Mojang and Microsoft - a tale of a man

Seems unbelievable, but Notch's selling Mojang to Microsoft. Here the news.

Mojang are behind Minecraft and this little game is just incredible. But I'm not here (after so much time) because of this, but because of this:

As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.
Considering the public image of me already is a bit skewed, I don’t expect to get away from negative comments by doing this, but at least now I won’t feel a responsibility to read them.
I’m aware this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public. I have no good response to that. I’m also aware a lot of you were using me as a symbol of some perceived struggle. I’m not. I’m a person, and I’m right there struggling with you. (I'm leaving..)

 There is something behind: a man. A man with a lot of money right now, but always a man.
Just yesterday I saw for the first time "Citizen Kane" and for me Notch is the indie-Kane. A symbol, a giant, but always a man. And before become something too big, too strange, he just quit.

Seems incredible, but now Notch, you can do anything you want, not we want you to do.

This is freedom, what do you think?

FlashPunk 2 announced

a recent photo of Chevray, flashpunk creator

Flashpunk2 announcement!! Feature list is awesome and will be something like a "game studio" than a game library:

  Stage3D-accelerated 2D graphics (via Starling)
  Rigid body physics out of the box (via Nape)
  Component-based architecture (design by component/inheritance is your choice!)
  Easily extend Worlds/Entities/Components to add functionality (no privates)
  Depth-sorted rendering & camera view that can rotate/zoom
  Flexible asset & texture atlas loading (use embedded, dynamic, or external assets)
  Rendering components (Images/Animations/Tiles/Text/Particles/etc.)
  Physics components (RigidBody/Circles/Boxes/Polygons/etc.)
  Timing components (Invoker/Scheduler/Tweens/etc.)
  Tagging & grouping system to easily manage Entity collisions/interactions/querying/etc.
  Comprehensive global utility classes for retrieving assets, object pooling, math functions, colors, saving/loading data, easing, managing input, handling filepaths, getting/setting/seeding random numbers, operating on strings, and tracking time


Most innovating topic is awesome component-based architecture (like in Artemis? we'll see, is a big topic) and camera view that can rotate and zoom!

MarteEngine is not dead

Yes, version 0.2 could be useful to build simple games ( and more complex like Starcleaner, Fuzzy and BackToThePast curiously three platforms.


As news you can found in development version of MarteEngine on github (named version 0.3). Stef569 (with some help of mine and Tommy) are helping in testing, solving issues and polish all. Objective is stable Marte Engine version 0.3.
Work done is a lot, as you can see from github network graph:

 
For more information see MarteEngine Github and for newbie MarteEngine wiki

Disqus on my blog

Recently I've tried a little Twitter (you can see last tweets in the box on the right) and found how much is useful among videogames developers: so my idea was to integrate Disqus comments platform into Random towers's comment system.. and all is working now!
Integration with blogger/blogspot platform is without pain and now you can post your comments using facebook, twitter, yahoo, openid accounts, nice right?

New game project

Time to make a new game! It will be most incredible game I've ever made.
Just one little (and misterious) screen here: part of a bigger spritesheet.. what is that? Starts comments now! :D

MarteEngine 0.2

MarteEngine (ME) is a Java videogame engine with it's focus on a simple, clean API for fast game development.

Major inspiration comes from (Flashpunk) and (Slick forum).

Authors are Alberto "Gornova" Martinelli and Thomas "Tommy" Haaks

Features

• entity based framework: everything in your game is an Entity, many things are already coded, no reinventing the wheel anymore!
  
  
  • basic physics
  • collision detection
  • a standard way to organize your project
    
    
• manipulate your entities: rotate, scale, animate using tweens,
  
  
• examples! Ready to play and easy to learn! (click to play!):
  
  
  • Star Cleaner (from RightAngleGames )
  • Hello World
  • Platformer
  • Pong
  • Tank
  • Tween
    
    
• distribuite your game: windows exe, webstart, applet all done using ready-to-run ant tasks, fast and easy
  
  
• based on proven libraries: Slick and Lwjgl
  
  

After two years

Two years of Random tower of games: soo much time on this hobby!


In last years I've done a great work in understanding basic of making games, changed blog template, released Zombie Employee and make new games:



Pong: build with Java on top of my marte engine framework (I promise to release it as open source soon!) is just an experiment. But with this little game done, I master basic stuff! Player controls, collision check and response :D




Escape from colors: an old project released and completed. Something strange but fun, maybe sometimes I'll make a flash version of it!


Airheat: not a perfect game, but different from my other games! Idea came one day... build a game without violence but with some fun? Airheat was a response!


RandomLd19: my entry for LudumDare compo 19 is a non-sense game where there is no path or explanation. You must discover all game mechanics and fight letters around. A good review on compo and some comments let me understand that games don't need stellare graphics at all, because many players wants only to master a game and understand it, something to think about it!

Again, the same question: It was worth the effort?
My answer is YES, AGAIN!

Not only programming videogames is fun, but you can meet people and learn many things:

My two-years lessons:
1) basics are important, make it solid!
2) polish a game is hard thing!
3) focus on little project with immediate return
4) partecipate on compos or contests, force you to complete a game
5) make games is important, creativity is important
6) different games, different gameplay even non-sense one!

What for next year? Make games! :D

Top Skill to become a game developer

Today I suggest to you to read very carefully this article.
Done?
Good, now let's try to think about it.

Become a game developer, not John Doe, but a great game developer, try something simple (like Minecraft concept) and make it perfect.. and see people enjoy playing your game.
From my point of view is a really hard task. What I've learned so far is a mix of programming experience, few games that you can play on this blog and not so much.
So IMHO, top skils to become a game developer is application: only with hard work and good and planned tasks you can try something. Forget all the sites that says to you "create a games in few minutes!".
Top games, from AAA titles to indie or casual one are all made from many peoples!
So what? Don't give up and continue to try, one step at time to build your game :D

Flashpunk 1.00 released

Flashpunk v1.00 is out! Try it on http://flashpunk.net
Soon a little review of this library I'm following from some time.

HTML5+Javascript Library

Akihabara is a new library designed to help developers with HTML5+Javascript games. Seems to be interesting!

Sketchpad - online drawing tool

Web of the future? Try sketchpad!

An online paint editor, without any plugin: you need only Html5 browser (like Chronium).

Amazing!

WonderFl - online actionscript

Today i've found WonderFl a really incredible idea: edit, compile and share Actionscript 3-based works: animations, games and so on.. all online!!

Try it out and let me know what do you think!

GameDojo - flash game tutorial

Google can help a lot, sometimes :D
I've accidentally found GameDojo, a website about flashprogramming by creator of Flixel and Flashpunk. Site isn't done yet, but will be full of tutorial.. read it!

New theme!

A new theme, do you like it?

Zombie employee on madsoftgames

Again, you can found Zombie Employee also on madsoftgames

Epical Game

A new game from Rouge on sourceforge

Update: game video, tnx Rouge!

More Flashpunk tutorial

On Flashpunk web site, more tutorial: collision detection, animation, parallax background, text manipulation, tilemaps

Zombie employee - achievements

Look to death counter.. 0 death!! Well done Fabiano :D

I really need to unterstand how achievements works both on gamejolt and kongregate and add to this game :D

Avellone's interview

On Eurogamer, always nice to read Avellone (Torment and Alpha Protocol!)

Actionscript 3 load BitmapData

Hi all!
I've found this intersting page explain how to load an image (for example a PNG) into a BitmapData class (useful with Flashpunk too), i report here so anyone waste time anymore:

package
{
import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.display.BitmapData;
import flash.display.Sprite;

[SWF(width = "800", height = "600")]
public class Main extends Sprite
{

[Embed(source="test.png")]
public var MyEmbed:Class;

public function Main()
{
var bit:BitmapData = getBitmapData();
}

public function getBitmapData():BitmapData
{
var image:Bitmap = new MyEmbed();
return image.bitmapData;
}
}
}

You need a test.png, obviously :D you can found a little Flashdevelop working example here.