Bonoboblogs

hat diesmal ziemlich lange gedauert bis was kam. ich muss offen zugeben, ich war schon richtig schlecht gelaunt. na gut, ok nicht nur deswegen - da ist ja noch diese dumme sache mit dem faschismus die mir zunehmend auf die eier geht - aber eben auch deswegen.

auf jeden fall ist jetzt die neue arbeit fertig, “desktop.sculpture” heißt sie. ich bin selber mal wieder ausgesprochen überrascht. heute mittag war noch nichts zu spüren, ging dann aber alles sehr schnell. wenn ich den verlauf des nachmittags aber nochmal revue passieren lasse, hätte ich eigentlich schon so um die kaffeezeit herum merken können, dass was kommt: “die desktop.sculptures”

And suddenly there was Flixel, a free and open-source gameengine. Very well designed, fast to step into, made for ActionScript 3 and very versatile. The engine was released only some weeks ago, but the community is currently submitting first games. Time to talk to Adam Atomic: The guy who wrote this genious piece of software. Let’s jump right in!

Flixel and a little code-example.

Why did you made Flixel? Where did the inspiration came from?

Flixel is probably my most selfish project ever! The whole idea behind it was just to make it easier for me to make and distribute the kinds of games that I like to make. After my third game I had most of the bits and pieces that I needed, and figured with maybe a long weekend I could clean it up enough that maybe other people could use it too.

Is there any deeper open-source related philosophy behind Flixel, or was is a more practical decision to do this thing?

Nothing deep I don’t think. I’ve used and played a lot of free or open source apps and games, and always like giving back. I won’t go so far as to say I believe in karma exactly… but it seems like it can’t hurt.

How much time / effort does it cost you to maintain the project?

I’ve spent approximately one hour on maintenance since release, for the v1.1 update. This is where the karma comes in; if you give it away for free, then you can trade that karma for a little help from the self-starters who are willing to share their knowledge with everybody else. Within a day or two of releasing the framework, people had already posted tutorials for settings the package up in FlashDevelop and running MXMLC from the command line and and and…it’s pretty rad. Basically, if I had to do that stuff myself, I could never have released it. So I think it was really release it for free, or just don’t release it.

We are very curious if there are any plans to monetize Flixel now or in the future? (Don’t be shy, we are ready for everything).

Yes and no, sort of, I guess? I have some ideas, I’m gonna build some stuff with the help of some friends later this year that will involve Flixel, but I don’t think it will be anything you can buy, or subscriptions or anything like that. The trick is finding a way to monetize it that isn’t so annoying to actually set up that it just takes all the fun out of the thing… which I haven’t completely worked out yet.

What about Gamemaker, Clickteam or Torque? Do you care about the developments of the “other guys” doing tools in that field?

Unity3D is the only system that really impresses me; they mix the GUI and scripting and asset tracking and all that stuff really nicely. I think after actually making a bunch of smaller games my ideas about the fastest way to do this stuff differs some from some of the popular conceptions of how to make game-making more accessible, particularly the whole GUI aspect I think level editors, GUIs, and all that stuff is a real drag. It’s probably a little egalitarian but I think it’s actually good for people who want to develop games to kind of… meet me halfway, I guess. Plus most simple game-making GUIs encourage static art and static level design, which leads directly to really costly, slow content creation. Scripting I think encourages users to experiment with procedural design more if only to make their lives easier! For 2D games, if you can learn just a smidge of scripting and basic programming logic, and you have the right libraries, you can do REALLY amazing stuff really quickly (see the entire Processing community for example). Plus, hey, now you know how to program!

Are you willing to tell us more about features to come at Flixel? How about community driven developments?

Sure! The big stuff I’m working on soon is making it easier to insert sponsor SWFs, support for displaying traditional tilemaps, and just some general improvements and streamlining (especially for controlling render order and special effects). The community is working on a bunch of different level editors that they’re enthusiastically sharing, and they’ve already developed and released some nice stopgaps for both tilemap display and better depth control, which is pretty rad.

I also read, that you were involved in the Wii-port of Cave Story. How did you came into this project and what does this project meant to you personally (i.e. for your developing skills or things learned)?

I got involved with Cave Story Wii as a direct result of developing and releasing Gravity Hook. Tyrone Rodriguez, the head guy over at Nicalis, thought it was cool, noticed I was a bit of a Cave Story fan, and asked if I wanted to work on scaling up the boss graphics. I was a little nervous about getting involved with what would undoubtedly be yet another unreleased and subpar attempt to put Cave Story on some console or other. After doubtlessly insulting Tyrone to his face multiple times, we somehow agreed that for like $5/hour I would redo all the level graphics, with Amaya-san having the final say on everything. It turns out Tyrone had been working with Amaya-san for over a year already to figure out the right console and the right feature set for this project, and Amaya-san himself had complete veto rights. The job paid poorly, and it was really, really boring. I went through a couple years worth of This American Life episodes while tracing those tiles. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked on anything I’m so proud of! Cave Story (for PC) is the game that opened my eyes to what one person could make, and sparked a permanent shift in my life. To get to be involved with the official commercial release, and to get to have a say in how the thing looked to people who were playing it for the first time… it was just awesome.

How do you think the indie-game-community and the market will develop in the next few years?

The “indie” part will continue to mean less and less, and the opportunities for small teams with great ideas will get better and better. I hope.

Now we are still curious to learn a little more about you. Where you live, what did do, how old, etc.

Sure! I’m 27, and I live in Austin, Texas, USA with my amazing wife Bekah and my two idiot pug dogs. Right now I’m living off our windfall from an iPhone game (Wurdle) that I worked on last year with my rock climbing buddy Eric, and I spend most of my time either working on supporting that game, or (especially lately) prototyping and developing our next iPhone game, which should be announced in a few weeks. As for important career steps… I think getting a four-year degree was a good start, and opened some doors. After college I worked for a couple years as a software developer, at a place where I had some creative control over my projects and only had to put in 40 hours a week. That was a pretty big deal, as it left me some free time and didn’t crush my soul. Quitting that job to go solo was pretty exciting, but I was really bad at it for a few years. I would say the single most important step was when I finally learned enough from my failures as a freelancer to start doing it right. That was last summer, I think. That’s when the cool stuff started to happen! I made Gravity Hook, Paper Moon, and wurdle all in the same month, and a month later had picked up enough steady clients so that my wife could quit her job, too.

So this is not the first time, that you are doing games and things. What role do they play in your life?

Good question! I’ve been an art geek for most of my life, but I’ve always been intoxicated by the mixed mediums, especially comic books, movies, and video games. When you start mixing art and writing and sequential imagery and then pile in interactivity…it’s just too much! How can you not be obsessed with this stuff?

Well, yes. In that context. Do you have any games, book, movies or other peoples work, that you would recommend to people or that you really love? (We even accept famous quotes!)

Oh boy, haha where do I start? Here’s some stuff that people might not have heard of, I guess. Seems silly for me to list stuff like “Pixar movies” when everybody already knows they’re completely awesome? Anyways, some good stuff I’ve digested recently that has been nice brain-fuel:

• The Scar, by China Mieville
• The Taking of Pelham 123 Soundtrack, by David Shore (1970)
• Tekkon Kinkreet, by Michael Arias
• The French Connection, by William Friedkin

Many thanks Adam. I guess I am not the only one, that is looking forward new inspiring stuff made by you and the Flixel-community.

Text and Interview: Martin Wisniowski, 2. Juli 2009

Weblinks

• Flixel Engine
• Adam Atomic Website

Records and process voice at Ableton Live. See the second tutorial at Torley.com

Torley once again made some very lovely video-tutorials. This time, he teaches us how to make some freaky alien voice recordings, some topic that should be also interesting for videogame-designers. So much fun watching this. Should be also much fun doing it. Thanks!

Yeah, brilliant cartoon, that has got some insights into the gaming-market, almost as a by-product. Have Fun.

Fantastic new chip-music magazine. The name is hard to remember: STFUAJPGM. But the music will last. The focus is set on freely distributed music within the chiptune community. The first episode features a selection of precious chip-tunes and small interviews as well. Keep an eye on it. It will be worth it!

PS: The first track from Shnabubula in the first episode seems to be obviously inspired by the ancestors of Tetris music. For a deeper background, watch this video, and also follow the links in the description of the video (on YouTube), for example this one. Thank you guys so much for this great stuff!

Most entertaining way, to quit the dayjob

Indie-developer Farbs from Australia quit his job, to head for full-time indie-game-development. So far eventually not a new or interesting story. But the way he quit, is some kind of interesting, proving his gamedesign-skills in heart and action: We wrote a sort of “Mario clone game”, that delivered the message to his boss. Good job! Just have a play or read the original blogpost. (via)

PDSounds.org is a new project, that can come in handy, if you are last minute searching sounds for a production. Compared to projects like the “Freesound-Project” all sounds on PDsound are dedicated to the Public Domain, so they are totally free of rights - compared to the Freesound, where the sounds are creative-commons-based and you at least have to give credits. Resulting in extra-work at the very end of the project.

So far the sound I discovered on PDSounds are very rough, not very precise, polished or special and still require extrawork to sound well. But maybe the quality of sounds will achieve a new level in some months or years.

I think the archive will be good to get inspired, or to linger around. The sound there are tag-based so exploring is possible. Also browsing the archive by user is given as an option, as well as a “sound chart” and a forum to get in touch.

All this is very fine. But in the end… recording own sounds is quite much more fun after all. (via)

With E3 Memories almost faded away, I wanted to drop a few of my thoughts. I'll make it super-quick by putting all the things we saw into categories:

We all know it's going to be awesome So thanks guys for showing us the game. You could have shown much less of it and we would be equally hyped. We played the prequel to death and we know it's good. On the other hand, we knew you were working on it and it's really no big surprise. Looks good though, please continue:

Modern Warfare 2
Last Guardian
Super Mario Galaxy 2


This looks cool! You win. I need to try your game. It might suck but even then, I want to find out for myself. You have cool ideas and bring something new to the Industry. I want to pay you money so you can continue your efforts.

Heavy Rain
Scribblenauts
Metroid: Other M (ok, this isn't really innovative but still awesome)


Personally I don't care. Um, great. People seem to be excited. I'm not, but I guess it's not you, it's me.

Everything Hideo Kojima does
God of War 3
Forza 3
Halo: ODST
Alan Wake
Splinter Cell: Conviction


You sucked before. I hope you got better. You haven't shown anything that would make me think you suck less now. On the other hand, I might be mistaken. Will check your game out and hate you if you still suck.

Assassin's Creed 2
Mass Effect 2


You will never catch up with Nintendo. It's cool that you're doing the Motion thing now but even though your solution might have advantages, you've shown no real product yet which means you are now where Nintendo was even before they announced the Wii for the first time. There are no games yet and I doubt 3rd Party developers will take the risk when developing for the Wii is so much cheaper and more lucrative. And the realy cool thing about Nintendo is that it is so cheap. Your solution doesn't look cheap. Nice try, tough.

Project Natal
PS3's glowing Ball Vibrator thingy


This is the most anybody will ever talk about your game. Congratulations, you're mediocre. Your have shown a game that looks and plays like pretty much thousands games out there. You shown one feature that is trying to make look unique but that's like make-up on a Zombie. You are going to fail, or at least I hope you will.

MAG
Uncharted 2


Gameplay or GTFO. You are even worse then anybody else. You've practically shown nothing. You are stupid. You waste my time. I hate you. Go away and come back when you have actual gameplay.

Wii Vitality Sensor
Halo Reach
Brink
Final Fantasy 14
Avatar (Sorry Cameron, you are an awesome guy but especially you should have learned that by now)


There were others as well but at this point, commenting on them would take up too much time. So here my main takeaways:

Microsoft: I really hate it how the Natal thing was hyped. Yes, there are some things about it that look cool and I would have liked a honest, objective presentation of the system's capabilities. But getting Master Bullshitter Peter Molyneux onboard with that Pedo-Simulation muddled things up beyond repair. Because what he is claiming is that Project Natal will basically somewhat solve all problems we had with realistic game characters. I can clearly see he is lying and that his demo is totally staged.
Otherwise a solid presentation. I like the new Movie, Twitter and Facebook features. Good move from Microsoft.

Nintendo: Wins the "Bullshit of the Show"-prize for the Vitality Sensor. Otherwise solid presentation. Not quite as revolutionary but then again - they are the winning team and not really under pressure to show something mind-blowing.

Sony: You guys are fucked. PSP GO is mildly interesting but has the same problem as your other systems - it's expensive and has no games! Besides, getting out a system so depended on on-line functionality would be only wise if you had a solid on-line experience. And yours suck!
I will buy your PS3 eventually for Last Guardian and Heavy Rain but I'm hardcore and even I have trouble justifying the expense. Also I can wait until you drop the price. Judging from how it goes now, I don't see a PS4 coming out.

What do you think?

Today I finally had the time to take a deeper look under the hood of the Flixel game-framework for Flash/Actionscript. My opinion? Highly recommended! Not only the mini-game “Mode“, that ships with Flixel, is a great one, but also all details of the source-code is well balanced and implemented in a professional way. You just need two hours to pop into game-development, even if you have only little understanding of developing games and Actionscript-code.

Screenshot from the example-game “Mode”

At Flixel you work with “states” and can add Sprites and Text to the states. There are also some handy halpers for doing animations as well, for example particle-systems. Things, game coders should instantly be familiar with. Here is the documentation.

Let’s look at a simple sprite object. Everything is implemented: health system, physics, animation handling, collision handling. It’s all there and it feels just right.

I do not know, how to best express my initial love for this tool.
A) It is open source.
B) It is possible, to extend it every time on your own for your projects.
C) It can be used for any project you like.
D) Even the preset-stuff that ships along is great.
E) There is a well maintained support-forum at Flixel.org, and I am sure, that it will grow into a community. Leaving one question open: Why pay for other tools? Flixel also integrates seamless into the free open-source code-tool (IDE) FlashDevelop.

Friends, I got a new toy to play with! Thanks Adam for this brilliant Flixel.

Update: I made an Interview with Adam Atomic about Flixel.

Picture posted with kind permission of Ross Racine

I do not want to talk about that totally web 0.8 styled website, with all that old-school copyright stuff and even text displayed as graphic, as well as those somehow boring “my work can interpreted as…” texts. But what is interesting about the site is the work from Ross Racine itself: a mixture of hand-made techniques in combination with the computer - and the vision behind it.

“Drawn freehand directly on a computer and printed on a high-end inkjet printer, my works do not contain photographs nor scanned material.”

He paint “suburban cities” from an urban-planning point of view. They are greyscaled, mostly have a bigger idea of a special form in mind (circle, spiral, tree, labyrinth), have a high aesthetic value, but are quite frustrating, if you imagine to live there or even to orientate in suburbs like this. Good, here we are now. Game-designers? Will you now take over and give it a third dimension?

Patapon is an upcoming Nintendo DS homebrew game, that is… somehow different. Look at this video, to see the gameplay in action (on the bottom screen) to understand, that the flow of the game has a very special rhythm. I somehow like it. Read more about it a E-Eragons site, who works on this title. (via)

Patapon is an upcoming Nintendo DS homebrew game, that is… somehow different. Look at this video, to see the gameplay in action (the bottom screen) to understand, that the flow of the game has a very special rhythm. I somehow like it. Read more about it a E-Eragons site, who works on this title. (via)

Update:
The DS homebrew above is made after a living PSP-game:

For the German-speaking readers and demoscene-lovers. At Superlevel is an interesting interview with Shahzad “Kojote” Sahaib about his project “Gianas Return” (follow up on Giana Sisters) and the games-scene in general, especially remakes and follow-ups of classic games.

My SF 4 pad's d-pad didn't feel right: after a short while of going right, the character would continue going right for a fraction of a second. And to input left, I often have to consciously press left all the way, there was a confusing/irritating wiggle room.

So, I did what any curious gamer would do: disassemble the pad. Check out another photo after the jump.



(Click to view higher resolution)

Note how the buttons have "fins" to ensure proper orientation. Indeed, I had an easy time reassembling, no uncertainties.

Visual inspection didn't reveal any apparent fault, so I reassembled everything right away. But the operation helped somehow. Both above-mentioned problems are gone now. Only the diagonals, especially the upper two, still require harder press than the straights. So jumping still doesn't feel perfect, but reverse dragon punch works much better now.