We are alive! And we are indeed working on a new game.
It's a 2d platformer made in flash (using flixel).
We are very excited about this one, and the reception so far have been quite warm.

We have decided to put up a development log for this on the TIGSource forums.
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=18179.0 <- devlog and playable alpha!

Go there, try the alpha, join the discussion!

/Hannes

Hey, no time to waste, we already missed the deadline!

This is our entry for the August edition of the Experimental Gameplay Project.
The theme was No Buttons.
It's called Balance and it's a physics-puzzle-game controlled entirely with mouse movement.

Balance is a Flash game using Box2D for physics.

The idea is to push the blue block to the green block to get to the next stage.


Hope you like it!
/Hannes and Alfred

Oh, it's that time of the month again. Experimental gameplay time!
For June and July the theme was Addiction.
Our entry is called Undercurrent and it's part fl0w, part geometrywars and part roleplaying game.
Guide your microorganism downwards, kill, level up, avoid spikes, repeat.
When you level up you get points to spend on enhancing your creature. More spikes, Longer Spikes, More health.

We found that one of the most addictive things in games are competing for highscores, so we built in 5 different ways to compete: Score, Most kills, Largest Kill, Deepest Death and Fastest down to 300.

It can get a bit laggy at times, and I'm sure there are a few bugs. But hope you enjoy it anyway!



Indiehugs!
/Hannes & Alfred

We are back with another Experimental Gameplay Project-entry.
The theme for May was "High Velocity" and our game is called Lightspeed.

Fly through hoops to gain points and speed. You get 20 seconds.
Black and white hoops accelerate you and gives you points. The faster you go, the more points you get.
If you fly through a blue hoop you get an extra second.

You build combo points by flying through several black or white rings in succession. If you have combo points you can Boost for additional speed.

When the time runs out you enter your name, and your score is posted to our online leaderboards.

We couldn't fit learning OpenAL into our schedule so the game is painfully silent. Maybe if you ask us nicely we'll crank something out ;)

Controls:
Steer with mouse.
Boost with left-mouse-button.
If the game is running slowly, use C to turn off clouds or reduce your desktop resolution.

Prerequisites:
Windows: .net Framework 2.0.
OSX and Linux: Download and install the latest version of mono from: http://www.mono-project.com/.



To run on Windows: Lightspeed.exe, Linux: Lightspeed-Linux.sh, OSX: Lightspeed-OSX.command. (Or just run mono Lightspeed.exe in a console)

Tech
I (Hannes) recently bought a macbook, and since I don't really want to run windows on it we decided to try some cross-platform development. We settled on C# + OpenTK. Through the seemingly miraculous power of Mono the same binaries seems to work on both Windows, OSX and Linux.

I code in MonoDevelop on the mac and Alfred code using Visual C# Express. MonoDevelop can use the vs-solution files natively so no problems there really. We have our own subversion server to help with the collaboration.

This is a very simple game, but I am very impressed with Mono and OpenTK!

There have been only a few problems with the cross-platform setup.
1) Loading transparent png's work differently on the different platforms. On Mono we have to convert from premultiplied-alpha manually. If you see black halos around your transparent images when running your games on Mono. Try doing this to the textures on load:

int id = GL.GenTexture();
GL.BindTexture(TextureTarget.Texture2D, id);

Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(filename);
BitmapData bmp_data = bmp.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, bmp.Width, bmp.Height), 
               ImageLockMode.ReadWrite, System.Drawing.Imaging.PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
int PixelSize=4;

// Fix premultiplied Alpha in mono
int p = (int) Environment.OSVersion.Platform;
if ((p == 4) || (p == 6) || (p == 128)) 
{
    unsafe
    {
        for(int y=0; y<bmp_data.Height; y++)
        {
            byte* row=(byte *)bmp_data.Scan0+(y*bmp_data.Stride);
            
            for(int x=0; x<bmp_data.Width; x++)
            {
                float a = (float)(row[x*PixelSize+3])/255.0f;
                float r = (float)(row[x*PixelSize+2])/255.0f;
                float g = (float)(row[x*PixelSize+1])/255.0f;
                float b = (float)(row[x*PixelSize+0])/255.0f;
                
                r = r/a;
                g = g/a;
                b = b/a;
                
                row[x*PixelSize+2] = (byte)(r*255.0f);
                row[x*PixelSize+1] = (byte)(g*255.0f);
                row[x*PixelSize+0] = (byte)(b*255.0f);
            }
        }
    }
}

GL.TexImage2D(TextureTarget.Texture2D, 0, PixelInternalFormat.Rgba, bmp_data.Width, bmp_data.Height, 0, 
                       OpenTK.Graphics.OpenGL.PixelFormat.Bgra, PixelType.UnsignedByte, bmp_data.Scan0);

bmp.UnlockBits(bmp_data);

GL.TexParameter(TextureTarget.Texture2D, TextureParameterName.TextureMinFilter, (int)TextureMinFilter.Linear);
GL.TexParameter(TextureTarget.Texture2D, TextureParameterName.TextureMagFilter, (int)TextureMagFilter.Linear);

2) Setting mouse position on mono (osx atleast). To be able to use delta mouse movement to steer we wanted to center the mousepointer between every frame. It seems that Cursor.Position = new Point2(..) locks the mouse position for a couple of hundred milliseconds. This makes the center-on-every-frame-technique unusable. We don't have a good solution to this atm. We had to settle for just checking the delta of the mouseposition each frame, which works but only until you hit the screen edge. You can press Space to recenter the mouse if things go bad. For this game you go pretty much straight ahead, so it's not that big of a problem.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy our little game!

Huggies
/Hannes and Alfred

So... End of the month, and once again we are late with our Experimental Gameplay Project entry.
Lots of last minute engine troubles, so this is quite rough.

The actual game code is written in a only few hours.
The admittedly crappy meshes were modelled in around 3 hours total.

Is it fun? Well if you're into hectic, memory-intensive, click'n'spell games, possibly :)

Anyway, here is our entry for the 10 seconds challenge:

Word Hunt

Instructions
You are in a cluttered room.
Spell the announced words by clicking on things. You get ten seconds per word.
If you fail to spell a word in time, you start over from the beginning.
The object you are hovering over is shown in the top left corner. It's first letter is used to spell.
You start with 3-letter-words, but every five words you spell correctly another letter is added.

>> Download here <<

Prerequisites
You will need

• DirectX 9
• Microsoft .net framework 3.5

This is built on our little unfinished game engine + editor called znCore.
It's not really up to even this small task yet, but it looks like it the game runs reasonably well.
The game is written and the scene is composed entirely within our editor.
Check "Game/Scenes/__temp.scene" for the anatomy and scripting of this game.
We plan to make znCore a nice platform to build 3d games on.
Right now it's usable but not enjoyable :)

Huggies!
/Hannes and Alfred

So what is going on in ZnCore-Game engine land? A ton actually.
First and foremost we have expanded into the third dimension. Complete with cameras, lights and 3d models.
The rendering is really rudimentary at the moment. No eyecandy yet :(

The engine still employs a component based entitysystem that is easily scripted through IronPython. We have added a simple xml based scene format that is used to load up sets of entities. This is based on our Template format, an xml file that describes what components and properties an entity should have. The scene lists all the entities in a scene, what templates they should be based on and any modified component parameters. Scenes can be both saved and loaded easily, and (it seems ;) ) reliably.

The third big thing we have added is a simple game editor!
The editor features:

• A Solution Browser that by doubleclicking enables loading of scenes and spawning of entities from templates.
• An Entity Browser that lists all the entities in the current scene.
• An Entity Inspector that lists all the components in an entity. You can add components and edit their properties in a simple Property Grid
• A realtime view that shows the scene. Entities are selectable with right click and moveable with left mouse drag.
• A Script Console that can be used to directly speak python with the engine
• A Floating editor for entity scripts (through the ScriptComponent)
• Modular "Visual Studio Like" dockable panel system through DockPanelSuite.

So how does it look?


This shows most of the functionality of the engine. Including some examples of how scripts can be written.

[UPDATED!] Game now has sound and a helpful helpscreen

Ok, so... we are a bit late, even in our own timezone. :)
But here it is, our entry in the February Experimental Gameplay Project.

The theme was Rejection. Wikipedia has this to say about that:
"The word 'rejection' was first used in 1415. The original meaning was 'to throw' or 'to throw back'."

Instructions
In our game you should protect the rabbits on the bottom from the evil, bomb throwing, badgers on the ledges above. Click and drag the bombs to throw them back to the badgers. The game is over when you have no rabbits left.

We have worked on the engine throughout February and practically hacked the game together over a few hours this weekend. As our engine is just in it's infancy, things are neither stable nor working perfectly. Fingers crossed that other people than ourselves can even run this :)

Prerequisites
You will need

• DirectX 9
• Microsoft .net framework 3.5

Download the game here

(old version here if problems occur)

Hope you enjoy it!
/Hannes and Alfred