Super Cube Racer

I've started working on yet another new game (Wilhelm's War is on hold). I call this one Super Cube Racer. It's a mix between Minecraft and Mariokart, I'm hoping to find fun gameplay in between these two wonderful games.

There is no design document or any set in stone plans but here are some ideas in my head:

- Random race tracks, every race is different
- Split screen multiplayer (1-4 players), offline
- Weapons/power ups, some of which may allow for temporary destruction of terrain to slow down the other players
- Map editing by letting the player place down cubes, probably start off with randomly generated terrain but no racetrack

I'm targeting Xbox 360 Indie, and possibly the PC.

So far I've been mostly working on the "voxel" engine, it's been a few weeks and I think it's in a pretty good shape. I'm now starting to cram a racing game into the engine. Here is a video of what I've got so far:

Sketchy Tower Defense on Xbox Marketplace

Sketchy Tower Defense was finally released on November 26th. It's been doing quite well since, staying in the top 7 downloads the entire time. Have a look, try the trial. If you find that you enjoy it the full version is only 80 MS points away (about $1 USD).

Sketchy Tower Defense on Xbox LIVE Marketplace

Sketchy Tower Defense going through playtesting!

I finally tied up some loose ends on Sketchy Tower Defense, and I've submitted it for playtesting to the XNA Developers Community. If you have an XNA Dev account then check it out!

Another night another car

This one is one of the junk cars from which Wilhelm will be able to siphon gas from. Not sure how many of these junk cars I'll draw in the end, probably just two or so.

Car pixel art

I sat down tonight to draw Wilhelms car. I started with a black outline based on some photograph I googled up. Then I took it from there, adding detail and some light shading. This took about 1.5 hours, plus another half hour skimming through some pixel drawing tutorials!

Wilhelm's War

The little character test I posted the other day was from a game I'm working on called Wilhelm's War. The game is still in the early stages, but here is a screenshot.

The core of the game is walking around the desert looking for car wrecks to siphon gas from, while shooting down zombies. Once you have enough fuel you jump in your car and drive to the next level, rinse and repeat.

The idea is to keep the game simple so I can actually finish it this time!...

Character animation test and 8bit graphics

I've added a new feature to PickleOS. It now allows me to create a surface with any pixel magnification to establish an "8bit" effect. Initially I did this simply by scaling everything I drew. This worked fine, until I started rotating sprites. Rotating a sprite by 45 degree rotates the pixels as well so that they end up looking like diamonds, not squares. To do proper rotation I instead had to render the entire scene at 1:1 scale to a texture, and then draw the texture scaled up. I've implemented this at a low level in the windowing code so all I have to do now is specify what pixel magnification I want when I create the main game window.

My first real use of this feature is in a little character animation test for a mini game I'm working on. The character is made of 4 parts, the head, the torso, legs, and arms. The head, torso and legs animate without any rotation, but the arms rotate around between -45 and 45 degrees. This works very well, and looks great in motion. Here are some still pictures.

Pickles!

Most recently I've been tinkering out with the idea of doing a few 8-bit-ish games. I took a while to look around for 2D engine to use for such a project, but I did not find one that I particularly liked. The XNA Game Studio is fantastic, but sadly it's limited to Microsoft platforms, and I would really like a cross-platform engine. More specifically I'd like a C/C++ cross-platform 2D engine, as those are my languages of choice.

Instead of settling for something I would not be happy with I opted out for designing my own engine. The engine is currently in a good shape, and performs quite well. I continue to develop it, as I play around with game ideas and discover requirements for my engine.

More after the break...

Sketchy Tower Defense

I've bought an XBox360 about 2 years ago, with the intention of trying some indie game development on it. At the time I was into tower defense type of games, and from this idea Sketchy Tower Defense was born. I've worked on it from time to time, putting perhaps around 60 hours into it. The game has been sitting in a nearly complete state for a while now, I just need to find some time to tie up loose ends... and the will to do so. Finishing off a project is always the hardest part isn't it?

Pixel Troll arcade

Late last year (2009) I got my hands on the Mame emulator, I was hoping to see what kind of scanline emulation it uses for the old timey 8-bit CRT effect. I ended up running into a webpage describing an arcade machine built from scratch. The obsession hit immediately, it took me a while but by mid 2010 I have finished building my own arcade machine. I started with an old gutted machine I found at a local shop. I don't play it as often as I expected to, the fun was in the building itself, but it's great at parties!

For anyone interested in making their own http://forum.arcadecontrols.com is a fantastic resource.

More photos after the jump...

Title design

I needed a nice title/logo design for this blog. Sadly I'm about as artistically handicapped as it gets, but fortunately my wife is on the other end of the artistic spectrum. She painted this troll for me, and I spent the next 2 hours or so fiddling in Paint.NET trying to turn it into small pixel art. I started by simply resizing the image to the final size, and then cleaning up the pixels one by one. I'm happy with the results, have a look.

Enter Pixel Troll blog

I've decided to finally start a blog to document my adventures in indie game development. I hope to keep this blog up to date with my latest developments.