hObbE's blog

I love the people over at Kokoromi and their annual Gamma contests and what they are doing for independent game development. This year they even got an invitation to show the Gamma IV winners at GDC! A great opportunity for many aspiring game developers. One problem though, such a display costs money and they need about $1600 for this to happen.

I have decided to help them by letting all revenue generated from sales of T.W.T.P.B. during February go directly to support their plea. Also I've got two game codes for some casual games that I will give to some lucky winners in a Twitter contest*.

You can help to!

• Support Kokoromi by Donating some $ and get some fabulous schwag
• Buy T.W.T.P.B. and all revenue will be Donated at the end of February
• Spread the word on Twitter and possibly win a game*

* The Twitter contest works like this

1. Tweet this message "RT @SpellOfPlay: Help Kokoromi Send #gamma4 To San Francisco and Win a Game! http://bit.ly/dmWiYZ"
2. Your entry will be collected in this post as soon as I see it in my timeline.
3. Wait... I will draw two winners at the end of February and send them their codes.

Oh... a new year has come and it's time for a view back on the year past from a Spell of Play perspective.

2009 was a social year for me. TWTPB launched late 2008 and much of my energy went into marketing and getting the word out there about twtpb, hUb and Spell of Play in general. This was also the time when I discovered twitter and I quickly took it to my heart... probably a bit too much There is even a way for you to connect your spell of play profile and twitter profile, via our twitter app Game Twtr

Via twitter we got a bunch of followers and visitors to our website, I tried doing twitter contests, blogging contests, appeared on some pod-casts and also a web show featured the spell of play homepage. We then decided to host a small game development gathering called SoPCon in Gothenburg. We also managed to end up on a list of Swedens hottest small game developers resulting in some local radio and tv-interviews. Things where looking good!

However, as it seems reality catches up sooner or later and I've felt quite uninspired, burnt out, call it what you want after summer. The end result was that I did not manage to pull through the latter half of 2009 and the result is that the number of visitors to the site is at an all time low Not much is happening and I've not been able to do much about it.

I also have not been able to get a real start on any new game projects this year. I'm torn between continuing working on TWTPB (I have some ideas for an expansion), Project L and some new ideas I have been experimenting with lately.

So what is my vision for 2010? What I would like to happen is to get the online community working and have some proper integration with our games. I want the homepage to feel more alive and kicking than ever! I would also like to at least start a new game project. I also have a number of improvements to the hUb backend that I would like to get on.

What will definitely happen is that we'll push our games to appear on Gamers Gate and also a port of TWTPB to XNA -> XBox is more or less done. So I hope we'll get accepted by Microsoft.

I will try to play more games 2010

I hope your 2009 was good and that 2010 will be even better for you!

So while things are progressing a bit slow at the moment I see the light at the end of the tunnel and I hope I'll get back on managing the site and developing some games in the near future! I've massed some creativity and feel really inspired to work on Project L again!

In the mean while I'm writing something about casual games and more specifically the genre hidden object games. This genre is the absolutely most popular casual genre at the moment. The latest being the hidden object game; Big City Adventure: New York City

To be honest I though that this would just be a fad in the casual games market, but as it seems the top casual games are mostly hidden object games! While the gameplay in the game are dead simple, basically click on a certain set of objects on a cluttered scene (with some variations on this) production values of the games are top-notch. The theme of the games also seem to lean towards the mystery/horror genre many of them having quite gruesome stories in them. A bit like an Agatha Christie novel.

As it seems this is a winning combo in the casual games market; keep the gameplay dead simple, add top quality graphics, music, user interface and a mystery story. Just check this list of the best hidden object games out.

So have you played a hidden object game at all? Why not? What did you think?

I just got an email from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe saying they have checked out T.W.T.P.B. and they think it's "a strong candidate for development on PlayStation®." and that it "showed particular merit for evolving what is one of the industries oldest genres into something contemporary through its striking visuals and varied colour palette whilst also introducing an upgrade system that keeps the combat continuously interesting."

Actually quite flattering that they seem to at least have tried it out and that they like it

So what do you guys think? Would it be a good game for the PlayStation® Minis platform (i.e. PSP et. al.)?

Today, we put our beloved dog Bamse to sleep. He was eleven years old, and he's been struggling with a heart condition the last few weeks. Though this was definitely the hardest thing I've done my whole life it was the right thing to do, and everything was very peaceful and worthy.

You will be dearly missed Bamse and we will remember you. Thanks for everything and I know you are running free, wild and strong again...


One of the last photos of Bamse and William

As a result of some personal stuff, daytime work pressure, and mostly the need to focus on other parts of Spell of Play I feel forced to put Project L on a back burner for now. That is there will be no regular releases for a while.

For the above reasons I've barely managed to complete my iteration goals up till now, and quite frankly the focus on tech has delayed much of the actual gameplay. I feel I've made good, alas slow, progress and I've had a really fun time with the game and the code. But it would not be fair neither towards my vision of the game nor you gamers to force the development.

Anyways, I do plan to make releases, and I do plan to bring it back to the top of the priority heap.

So my focus will switch to marketing (we do need to pay for servers, tools, content etc), these web pages, the community and to further develop hUb. Streamlining the web and hUb experience is currently my top priority, and also making hUb Windows 7 compatible.

Hi all!

Time for another release of Project L! Woot! Actually the release is somewhat lame as I've spent most of this iteration debugging my intersection testing. This iteration adds lightmaps with ambient occlusion in them so basically I had to make a simple ray tracer and optimize a lot of things in the intersection code.

Anyway, not much added to the actual game, but it was fun working at and visually I think it really pays off I hope you like it.

Oh... there is a slight game-play change, when you spawn you keep your jumping velocity though it is reversed. Jumping of the level and pressing "space" to respawn can give an interesting experience...