Author Archives: simeon

Can You Express a Concept with Game Mechanics Only?

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This game came out of an argument about whether one could design a game to express a specific idea using only game mechanics. My argument was that you can’t – that you need to at least imply some relation to the real world to express ideas.

So that night I decided to spend a few hours prototyping an abstract game based on my idea of “supply and demand.” You can play it here.

Supply and Demand Prototype

I’m not sure whether I succeeded. I’ve asked people to play it and tell me what they thought it represented, some of the answers I received:

  • Bacteria
  • Social Networks
  • Finance
  • Balance

Out of those, balance was probably the closest to what I intended to express.

Cartoon Styled Explosions

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I wrote this processing prototype to generate cartoon styled explosions for our next game. It took about two hours to get the basic burst effect. I’ll be adding debris trails and smoke to it when I next get some time, as well as PNG sequence output. For the moment you can click the link below to try the demo for yourself and get the source code.

The base effect consists of additive and subtractive expanding circles, with some randomness. An initial additive burst creates the colour, which is subtracted by using a delayed subtractive burst. There are many magic numbers and it’s hacky code, but it’s only for PNG sprite output.

Let me know if you find it useful!

Click here to play with the Processing demo – also includes source code. Left click to make an explosion, right click for a random colour explosion. Left clicking while an explosion is in progress will pause the effect.

The Cool Effect that No-one Noticed

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The way I developed the animated ocean effect in Wheeler’s Treasure is something I’ve been wanting to share for a long time now. It ended up being a very small background effect in the final game, but it’s something I’ve always been proud of.

I made this video overview of how it works (best viewed in HD).

I painted a set of 4×4 ocean tiles that were tileable spatially (from one tile to any other tile), and temporally (through the horizontally adjacent neighbours). This allowed me to create a 3D ocean grid with a random texture tile in each grid cell. Each cell was then animated forwards in time from its starting frame. All tiles were guaranteed to match up with all neighbouring cells due to the arbitrary tiling nature of the texture.

I’ve included the texture below, feel free to use it however you like.

inCline Story Redevelopment

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Apple recently decided to come down on developers who reserve names on the App Store but never upload an app. Because of this we lost the name inCline Racer and can no longer use it. (We weren’t sitting on the name, development just took too long.)

You can find out more about inCline here

What could we do? Use this as an opportunity to re-think the name and the story of the game? YES. All we’ve been doing for months is polishing the gameplay.

So I’m replacing the original title screen and name

Original title screen

With this new story sequence (note: these need a lot of cleaning). The name will become inCline Peaks, a small, precariously located penguin community.

The opening shows us inCline Peaks, population: 142.

Controversial news!

On the precipice

Very conservative locals. I’m hoping this introduction will add a little more character to inCline.