2015 June 2 - 22:51 Fire Flying!
My latest game is out!
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhiXkvkc9sE
Get it now for iOS and Android!
http://devmgames.com/fireflying/
2015 April 9 - 13:58 Extreme Wheelchairing numbers
Now Extreme Wheelchairing has been out in the wild for a month. So here are some numbers since people have expressed an interest in those. :)
UnityAds, ios+gplay, 282k impressions, $ 951
Appstore Sales, 888 sales, $ 597
Google Play Sales, 1316 sales, $ 1231
Admob, Windows Phone, a beer or two.
I was expecting better numbers, but overall it’s pretty decent, especially since I managed to create the game so fast, and the daily numbers seems to be pretty steady now.
Extreme Forklifting is still doing pretty well even though it’s almost two years since it’s release.
One of the major problems with Extreme Wheelchairing is probably the rather steep learning curve for the controls. Many, or probably even most people are not dedicated enough to get through the initial learning threshold.
2015 March 9 - 16:49 Extreme Wheelchairing
And it’s out! Extreme Wheelchairing, for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8.
Extreme Wheelchairing
2015 February 20 - 21:21 Timeline
Things are looking really good, I think my next game will be completed by the end of the month, or maybe in the first week of march. Then 1-2 weeks for Apple to review it.
I have ideas for a strategy game I want to start experimenting with as soon as I’m finished with my current project.
2015 February 5 - 14:28 Home Office
Not really anything new, but I’ve slightly reorganised my home office. I’m pretty comfortable with it now.
2015 February 4 - 21:38 DEVM 2.0
I’ve had a great time at King for the last ~18 months, but I also have too many ideas of my own that I want (need) to realize. Last week was my last at king, so from this week onwards I will instead work with my own company again and create my own silly games.
Mostly mobile games, but maybe some PC or console might sneak in.
I’m aiming to keep a similar pace as last time, that is, create 3-4 small-ish games per year.
Now full speed ahead!
2014 December 14 - 22:05 Moving Out
2014 November 21 - 19:09 2015
Im aiming to start posting stuff here more often in 2015. 2014 has been a year where I’ve been too busy on other things.
2014 July 10 - 23:25 Extreme Forklifting to Windows Phone 8
I’ve ported Extreme Forklifting to Windows Phone 8, since it’s built in Unity it was a pretty easy task.
Wpcentral wrote a piece about it.
2014 June 6 - 15:28 Unity Font Importer
Want bitmap fonts with an outline in Unity? Not as easy as it might seem since the built in feature for creating bitmap fonts packs the characters so tight that you can’t add any shadow or outline. And no setting to add padding.
So I made this little editor extension that makes it possible to import fonts created with tools like AngelCode Bitmap Font Generator or Glyph Designer. Anything that creates a .fnt-xml-file.
Here: FontImporter.cs
2013 December 8 - 21:16 Extreme Forklifting
Extreme Forklifting is still going really well! I’m surprised how many people are still playing it.
Other than that I don’t have much to write. I can’t talk much about my work at king.com.
2013 July 27 - 11:40 #1 on iOS
Extreme Forklifting is #1 in the UK AppStore for the second day now. Overall!
And it’s the number one “racing” game in Austria, Australia, Malta, New Zealand and Turkey! And within the top 10 overall in those countries as well.
I never expected it to do so well, really surprised!
2013 July 23 - 16:28 Extreme Forklifting on iOS
Extreme Forklifting has been released on iOS for about a week now, it’s been doing surprisingly well.
Taking the #1 spot for racing games in Austria, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Malta!
Within top 10 in a number of countries as well.
And with an average rating above 4.
2013 June 25 - 23:05 Extreme Forklifting released on GooglePlay
The summer is saved! Now you can forklift your way to happiness!
Prepare to embark on the forklifting adventure of a lifetime!
Extreme Forklifting on GooglePlay
I’m hoping to get it released on iOS within the next few weeks.
2013 May 29 - 22:59 LightmapLightApproximator.cs for Unity
An alternative to lightprobes for Unity Basic.
For my forklift project I don’t think it’s worth to invest 4500usd to buy Unity Pro with iOS & Android support. I don’t really expect to make much money from it. It’s mostly just for fun and to learn some Unity.
Since lightprobes is a Pro feature I needed something else to adapt the lighting on the forklift according to the shadows in the level.
So I created this script, it casts one or more rays from the forklift onto the ground, and then picks the color from the lightmap at that point, and then applies that value to the intensity settings of the lights that are lighting the forklift. It works pretty good.
If you give it more than one transform to cast a ray from it will use the average intensity.
You might want to use LayerMask to exclude some objects.
A poor man’s lightprobes: C# class
An example:
2013 May 24 - 00:34 Extreme Forklifting
I’m spending most my time on a client project which I can not yet talk about, but it should be finished really soon. It’s a quite cool Flash 3D game thingy, with some really huge brands in it.
Whenever I get a little time left over I’ve started to play around with Unity more seriously. And I’m working on a forklift game for mobile which will be pretty great.
I’m confident to say that it will be the best forklift game for mobiles.
So prepare to embark on the forklifting adventure of a lifetime!
Should be released within the next few months.
2013 March 13 - 23:11 Rage Giraffe, and portrait
So, release a new game a while ago, Rage Giraffe. I had to release it earlier than initially intended since I have so much work to do right now and the next few months.
Also I made a 3D self portrait, mostly made in Sculptris. I’ve now sent it to be 3D printed. :D
2013 February 1 - 13:13 Showreel!
I’ve created a showreel featuring most of the games I’ve created during the last 4 years.
2013 January 2 - 13:30 Monster Trucks 360 Development
Frameworks/Engines
I had used Away3D earlier, on Tharsis, so it seemed like an good choice for 3D engine. And even though the visuals would be in 3D the gameplay itself would be mostly 2D so I decided to use Box2D for the physics, Box2D is very easy to use, very reliable and well tested.
File size/formats
I wanted to get the core of the game including textures under 5 MB. With my own framework plus Away3D 4.x and Box2D just the code added up to to almost 700 KB. Adding textures, 3D models, and sound effects on top of that and I was worried that it would grow to large.
Music could be streamed and the individual levels loaded on demand, but it would be nice to have all else embedded into the main .swf.
Textures was as expected the biggest assets, however texture resolution is fairly low in the game, mostly 512x512s and 256x256s. It’s a bit funny since the first 3D game I worked on (in 2001) used about the same texture budgets.
I used JPG-XR for some larger textures which required transparency, Flash 11 has native support for JPG-XR. I really like JPG-XR and would have used it for more if the Photoshop support for the format was better.
I ended up using XnConvert to compress the JPG-XR files.
3D models was exported from my 3D modeling application as .obj-files, which are then compressed when they are embedded in the .swf. I could probably have gained some on using a more efficient 3D format, but .obj was the easiest to use.
Levels are .zip-files with .obj-files for the geometry and an .xml-file for the interactive game objects. There’s a separate .obj with the 2D collision geometry (It just ignores the z-axis). The zipped level ends up weighing in at about 200KB-400KB.
I wrote some scripts to automate the process of getting the level exported and packaged for the game, the resulting workflow was perfectly ok, making a dedicated level editor would certainly been better but there wasn’t enough time for that.
I got some question on how I get the polygons from the .obj-file to Box2D.
I make sure they are all convex shapes and then I load the .obj into this code.
At the end the game .swf weigh about 3.5 MB.
Performance
Performance was never much of a problem, as long as you have a decent graphics card. The CPU usage is very low, less than 1 ms per frame on my system.
I added the option to toggle anti-alias and shadows in the game, but I’m not sure it makes much difference, it seems more like either the graphics card is way too slow to even remotely work well or performance is not a problem.
A lot of thing could be better optimized in the game, but I don’t think the impact would be enough to justify the time.
Overall there wasn’t any major bugs or problems with the development.
Youtube
Play the game at Miniclip
2012 December 4 - 22:58 New low-prio project.
For the main part of my time I’m finishing the last bits on the monster truck game and porting a clients games to Android.
But I also started a new project which I will work on when I get time inbetween. It’s getting more crazy than initially planned. :D
Work in progress, close to final geometry but without textures.