PS. Pic related.

We are three programmers, two of us whom also will do some graphics and sound, and one designer. We have only been working for a few hours now and are still working on the very basics of the game engine. I will try to post updates a few times a day here on our progress and hopefully include materials, either screenshots or working demos. Keep an eye out for more info.

I wrote the following article for our school paper. The theme was adventures so I wrote an article about adventure games. It's in Swedish since I couldn't be bothered to translate it. Enjoy!

Äventyr för oäventyrliga

Äventyr, äventyr. Hur ofta är det egentligen man upplever ett sådant? Om man är för feg för att åka forsränning eller för fattig för att åka jorden runt, hur gör man då? Lyckligtvis finns det ju dataspel*, och då inte vilka spel som helst, utan äventyrsspel, en genre som jag håller mycket varmt om hjärtat.

Genren hade sin storhetstid under 80- och 90-talet då de ansågs vara bland det mest avancerade som fanns med hittar som Monkey Island och King’s Quest. Tyvärr dog genren mer eller mindre helt ut under slutet av nittiotalet och början av detta millenium. Lyckligtvis slutade det inte där och precis som hårdrocken, som ansågs död på sjuttio eller åttiotalet eller hur det nu var, så kom äventyrsspelen tillbaka. Mycket tack vare enkalre plattformer så som mobiler och handhållna spelkonsoler. Det kommer idag ut nya äventyrsspel hela tiden, flera riktigt bra.

Spelarna finns även de kvar, vilket syns tydligt då Tim Shafer (Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, mm.) lyckades dra ihop 1,4 miljoner dollar från över 40 tusen fans i frivilliga donationer för att finansiera sitt nästa spelprojekt, detta på mindre än ett dygn.

Var ska man börja då? Vilka är bra? Vilka kunde ha fått förbli en idé hos någon speldesigner? Ett bra ställe att börja är såklart internet, i synnerhe sidan Adventure Games. Där hittar man topplistor, recensioner, osv. Som en hjälp på traven så tänkte jag, för de som undrar vad man ska lägga sin (väl tilltagna) fritid på för spel, rekommendera tre av mina absoluta favoriter från de senaste åren.

Ghost Trick – Phantom Detective (NDS)

Ett, för genren, ganska annorlunda spel där man spelar ett spöke som har ett dygn på sig att ta reda på vem man är och vad som har hänt då man har tappat allt minne av sitt tidigare liv. Ett snyggt spel som kombinerar en fängslande, om än lite udda, story med både tänkande och stundtals rejäl tidspress, något som annars är ovanligt bland äventyrsspel.

Machinarium (PC)

Klassiskt upplägg, annorlunda framställning. Några stora tuffa robotar har kidnappat din robotflickvän från dig (ja, du är en robot) och tagit henne till ett låst torn i en plåtstad. Vackra handritade miljöer tillsammans med ett minimalistiskt gränssnitt och smådeprimerande bakgrundsmusik gör det här spelet en riktigt mysig upplevelse.

The Whispered World (PC)

Min absoluta favorit de senaste åren. Du antar rollen som Sadwick, en deprimerad clown i ett kringresande cirkussällskap som får den betyngande rollen att rädda världen. Från vad är oklart men säkert är att världen är på väg att gå under. Till sin hjälp har han sin trogna vän Spot, som är någon slags grön blob. Underbart vackra handritade miljöer, ett fantastiskt ljudspår och riktigt bra röstskådespelare gör det här till en riktig sagostund värd varje minut, och lite till.

*: Ja, både datorspel och dataspel är korrekt.

I had some discussions with my fellow programmers on project Duck during the weekend. We admit that we have been lacking progress and while we can't really make any promises since we all have a lot to do, we are very keen on getting work done and hopefully release something playable later this spring.

During my Christmas break I didn't manage to stay away from development completely. A friend of mine requested a program for our LAN party which we had two weeks ago. The idea was to have one computer with speakers plugged in running a jukebox system so that everyone could choose songs. I solved the problem by creating a simple media player in C# which hosted a web interface from which anyone could upload songs to the server which then was added to the play queue. It was an interesting project because even though being a rather simple program it involved several topics including networking, audio and multi-threading. The program, named LAN Jukebox (creative, I know) can be found on GitHub.

I also have some smaller personal projects and ideas I would like to talk about, but I will get back to that later.

HTML5 based, fully customizable, media player
Ok, I'm totally sold on HTML5. There are great opportunities with enabling these features in browsers. I got inspired by the wealth of desktop-like applications there are on the web, like Google Docs and Microsoft Office Spaces. The idea is to use the file and the sound API to create a media player which plays music stored on your local computer. There are several advantages with this. For example, you will never have to actively install or update your client, as long as you have an internet connection you will have the latest version in no time. Secondly, you could implement a login system and save all your settings between computers automatically. The most successful media players, (excluding iTunes and WMP since they are forced upon you), Winamp and Foobar have one thing in common, plugins. Therefore I would like to include the possibility to plugin custom javascript files to customize the players as they see fit.

EVE Online Tools
Since I play some EVE online I've been thinking about programming something with their very nice API which can access most data from characters and corporations in the game. I've been thinking about a bookkeeping system which tracks your transactions on the game and lets you organize and file them in different categories letting you see where your money comes from and what it goes to. Another idea is a corporation management system which let's you overview your corporation, including the bookkeeping system, viewing and check details about bookmarks, fittings, members, roles, tasks, etc. This is probably something that won't be realized soon.

An app for the new Spotify app system
Spotify has released their new app API to which allows developers to create apps for the new version of Spotify. Two friends have confronted me with a rather interesting ideas. One of them I can't really talk about at the moment but the other is a system which enables you to control Spotify from a remote location, like your phone, laptop or tablet. There already exists controls for stuff like play/pause but this would allow total remote control of Spotify, including searching, playlists and song selection.

That was all for the time being
Merry x-mas everyone!

I have finally recovered from last weekend's adventures. The club fraction from our section, the physics section at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) went down to Lund, a student city in the south of Sweden. We had been invited by the physics section there to an event called F1 Röj which is a wordplay containing F, the letter of the physics section (physics = fysik, in Swedish), F1, which when pronounced (kinda like "m8" = mate) means something like "wicked" and finally RÖJ which is both the Swedish name of Minesweeper and also means something like party. Now, having finally explained the name you maybe wonder what this was all about.

Basically the physics section in Lund had invited all the major technical institutes in Sweden to this three-day long party and competition. We arrived Thursday afternoon and basically started partying straight away. When we finally got to the cabin where the actual party was most people there were so drunk that you think the time was around 01:00, not 19:00. The dinner was the most chaotic and trashy I've ever experienced. People jumped around on the tables. Food and drink flew through the air and several different songs were sung at the same time. We did survive though and after seeing a live band, owning the dance floor and some minor after partying we finally stood to face the next day.

One would have hoped for a long morning but apparently we had to get out in the morning rain and play and drink. At first the mood was high and among other stupid stuff we skid down a slope on our bellies making our student overalls rather dirty. After a while the rain and alcohol had taken over and when we finally met a very intoxicated cow who asked us to remove our clothes we concluded that the games were over for the day. While the others started getting even more drunk for the big party of the night my friend Calle and I went to meet some friends who had moved here to study. We had a very pleasant dinner at "Chateau Dreber" (ie. his apartment). After nearly killing myself by eating too many tacos and spending some time with the typical pre-party You Tube surfing we went to the student union house for even more partying.

Saturday eventually came and the actual competition was here. The arrangers had created a nine times nine squares, 25 square meters big minesweeper playing field with LED numbers and flags which you were supposed to place on squares with mines, just like the computer game. The matches were played with two teams against each other with the goal to find and mark as many of the eleven mines as possible without stepping on them. You got penalty points for incorrect marks and dead players. The creators said that a certain video on the internet could have been a inspiration for the game. Apart from some technical problems which delayed the first match by an hour or so the tournament was a total success. Unfortunately our team was eliminated right away by the team "Ugly Girls" which was a little humiliating. Not very surprisingly the winning team came from the computer sciences section in Lund.

After yet another very trashy party (this time with suits and dresses though), a night of puking, a storm and a long train trip we were finally back in Stockholm. I didn't feel very well, I was even more behind in school, my neck was hurting so much that I took my first pain-killer ever and I had caught a cold but it was all worth it. It had been a fantastic trip and I hope they continue to arrange this amazing event.

Here is an article from their newspaper about the event: http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/article1581155/Glada-miner-nar-teknologerna-rojer.html

We have also looked into different ways of rendering stuff. This was also related to the terrain issue. Do we render a model of the terrain or do we create it on the fly. As mentioned earlier we didn't use a model. The way this works is that we have a rectangular grid of points, each point has a height. This grid is generated from a grayscale bitmap. Every point corresponds to a vertex which constitute our polygon surface. In our current implementation every vertex is colored depending on its height but this will change as we will put a texture on the ground.

Project Duck Screenshot 1

Among the various issues we have encountered during the week there is really only one we haven't really solved: the question of networking. There is a lot of question regarding how to implement this in a way that gives us a good balance between code maintainability and game stability and precision. We have at least decided on a server/client architecture since we believe this is the easiest to start out with. I did some reading on the subject and there is a lot of sources of to do different stuff. Among the most interesting I found an article from Valve which describes how the Source engine's does network communications.

Other than that I don't have much concrete news regarding the game but always feel free to visit the project page to give ideas and feedback. Unfortunately all of the design documents are currently in Swedish so the audience may be a little limited. Hopefully we will have time to fix this later on but right now the priority is to make the actual game.

The goal is to create a third-person team-based 3D shooter with some classic game modes like TDM, CTF but mainly a new game mode revolving around a research system. More about this later. We decided early to program the game in C# with Microsoft's XNA framework. We also found a physics engine which seems to suit our needs called Jitter Physics. The graphic style is supposed to be a cartoonish sci-fi style with "cute" little robots battling each other. Basically it started as a suggestion by a friend that we should program something together. A few hours of talking on our Mumble-server we had a few friends who were interested. Right now we are three programmers and a few other guys who will try to help out with everything from concept art to game testing.

Project Duck UML Diagram

We decided from the start that is this was going to work we would have to organize and structure up our efforts. Therefore we consciously waited some time before we started coding. The first week was spent pitching all kinds of ideas back and forth. From overall game design to technical details. Last week we had a programmer meeting where we addressed the most important programming questions and drew an outline to a UML diagram. This diagram would be used as a rough sketch over the various components of the game engine. Now we are actually up and running and it fells really good. Stay tuned for more information and developer stories.

The first step of this was to upload the code for an old game I made, Watch out for the Curve!, to GitHub. The game is a clone of a really old game called Achtung Die Kurve! which I used to play a lot at school with my friends. A few years ago I made this clone using C# and XNA. Now I finally found the code again and put everything on GitHub for anyone to use.

The project is hosted on GitHub. Feel free to download the game and/or the code and do whatever you want with.

I've been playing, or should I say survived, EVE for almost half a year now. From my experiences so far it feels like most people who play this game has been around since the dawn of time. There community seems well established with a lot of well-known facts and histories and a developed lingo. There is a lot I don't get when reading articles on evenews24. This is what encouraged me to write this post. I felt that someone should tell the story from another perspective, from the view of someone who wasn't around when Goons formed, from the eyes of a new player in this vast universe called EVE.

Yes, we have all been there. We have all started up the game and thought: "what the hell is this?". Though some may not remember it. This is why I'm going to take you on a journey from when I started playing to the point where am I today. I hope this will act both as a nostalgic trip back to your baby days and also for players to see what the low-end of the game looks to players coming to the game, which from what I've understood is rather important considering CCP's economic situation.

Anyway, on with the story. I had been playing WoW for almost half a year when I found myself in an awkward position. I didn't really fit into the raid group of our guild and I couldn't be arsed to go and join a new one. It all soon became rather dull and I wanted to try a new MMO. Almost two years earlier a class mate had tried to show me EVE but it didn't really stick at that time. Surfing around the web I saw an ad and thought about trying it again. I reactivated my account and soon I was in space (free to do anything).

I had just made it past the spears...

Upon logging in I was greeted by EVE's famous wall of menus. I thought, "oh god, this will take some time". This was followed by a monotone greeting from Aura who after an hour or so had showed me the basics. So far so good. I was training some skills, doing some level 1 tutorial missions, just chillin' out all alone in space. Recalling the trailer, underlining the player-driven system the game is based on, I felt a little lonely in my Condor. I managed to persuade two of my friends who also had recently quit WoW to try it out. We all managed to choose characters of different races, but after some traveling we were finally united, only to find out that you had to train Ethnic Relations to form a corp together. I took the role as corp director and after two days or so we finally could work together for a common goal. The Space Marmots were formed, only to be disbanded a few days later after realizing three men ain't gonna cut it in the long run.

At this point I had been playing for a week or so I believe. I had entered the world of EVE. A game rumored to have a tremendous learning curve and basically kicking new players in the face, but also a game that is known for its player driven system which basically shapes the game. A class mate had told stories about EVE politics and how he had hunted down spies within their corp. I was excited. Armed with EVEMon and Google I stood facing a new step of my EVE career, my first encounter with the EVE community. That is, I joined the recruitment channel.

Part 2 (coming coon)