waiting. My ex hosting company hasn’t given me a shell access, so I could fix the SQL tables and get my blog back up and running. It’s been now 9 days and I’ve been in contact with them several times and they still haven’t been able to give me a shell access or fix my SQL tables.

In the meantime I did a quick one day game, which I’ll provide here.

I’ve been fighting the urge to do a SHMUP for a long time. The indie SHMUP genre is a very interesting and a lively one. So greetings to you all, I admire your work and I hope I haven’t cloned anyone’s game without knowing it!

Grammar Nazi

DOWNLOAD: Grammar.zip (5.8 Mb)

Instructions

You’re the grammar nazi, fighting poor English usage everywhere you go!

Type in letters to fire. You can do damage to the poor English (the boss enemy thing) if you manage to spell a word correctly. Longer words do more damage than short ones.

Controls: your keyboard

Credits

Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )

Music: The Coconut Monkeyrocket & Martinibomb - Shopping For Explosives. The song “Shopping For Explosives” is freely available at http://www.archive.org/details/csr016 under the  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license.

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).

Edit 19th Dec 2007: I did a small update on the game. New version is available now.

And now for the final exciting episode of my Ludum Dare blog post trilogy.

The game is done and it’s called M3 - Molesting the Match-3 Market. It’s inspiration was this blog post, which somewhat explains the name.

The idea in the game is that you’re a casual games’ level designer and it’s your job to create levels for the game, in which the players can get the maximum score without really doing anything. Because the truth is that’s what most commercially successful casual games are like. Big rewards with minimum input from the player.

This is my first “48 hour game” and I entered it for the 10th Ludum Dare 48 hour solo game development competition. The idea of the competition is to see how good of a game can you create alone, from grounds up in 48 hours. Also I overslept the first 10 hours, so for me it was a 38 hour game development competition

M3 - Molesting the Match-3 Market

Download

M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2)

M3.zip (2,3 Mb) (Release 1)
M3_source.zip (0,5 Mb) (Source code of release 1)

Instructions

You’re a level designer for a casual game. Your job is to design levels so that (casual) players don’t have to do anything to get a huge score. This is the way commercially succesful casual games are being made.

Drag the pieces around and click start. The colors will be destroyed as they touch each other. Try to go for the big multiple chains.

[space] - swaps between the editor and game.
[m] - toggles sounds.