Yesterday the Rune Twister has been added to Softpedia's database of games and gaming tools. They were impressed with the quality of our product and encourage us to keep these high standards in the future. In addition to assure their visitors that Rune Twister is clean, they have granted it with the "100% CLEAN" Softpedia award.
We are very proud and we promise to keep up the good work in the future :).
Hello! It's been a while since our last update. Lately we are struggling with Flash and Action Script 3.0 to create our second game which we hope will be seen by a wider audience than "Rune Twister". Our flash game will be based on the similar gameplay as in our first production. We tried to remove elements which were not entertaining enough and replace them with something different. Keep your fingers crossed for the effects of our hard work :).
The Rune Twister is our debut and a first serious step into the indie gamedev community. We are the new team on the market and not many of you are familiar with us. So for the good start, we let you decide how much would you like to pay for our game. Yes, this is the Rune Twister Sale! The base price of the game is still $4.99, but you can buy it cheaper using one of the discount codes. More details you can find at the bottom of the Rune Twister page.
We are proud to present our first commercial game - "Rune Twister". It took us a long time to finish. Most of the game graphics were made by Piotr Kadzialka. Thank you for all your help, we appreciate your hard work and patience :).
Enjoy our new trailer which is basically a remake of the older one. We did that intentionally to show you how different our game looks now. You can compare it with the first version by yourself. Full game and demo are available, look here for more details.
Hello again! Since our last blog update we were very busy. Graphical appearance of our game has been totally renewed. We've also improved gameplay to be more interesting and appealing to the players. Stay tuned because the full version of the Rune Twister is coming out this month!
While you are waiting for the Rune Twister we offer you a small prototype, based on the Pong game. Because steering only one paddle is out of fashion in this season, try to control more than one.
Download DoublePongPrototype and run it by shortcut. If it doesn't work, edit shortcut and set correct path to your jre. Good luck.
Unfortunatelly the previously announced release date of the Rune Twister will be delayed. The good news is, the game will have a totally new look, thanks to professional graphics created by Piotr Kadzialka. Additionally we made a couple improvements in game mechanics to make the Rune Twister even more attractive. New bonuses, progression of levels, achievements and much more are waiting for players to take the challenge!
Stay tuned for our new trailer which will show up in July.
Bionic Nose proudly presents the trailer of our game called Rune Twister. We hope that you will enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making of the whole game. Your opinion about it and a constructive criticizm are always welcome.
It's been a long two months of hard work with prototyping and struggling with production of our first commercial game. It will be our debut on casual market. Our "Rotatris" prototype has evolved and soon you will be able to see what it has become. We have mixed it with some match-3 elements.
In the meantime we've created small prototype which maybe in future will be our second commercial game. It's basically a mix of platformer game with logical puzzles.
Our blog is extended by new "Links" page which can be accessed from top menu. We've placed links to our friends sites and pages which we think may be useful for people interested in gamedev and independent games production.
There are things that have been done many times. So why do it again? Why not?
Rotatris is simple variation of Tetris. In this micro game there is no posibillity to move block left or right as usual. The player can only rotate both the board and blocks.
In this solution, board becomes square. Player has the opportunity to lay down tetrominoe blocks on all four walls of the board. So what should be the algorithm for clearing full rows?
Which blocks should be full to start cleaning? There were three options:
1. Blocks at the same level on all walls, forming a square.
2. All blocks on a single wall.
3. Blocks on a single wall, limited by diagonals of board.
First one is too difficult to play. Second one, too. In both cases there is too high propability of indelible empty spaces occurrence. The third is that which has been applied.
Which blocks should be thrown down by gravity? There are two options:
1. Throw down blocks above the cleared line and under the board's diagonals.
2. Throw down blocks above the cleared line and under the board's middle.
First one leaves empty spaces on the board's diagonal lines. Second one leaves them on the board's middle lines. The second was chosen because of the smaller hardness.
Although selecting the simplest (for the player) version of the algorithms, the game become not easy. Try yourself: Rotatris download.
As it was shown in Juggling Games Research, there are no games which imitate ways of juggling realistically. The closest to this idea is Juggling Simulator Game which allowed player to make two kinds of throws from each hand.
On the other hand, there are many simulators where you can imitate throws in patterns strictly defined by user. Siteswap notation is one of many types of describing mentioned earlier patterns.
"Siteswap is a notation used to describe juggling patterns. It encodes the number of beats of each throw, which is related to their height, and the hand to which the throw is to be made."
According to that notation:
0 - pause with an empty hand,
1 - quick pass straight across to the other hand,
2 - momentary hold of an object,
3 - diagonal throw of an object to other hand, at the length of three beats,
4 - vertical throw of an object to the same hand, at the length of four beats,
5 - diagonal throw of an object to other hand, at the lenght of five beats,
6 - vertical throw of an object to the same hand, at the length of six beats,
etc.
What would it be after connecting these two ideas with siteswap notation and ability to define throws sequence in real time?
We decided to take that challenge and this is the result:
In this prototype the balls are thrown by selecting throw numbers. Each of them corresponds to throw type defined by the siteswap notation. It is done by pressing keyboard keys in proper moment of time, called "catch mode", which is shown by red border. The other borders give us a clue, which balls will be next in "catch mode".
Despite the juggling in this prototype being hard to learn, it enables variety of tricks which can be done by the player. In our opinion, it is good foundation for creation of game which simulates juggling.
Our team was made of Bionic Nose members and guest appearance of Havock.
Topic of the competition was "Deception". Three additional topics for our time zone were: a key, a monkey, a donkey.
According to this guidelines, we made a game called "Infinite Burglary". Player is a thief who is breaking in by making keys which fit to the specified door. Deception lies in the fact that you can play forever and the game ends in victory by giving up and getting caught by the police. Justice triumphs and we get a trophy as a prize. Additionally game fulfilled "Universal Language Game" achievement, which means that game has absolutely no text or numbers.
Making of the game.
18:00 - announcement of the topic for this year
18:00 - 19:20 - integration and official keynote, designing of our game in the meantime
19:40 - first graphics to the hallway
19:54 - first environment setup
21:58 - finished hallway screen with it's logic
23:14 - finished door screen with it's logic
END OF THE FIRST DAY (we didn't even notice when it was finished)
00:13 - finished main menu
02:00 - 6:00 - programmers are taking a nap
before 6:00 - Havock goes to sleep
till 6:29 - a key, hallways and door graphics were made, Magda goes to sleep
6:31 - finished credits screen
8:20 - fade in/out effect
8:54 - first version of the key
9:50 - fade in and fade out on transitions between screens
about 12:00 - Magda gets back to making of the graphics, Havock starts searching of the sounds and making graphical elements
12:19 - finished early graphics for the intro
13:58 - game intro logic
15:10 - finished parts of the graphics for the key
17:22 - key making logic
17:53 - first sounds
18:03 - updated key making logic
19:30 - 21:30 - break
21:30 - 23:20 - addition of many missing graphics
23:09 - very serious bug with image transparency is fixed
23:30 - sleep
END OF THE SECOND DAY
7:50 - 9:00 - waking up, breakfast
9:00 - 9:38 - first graphics of the last day
9:50 - new mouse cursor graphic
9:58 - big update of the graphics and the key logic
10:21 - removal of serious bug with door rendering
11:11 - "back" button on all screens
11:43 - sounds in game intro
12:17 - animation of file and haze
14:03 - finished animation after proper making of the key
14:19 - last graphics are finished
14:00 - 15:00 - addition of missing elements of the game: sounds, graphics, text files etc.
15:00 - the end of making of the game for KrakJam 2010
15:00 - 18:00 - games testing, presentations, voting and announcement of the results
Postmortem
a) What went right?
- we managed to create everything what we've planned
- job distribution. There were no idle time. When Luke was programming, Peter was planning next stages of work. Magda and Havock were consulting graphical issues. In the end Luke and Peter were programming different functionalities in parallel, which resulted in very quick code creation.
b) What went wrong?
- we were at least one hour short at the end of the competition and some of the game elements were made too fast, which resulted in malfunctions.
- our breaks were not optimal, we were taking a break only when we're totally beat up. That resulted in lack of our productivity. We should've taken shorter breaks more often.
This competition has shown that we're capable to plan, make and finish our conceptions in specified amount time.
The first game that Luke and Peter made together many years ago was simple remake of Boulder Dash. In this game player diggs the tunnels to find diamonds. He runs away from danger like monsters and falling stones or diamonds. There was no next lives and levels order. Death or timeout ended the game. Collection of all diamonds in time caused jump to randomly picked new level.
As you can see, it wasn't big production. ;) But there was a lot of fun to make this. Menu - always the first part of game! Config loading, bitmap loading, levels loading - easy. Player moving - first bit of life in game. Falling stones and diamonds - look out what are you doing. Moving monsters - some bug makes them teleport, so they were unpredictable. Explosion when something fall on the monster - like special effects. Score bar, 'game over' label, credits inscription and game was finished.
Simulators are tottaly different kind of juggling programs. They are trying to imitate juggling process as much as possible to make throws physics and user capabilities close to real.
Anyone who knows juggling a bit, also know there are thousands ways to juggle three balls. One ball throw can be made in many different ways.
Simulators allow for an accurate preview of juggling tricks, a review of them from different perspectives, and analysis of their writing. They can be helpful tool or inspiration for juggling treaning, especially the sports juggling. It should also be noted that some of tricks generated in simulators are impossible to make by even the best jugglers due to high degree of difficulty.
Larger list of simulators can be found on The Internet Juggling Database, or the chilean site about juggling Malabarismo. Also collection of juggling programs and animation from the '90s is located on juggling.org.
It's hard to find bigger game with juggling theme. To be honest, we didn't find any. Most of them are simple flash games, available on sites with free games. The only one, which can be installed is Virtual Juggler 3D.
Juggling computer games can be split in two categories.
First one contains games made as pong remakes, where you operate paddle and try to bounce an incoming ball. In juggling games, paddle is replaced with player holding different kind of items (balls, clubs, chainsaws etc.), and bouncing is replaced by catching and throwing. The throwing quasi physics are used but whole gameplay looks almost the same as in classic pong game. The examples are Virtual Juggler 3D and flash games like Juggler, Fire Juggler, Juggle Challenge Game, Juggle or Juggle Mania.
Second one contains games based on proper timing when you must press buttons to catch or throw balls at specified moment. Probably the most known is Juggling which is also available on Facebook. Left and right buttons are used to catch balls with left or right hand. On the other hand, the most advanced example we have found is Juggling Simulator Game which allows player to make 2 different types of throws (vertical and diagonal).
There are also games based on other rules. In Juggling Hero player has to throw ball (or balls) over the wall. In Jojo's Juggling Jumble he has to add balls while juggling.
Juggling Puppies is a great example of game with interesting (but hard to learn) control. Juggler's hand is controlled with mouse. Items are held or released by pressing or releasing mouse button.
All juggling games available on the internet are based on very simple rules and gameplay rarely looks like real juggling. Mostly it's chaotic items throwing, sometimes ordered passing from hand to hand. Only in Juggling Simulator Game player can get familiar with couple of simple patterns known to jugglers. Practically there's no game which allows you to simulate even small part of diverse world of juggling tricks.
