Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Platform Game - More WIP
A little more progress on my platform game. I've now got background tiles, grass and little wee flowers.
The blurring effect in the background is done in real-time on the GPU. Yay for gratuitous use of shaders!
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Going old-school
While I've still got work to do on Tunescape, it is starting to wrap up so I needed something else to keep me busy. I've started to work on a new project - a kind of platform/exploration/adventure game of sorts. So far, I've been working on getting the basic platforming elements to feel right.
If you squint, you might recognize my placeholder player character...
Friday, February 12, 2010
Tunescape Update
I've managed to avoid my standard behavior and have been pushing to try to actually finish (!!) Tunescape. It is in pretty good shape right now, and I've currently got it in playtest over on Xbox Live Indie Games.
In polishing the game, I've been doing some fun shader work. I implemented a particle system shader for my new explosion effects, and I created a "plasma" shader for the background that uses multi-resolution noise to generate a smoothly moving cloud pattern.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Music-based Gameplay
My latest project is a game that uses music as the gameplay content. I use spectrum information to detect energy pulses in the music and use peaks to trigger emission of particles. The object of the game is pretty simple - collect the particles while avoiding the red boulder-thingies. Grabbing stars increases a score multiplier.
Collecting the particles, in addition to increasing your score, fuels three kinds of colored energy - shown by the three lines inside your circle. This energy can be expended to use a shield, give you a speed burst, or temporarily suck particles toward you.
There are also cooperative and competitive multiplayer gameplay modes. This is a mode where players are "bungied" together:
Here is a gameplay video:
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Steam and 3rd-Party DRM - Risen and Tages Activation
This past Saturday morning, I decide that I'd like to play Risen, the latest game from Piranha Bytes. I check on Steam, and they have it for $49.99. Amazon has it for $46.99. Boo, digital distribution! You aren't going to ship me a box, and you are still going to charge more? Still, I've been pretty happy with Steam in the past, so I was willing to spend the few extra dollars to get it quickly.
So, I make the purchase. A half-hour or so later, my download was complete. Yay, digital distribution! I launch the game, and it brings up an activation check that needs to authenticate to a server online. When I proceed, it pops up an error saying that it can't connect. There is also an "offline" activation mode, which involves entering data on a webpage (not really "offline", but whatever...), but the website can't be reached.
I check the Risen forum on Steam, and a handful of other people are having the same problem.. Turns out that all this is Tages DRM being applied to the game on top of what Steam does. And it looks like their authentication servers are down. Lovely. If you buy a physical copy of the game, it doesn't authenticate online (it uses a disk check). Boo, digital distribution! I fire off a support ticket on Steam (after having to create a support account, which is different from my Steam account).
10 or so hours later, I try again. Still not working. I'm thinking that if you are going to require online authentication, your authentication server bloody well better be up. And if it isn't, someone better be getting paged. And, of course, I had no response from Steam support. They are happy to take my money on a Saturday, but don't seem inclined to provide support on a Saturday.
The next morning, the authentication server is up, and I can play the game (which is pretty good, by the way). Still, the whole incident left me with ill will toward all parties involved. Tages, for their broken DRM. The publisher, Deep Silver, for using it. And Valve, for allowing 3rd-party DRM that is out of their control to be used on a product they sell. And for having crappy customer support.
Speaking of their customer support, I just got a response from them (3 days later) - a useless canned response about running Steam as administrator if I'm using Vista or Windows 7. Thanks, Valve!
So, I make the purchase. A half-hour or so later, my download was complete. Yay, digital distribution! I launch the game, and it brings up an activation check that needs to authenticate to a server online. When I proceed, it pops up an error saying that it can't connect. There is also an "offline" activation mode, which involves entering data on a webpage (not really "offline", but whatever...), but the website can't be reached.
I check the Risen forum on Steam, and a handful of other people are having the same problem.. Turns out that all this is Tages DRM being applied to the game on top of what Steam does. And it looks like their authentication servers are down. Lovely. If you buy a physical copy of the game, it doesn't authenticate online (it uses a disk check). Boo, digital distribution! I fire off a support ticket on Steam (after having to create a support account, which is different from my Steam account).
10 or so hours later, I try again. Still not working. I'm thinking that if you are going to require online authentication, your authentication server bloody well better be up. And if it isn't, someone better be getting paged. And, of course, I had no response from Steam support. They are happy to take my money on a Saturday, but don't seem inclined to provide support on a Saturday.
The next morning, the authentication server is up, and I can play the game (which is pretty good, by the way). Still, the whole incident left me with ill will toward all parties involved. Tages, for their broken DRM. The publisher, Deep Silver, for using it. And Valve, for allowing 3rd-party DRM that is out of their control to be used on a product they sell. And for having crappy customer support.
Speaking of their customer support, I just got a response from them (3 days later) - a useless canned response about running Steam as administrator if I'm using Vista or Windows 7. Thanks, Valve!