The concept was to have a 2D game with lots of particles, platforms and endless, randomized level. Now everyone knows that Unity is not really meant for 2D games, so it was perhaps a bit overkill for a simple project like this, but I took it as a learning experience, since I hadn’t made a game with Unity before this jam. Since I was working alone, I had to create all my own assets. I don’t like to grab free art from the internet, instead I try to use what I’ve made in the past and create all new models and sounds which suit the game. Twelve hours after the theme was announced, I had first playable version done. Then I did a mock up of the main character, threw a build online and I posted the link to facebook for my friends to test. That’s one thing I’ve learned from previous jams – playtest a lot, and playtest early with a release build configuration. At this point I had a particle emitter that creates rainbow smoke attached to a player controlled spherical object. The level consisted of blocks that slowly fell downwards, pulled by gravity and slowed down by drag coefficient. But wait, the sphere wasn’t actually a sphere.. it had eyes!  It was Illi!

Ok now who the f**k is Illi? As you can see in the game, Illi is a strange bird-like creature. Pink colour tells us that she’s a girl. She cannot fly, but she can jump pretty high and that’s how she’s going to access the platforms falling towards her home cloud. But why does she want to go higher? To space?

Yes, SPACEEEEEE! You see, one day she saw Nyan Cat fly past in the sky and now she wants to meet that strange rainbow cat. Illi thought they might be related somehow because they both leave a rainbow in their wake. In the game itself, you won’t find Nyan Cat.. or can you?

After that I tweaked the gameplay physics and created some sfx for the game and also started working on split-screen multiplayer mode, where Illi is accompanied by her brother Ippi (a boy, because he’s blue). Suddenly 24 hours of the game jam had passed, it was now friday afternoon, and I had been awake for 31 hours so you can guess how tired I was. I went home and slept for a bit over two hours, took a shower and went back to the Game Development Lab at KUAS to work on the game. Now for the next twelve hours I was basically just playtesting and tweaking stuff, but I added one more feature: global online scoreboard that can be viewed here. The game uses my web server to store the single player mode scores in a database for instant access and updates, the scripting part in Unity was easy, but my server was giving me some troubles, mainly because I didn’t have crossdomain.xml in place at the web server’s root folder. During the last twelve hours, I redid almost all of the physics colliders and how they affect each other, faked a glow effect, bashed my head against the wall with HSV to RGB converter script which I didn’t get to work with Unity and decided to call it a day two hours before the deadline. The game was complete and I ended up building versions for webplayer, Windows and Mac OSX. You can play the game here for now. I’m making a new version with some bugfixes and tweak the multiplayer a bit more, but there’s no set date for it – and probably it will go up to a place like Kongregate.

So, the game was delivered but the day wasn’t over. We had to go and present our games to the audience and there was also a prize ceremony coming up. There were a total of seven games in the competition so seven teams managed to finish their games. After the presentations, I joined some of the other teams for a tasty kebab treat. Then it was time for the prize ceremony. The prizes were cold hard cash sponsored by Supercell and Kajaani University of Applied Sciences. I wasn’t really expecting any success since I knew who the judges were, so I was pleasantly surprised when I got the third place and a prize of 250€. The winner was KajakNautti – a game for Windows Phone 7 (1500€) and the second place went for PogoMole (500€).

I had a great time participating this jam, and will definitely participate in other game jams in the future. Too bad there wasn’t that many teams participating this time, maybe the first year students in KUAS don’t want to become game developers as much as the students from previous years… ;)

To summarize: Demoefekti was 6th, Eurohumppa was 7th, and Interstellar Cruiser was 10th in their compo categories.

And now for the vid…

Free Music Compo: eimink – eurohumppa

Graphics Compo: eimink – interstellar cruiser

Beginner Demo Compo: Teknopapu Productions – Demoefekti (check also my previous post here for a little bit of background info about the demo.)

I’ll be making another post later with download links to all of my compo entries :)

eimink out.

It’s been about twenty years since I first found out about demoscene, mostly thanks to Sivu/Byterapers who lived in the neighborhood back then. As a little kid who had just learned some BASIC on Vic-20 I was thinking that one day I want to make those amazing graphics too. Well, several years passed and I started learning C, and with internet I found articles about demo making and started experimenting with Allegro library. I actually had a couple of effects ready back then, but teen mind wandered away from demos and concentrated more on music. Fast forward to this day and here I am sitting in my computer corner and I’ve just finished coding my first complete demo. It’s quite funny feeling to finally do something that you’ve dreamt of since you were a little kid. Wow.

The demo is built on top of Kajak3D game engine and it runs currently on Windows. Coded in Visual Studio 2010, graphics done in Photoshop, Blender, 3DSMAX and Paint. Music is handled by FMOD EX framework and the song behind the demo is made by my good friend Alpha Mind. I’ve probably been a huge pain in the ass for Mika and Mikko by pestering them about features in the Kajak3D engine back at work, but I hope I’ve given them some much needed feedback about their engine.

You can read more about the engine from http://kajak3d.com/index.php?page=pelimoottori_en

See you at AltParty! http://www.altparty.org

Hello world! AVGA on Arduino @ 16MHz

As you can see from the picture, I managed to get it running. The display recognizes the mode as 640×480@60Hz which is the VGA standard, but due to 16MHz crystal on Duemilanove board, the actual resolution is 64×64 or 8 ramblocks high and 8 ramblocks wide. Each ramblock has dimensions of 8×8. That’s not very much to work with, but it gets the job done.

The modifications that were done to the AVGA:

1. Set F_CPU to 16MHz in code/makefile/compiler settings.
2. Modify config_screen.h so that DRIVER_WIDTH and DRIVER_HEIGHT macros are both 8.
3. Adjust XPOS and YPOS in config_screen.h to center the image on screen.

Not much to do there really. :) The test setup was done by the basic schematic found on AVGA site and that’s about all there is to it. Next step for me is to build a better rig for doing stuff with this, and I’m going to incorporate a faster crystal to that board too, so I can pump up the resolution as well. :)

Fallout 2 is a old game, and the file formats are hacked open by the active modding community – I couldn’t have done this without all that knowledge that people have gathered during many years. So thanks to all of them. The main motivation for this tool comes from a FO2 total conversion project called Mutants Rising that I’ve been part of for several years now. I urge you to check it out, and if you think you’ve got talents in 3D animation and movie making – we could use your help!

Features that will be in the final build:

• Analyze .wav files
• Generate .lip files based on analysis
• FRM file support
• Preview generated animation
• Edit lip file by either entering offsets by hand or clicking offset positions on waveform display
• Save and load .lip files
• Convert .wav to .acm (the sound format in FO2)

Years ago I bought a Digitech RP50 effect processor for guitar. It’s not very good piece of gear but it has worked for me while practicing at home, and even during some home studio sessions. The nice thing about the RP50 is that it has a 6,3mm jack labeled Control In in the back. The user manual says that one can hook up a passive volume pedal to it and use it to control master volume, wah or whammy effects on the processor. Nice. Now, how can I emulate a passive volume pedal with Arduino?

Passive volume pedal is a very simple piece of equipment, basically it’s just a potentiometer. With that sorted out, how the hell can we get Arduino to act as a analog potentiometer? There’s of course digital potentiometers that can be controlled directly, but since I had none available, I had to think something different. How about an old friend, optocoupler. With PWM drive. After a bit of searching I had a MCT6 Dual Phototransistor Optocoupler, a spare 6,3mm mono plug and all the other small things like Arduino and my Mac at hand. The build was simple, just connect one of the PWM pins on the Arduino to the optocoupler anode, through a resistor of course to protect it, cathode to ground, emitter and collector to the 6,3mm plug and I was ready to test it out. Guess what, it worked with first try! The volume went up and down and the whammy worked nicely, so now I only need to find a suitable accelerometer for the build.

In this test I used the basic Fading -sketch found in the Arduino examples and there’s a pic of the wiring below :)

Arduino to Digitech RP50 Control In - Wiring

Stay tuned for more guitar fun :D