Development

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!

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...

Finally iteration 2 of Project L has been released for download on hUb. This has been a tough iteration for me personally with a lot of stuff going on irl.

Some things from the previous iteration has been addressed such as the addition of a small menu where you can flip the mouse axis and actually quit the game Albeit there is not much actual gameplay as of yet I feel that progress is being made and that I'm growing more and more fond of this project, especially the kind of ancient civilization ruins theme that seem to have been evolving

The biggest gameplay additions are the ability to jump (use rmb for this) and the spawn and exit points.

I would appreciate any feedback, comments, encouragements or bashing.

I'm working hard on getting iteration 2 of Project L out the door tomorrow There has been a lot of focus on the level editing abilites and I think I've got quite a lot done and you can really give the levels a lot of love

There are of course tons of optimizations and beautifications to be made but right now I'm mostly bracing for release!

Well... maybe not so epic As you might know I'm working on a new game; Project L, of which iteration 2 was supposed to be released today. And it's not... Usually I'm quite adamant about releasing like clock work. I think it's of utmost importance to get into the habit of regular releases and to downscale the release if time is running out rather than postpone it. All in the true spirit of iterative development.

However, sometimes the shit hits the fan so hard you can't do much but take cover...

This week has been such a week for me and my family. Tina (my wife) is down and out in a nasty viral throat infection making it near impossible for her to both eat, drink and speak. For the second time this week we went to the doctors today (first time we got the standard antibiotic (i.e. lets test if it's bacterial), and got sent to the hospital. They checked her up quite thoroughly for a few hours and actually wanted to make her stay over night to get properly hydrated again. However, after some special painkillers she managed to get some fluids down and we finally got sent home.

The only thing we can do now actually is wait for it to get better, and hope that no one else in the family catches it too. A big bummer is that we where supposed to go for a one week vacation in Denmark tomorrow, but that is of course simply out of the question...

Anyway, the release will be made as soon as I get my energy back and get some time to make it happen...

The first iteration of my new game project has seen the public light on hUb! So why are you still here? Go play it now!

Oh you kept on reading did ya? Well then I might as well tell you a little bit more. The name "Project L" is very much a working title. I definitely suck at game names (T.W.T.P.B. anyone...) so I'll wait for a while before nailing something down.

Also, it's not much of a game right now... mostly a set of controls and some world collision. Can you make it to the top? Actually.... what is the top... up is so relative from here

Anyway, the project (L) has officially started and I'm looking forward to your ideas, suggestions, impressions, comments, bug reports and what not! Remember you can be part of this game by contributing and feeding me!

I plan on continuing with 2 week iterations that works so well (for me) so there will be another release sooner than you think!