The game I made with Matthew Gallant and Henk Boom (us three being the “No Fun” collective) at ToJam earlier this year is finally out!
Matthew already wrote a super thorough write-up about it, so I won’t bother. But here’s the direct link to the game itself :
P.S. : Did you notice the new Games page on the top menu-bar? It keeps track of all the games I worked on, with links to blog posts and download links. Check it out!
The Cloud is a Lie is a game that me and Aliceffekt (our team name was “Les Collégiennes”) made at a 36-hour gamejam/competition in Québec City called Bivouac Urbain. (Last year I also attended the event, and made Stimergy with Heather Kelley).
The game is available for Windows or Mac OS X. [10 and 15Mb respectively]
WASD or Arrows keys move. (you need to hold them)
Spacebar shoots.
M toggles the music.
Escape quits. (there may be a 2-5 seconds pause when quitting the game on Windows)
The Cloud is a Lie is a LAN multiplayer game for any number of players, but best suited for 2 to 4 players. It can be played alone too, it’s just less fun.
Otherwise, it’s like Tower Defense meets Tron.
The idea was to make a multiplayer game without a server, that happens “on the wire” and free for any one to drop in or out.
So it kinda goes against the idea of cloud computing, where the client is as thin as possible and the server (or server farm) does all the work and keeps all the state. In our game, the clients are as heavy as can be, and try to maintain the state of the whole game based on the messages that are passed around.
Also, the theme of this year’s Bivouac Urbain was the song Dan Dan by Misteur Valaire. The song that is played in-game is Aliceffekt’s remix of that song, and it complements the gameplay nicely.
This year’s jam was very different from last year’s. Aliceffekt is a super-productive multi-talented artist/designer/hacker and he was quite an asset at a gamejam.
The game’s design was already decided before the jam started, so that saved us a lot of time. And 12-hours in, most of the art was already done, and I was really lagging behind. :P
It was a huge challenge to me for two main reasons :
Most of my time at the jam was spent debugging the network code, and just messing around trying not to crash Unity. Even at the end of the 36-hours, the game had pretty bad synchronization issues between clients, different enemies on-screen and lasers shooting in the void. People seemed to like it nonetheless. :D
I can’t say I regret decisions that we’ve made, or that I/we should have done things differently. It was a great learning experience, stressful but gratifying, and jumping into unknown territory like that is one of the best ways to kick yourself in the butt and learn a technology for good. I feel infinitely more confident in using Unity now than before the jam.
About the initial concept (a headless LAN multiplayer game), I’d say that it’s feasible, but keeping the clients in sync is a big challenge. I’d also say that my implementation is pretty poor and doesn’t play well with lost packets (and it uses UDP, so no guarantee) or an unstable connection. I didn’t do any kind of client-side prediction either, but I literally flood the network with packets (every client sending 10 packets a second) so interpolation isn’t really necessary if the network can stand it.
A couple of things annoyed me with Unity, but I was at such an early learning stage that I probably did things all wrong, so they’re not worth pointing out. The general thing that stood out is that Unity is fantastic when you use the built-in stuff, and less fantastic when you want to hack it your way… but everything’s possible if you have sufficient google-fu and patience. :)
Hope you like the game!
Stimergy is a game that I have made with Heather Kelley of Kokoromi for the Bivouac Urbain gamejam/competition last weekend in Québec city. Our team name was EMERGENCY HAMMER… don’t ask?
The point of the jam was to make a game in 3 days – 36 hours. And so we did.
stimergy_final.zip (2.1 Mb – Binaries)
stimergy_src.zip (471 Kb – Source Only, get DLLs for TV3D, SlimDX and IrrKlang from the Binaries)
I thought it was so cool that Petri used Chronolapse to film the making of his game Post I.T. Shooter, so I used the same thing for Stimergy :
Heather did most of the game design, defined the graphics style and did the sound effects. I did the programming and some game design.
The game was made from scratch in C# 3.0 using the Truevision3D engine with no prior design, graphics or sound work. All the graphics in the game are procedural, and the gameplay itself is based on AI rules, basically a cellular automaton plus the notion of “stigmergy” from the insect world. (We dropped the G in the game title.)
I used a more recent version of my components system, which now has a sound interface via IrrKlang. It’s the same system I used for Super HYPERCUBE and Trouble in Euclidea, growing quite fond of it.
There are 4 levels. Each level has different goals, which are explained when it begins. Some have time limits. If you fail the objective, the level will restart until you get it.
Mouse Left Button : Attraction Pheromone
Mouse Right Button : Repulsion Pheromone
Escape key to restart the game from Level 1.
This game uses the .NET Framework 3.5, installing it is mandatory. I suggest you install the SP1 version just in case.
You will also need a bunch of DirectX DLLs that are provided by the DirectX Web Setup.
Because of the fancy blur effect, the game requires a Shader Model 2.0 compatible graphics card. This type of card is fairly commonplace now.
This was my first real rapid game prototyping experience. The shortest project span I had seen for a game before was about 15 days… so this was something else. Here’s a couple of random thoughts about that :
I may sound like I’m complaining about everything, but I’m actually really happy about how the game turned out. It’s fairly fun/challenging and it looks pretty good. I’m still wondering whether I’ll release the code because it’s kind of a mess. I suppose I will if I get a request. The source is available up in the Download section!
Note : SUPERHYPERCUBE has been released by Kokoromi for PSVR, I did not work on this version at all, but this article shows its development history.
Super HYPERCUBE (capitalization may vary) is a game I made with the fine folks at Kokoromi for this year’s (2008) Gamma art/game show in Montréal. Gamma is a themed game party that’s been happening for three years now, each year with a design constraint for all the games that apply; this year’s Gamma 3D was about red/cyan stereoscopy aka color anaglyphs.
SHC Logo/Splash Screen : It’s actually all 3D and animated.
The idea is that you have to fit a cluster of cubes inside a wall that represents a projection of that cube on one of its faces, with a series of rotations applied. So it’s a bit like the Japanese “Human Tetris” game shows, which is the comparison that our recent blog coverage have been using, and it’s exactly right. Except you’re handling a random cluster of cubes.
Development Timeline : From concept art, to Sketchup mockup, to early prototype, to final product!
The game, like all other Gamma games, was made to be easy to learn and fun within 5 minutes, because it was to be played by the public and we want to get as many people to play as possible. So the concept is fairly simple, but I was surprised about how competitive the gameplay was on the showfloor! Until the last minute, I had a fight with a fellow party-goer for the #1 high score, which I won by an unfair margin, which I assume was due to luck and… well… hours of testing the game while making it. ;)
Good Luck With That : The shapes get pretty crazy in the last moments.
But our game’s most awesome feature is not just stereoscopy, it’s wiimote headtracking! Which is a bummer, because even if the game is now available for download, I assume noone will have the setup to play it as it was meant to be played. (The most important part being IR-LED-mounted glasses!)
You can still use an Xbox 360 gamepad or just the keyboard to play it, and that’s how I’ve been testing it most of the time. It’s just nowhere as immersive without the headtracking… the combination of that and stereoscopy worked really well for us. There will probably be videos of people playing at Gamma 3D sometime soon, I’ll update this post with links.
Updates :
Binaries (this one isn’t open-source, sorry…) : sHC_final.zip (1.6 Mb)
Update 21/11 02h57 GMT-5 : Put the required font in a texture instead of looking up the TTF. I didn’t realize that Century Gothic wasn’t shipped with Windows anymore…
You will need the .NET 3.5 SP1 framework installed, and TV3D requires some oft-missing DirectX DLLs which you can get with the End-User Runtimes.
I have to say that the Wiimote headtracking technology is all thanks to Johnny Chung Lee‘s inspiring work on the subject (and free code!), as well as Brian Peek’s C# Wiimote library without which this would have never happened.
The game itself was programmed using C# 3.5, the Truevision3D 6.5 engine and part of the XNA framework (I’ve bundled the DLL) for full Xbox controller support. There is no sound, this is voluntary… there was a DJ at the actual event. :)
And last but not least,…
Credits (I’m not alone in this one!) :
Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve already heard of this, but I’ll put it here for archiving. :)
Trouble In Euclidea is a game I made for the TIGSource Bootleg Demake Competition as an obvious demake of Geometry Wars. My intent was to demake the graphics (by using ASCII art for everything) more than the gameplay, but it turns out most people did both, which makes much more sense as the gameplay ends up being more original and it plays less like a cheap clone. Mine kinda does. :P
I ended up with five votes in the competition, which places my game 26th out of 30 positions. It may not sound like much, but I’m really happy that I got votes at all! There are really amazing entries that scored around mine, SHADE: Ghost Academy and DamN for instance…
It was also a nice experiment in fast prototyping. I did the game in a single month, but only on weekends except for the last week. Which means I spent at most 15 days on the game, from start to finish, from graphics to game code.
I used C# 3.5, IrrKlang.NET, TV3D and my spiffy new XNA-inspired Component Framework to build it. It worked really well for me, so I decided to release the source of the whole project. As with most of my code recently, it has an almost complete absence of comments, but should be fairly self-explanatory.
Source with libraries and content : TroubleInEuclidea_src_r4.zip (2.7 Mb)
Binaries only : TroubleInEuclidea_r4.zip (1.6 Mb)
(for those wondering, the fourth update “r4” only contains bugfixes in the component framework, a new version of IrrKlang and very little code cleanup)
Of course you’ll need .NET 3.5 installed, and TV3D requires some oft-missing DirectX DLLs which you can get with the End-User Runtimes.
There are three known bugs :
There are also two achievements, read the ReadMe file for more info! :)
