johno's blog

Obviously, the title of this post is just a bad joke. I can't stop coding!

I've been hard at work on my new game (unannounced at this time) since some time in April, and it's getting closer and closer to the finish line; my goal is to be done with all the code by the end of August.

This game most likely won't be on Spell of Play, as I'm looking into other publishing options at the moment.

As I tend to blog here far to rarely, and also post news om my own site far to rarely as well, I've introduced a new perspective straight into my development workshop via this Sneak Peek page.

If you are in any way interested in what I'm up to there's no better place to stay updated.

I hope all you other indie-devs are having a productive year so far, and I hope to see more of your games here or any other where soon!

Peace!
/johno

Hello all,

I've been working on games alright, but I've been REALLY sidetracked lately by my discovery of Speech Level Singing.

Never fear though, I finally managed to write the MVC reference game that I had promised. Discuss it in this forum thread.

Hi everyone,

In addition to my recent updates of my games on hUb to Direct3D9 goodness, I have been continuing my exploration of 3D-space in my project The Swörd.

Hopefully this stuff will see the light of day in an actual game (on hUb of course) within the near future.

/johno

My game Bloom has been reviewed by the online games magazine Thirteen 1 (page 40). According to the review Bloom is too hard and / or fast, and I also seem to remember other people having similar opinions.

This gets me thinking; would there be a way to fix that? Since the game is already released and has sold at least one copy , I can't really get away with completely changing it (this would also mess up the replays), but perhaps I could add stuff to it that allows people to play it in a way that works better for them? Since we do iterative and collaborative development here at Spell of Play, it seems only natural to me to continue tweaking the game for the benefit of all users.

Indeed I feel very motivated to learn from this experience, and I'll surely try some ideas out. Stay tuned!

Hello all!

Here we are at SoPCON having a great time!

I have just released the first iteration of Sentry, an action/puzzle game where you try to navigate labyrinths filled with nasty aliens. The twist is that you don't have any weapons of your own, rather you have a number of sentry guns that you can move around to try to clear a path through the alien hordes. However, ammo is limited...

In this game it is possible (if you are logged in) to create your own levels for other people to play. In time there will of course be highscore lists for this, and possible also replay support if it fits the game (without giving away too many solutions...)

I hope you get a chance to try it out, and please give me feedback!

Hello all!

Long time no blog, but I haven't been idle, so here's an update.

Some friends and I recently concluded work on the video to what we think is this year's swedish "radio plague", namely our song Bärs é Livet (loosely translated as "Beer is Life / Beer is teh shit").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkwtiyh-uvg

Even if you don't speak swedish the song is still quite catchy, enjoy!

Check out www.quakelive.com!

I think this is cool. It's kind of in the same ballpark as what we're doing here at SoP in that it combines the use of web technology and native "high performance" stuff.

I still think the Quake III Engine (the tech basis for Quake Live) looks great, and they've certainly done a good job updating the look on lots of the maps that are from the original Quake III Arena. And lots of the new maps are really curvy...

Obviously they wanted things to be automatically updated, hence the required plugin.

And yes, it probably is easier to do extensive gui and statistics stuff on a webpage rather than in a game. Remember, guis are hard...

/johno