I realized today that I have applied approach 1 too much in game design. I must apply approach 2 more!

Hit read more to see a lovely graph that hopefully explains what I mean…

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Here follows a couple of videos I posted on my youtube channel from the development of Cobalt v121 Alpha. Some of them showcase interesting bugs, other show off new features! Read the descriptions to find out more!

Hit the jump to watch them!

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Hi again! The last update was some time ago now, too long in fact! This is not a post to announce a new update, but to give some insight into what is going on.

Hit the jump for the full read.

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In this post I will talk about:

• Adventure mode!
• Item Comparison

Hit the jump for the full read!

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Hi! In this post I will be musing on the following topics:

• Metalface hull types and equipment
• Map competition
• Adventure art

Hit the jump for the full read!

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Hi! In this post I will be musing on the following topics:

• The last couple updates
• A new reload related feature
• Outdoor climate colors
• A community lead map making contest

Hit the jump for the full read!

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Hi everyone!

As some of you may know, many in Mojang and the whole lot of them Oxeye went to GDC/IGF this year. For me (thewreck) it was mostly to visit enchanting San Francisco and meet (hug) other developers, while for others – like notch who had speaking obligations – things were a bit less casual. Even while engorging myself in all the casual fun I managed to fit a bunch of work on Cobalt, alas I managed to catch the flu and was knocked out for the better part of the weekend following gdc.

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Happy new year everybody!

As you already know, Oxeye is run more or less like a hobby, so things get done in the order they are fun and we have energy and time to make them. That means we’ve accumulated a lot of unfinished projects (because finishing projects is not as fun as starting them), so I’ll begin this year with a small list of stuff that aren’t “done” yet, and what our “plans” for them are.

• The Harvest 1.17/1.18 Patch – I still intend to finish and release this patch, but unfortunately the Mac OS X version just keeps crashing on me. I’ve spent a whole weekend cursing at xcode to no avail, and I’m not looking forward to wasting another weekend on the same problem. You could say that I’m waiting for some kind of divine intervention, and who can tell when that is going to happen…
  Also, I want to add more features to this patch before I release it. I realized that it would probably be possible to allow mods for other game modes than creative, as long as I make sure that all “cheating” methods are disabled. That would be quite nice, since it would allow people to make user interface mods and so on.
• Harvest Lua Documentation – I started moving our forum documentation into our Oxeye wiki, but that quickly became really boring, so it’s also unfinished. I’m not really planning to finish it anytime soon, but I’ll make sure that whenever I change or add stuff to the mod system, the documentation on the wiki will be up to date.
• jeb <3 RTS – The RTS Design article series I did (over a year ago now) is also unfinished. I think the reason I stopped working on it was because I had already written my most important points, and the remaining articles were derailing a little too much. I also got some critisism that my articles were too Starcraft’y, so I need to take one step back and look at the subject in a more general way.
• thewreck’s Retrospective – I’m not the only one here who isn’t finishing projects Daniel Brynolf, who is better known as thewreck, has made a lot of small games in MMF over the years, and was writing an article series about them. The first article is here, http://www.oxeyegames.com/thewreck-in-retrospect-part-1/, but the second one is still a draft in our wordpress backend. Pontus (Kinten) even wagered 500 kr (roughly $60) that thewreck would never write the second article. He said, “the money is safe with me,” and so far it looks like he’s right.

So there it is. I’ll make a new year promise that during 2010, we’ll start more projects that we won’t finish!

/jeb

During the early years of thewreck’s life (yes I know I’m speaking of myself in third person!), he spent most of his time either making games or playing them.

It all stared a time long ago, in the age of the Amstrad. His father had just sold the tape-version in favor of a diskette version! Oh the joy of basic 1.0 – Many text adventures and fake operating systems later thewreck felt ready to take on his first sprites – and on what system you ask?

On the Atari of course! This is where he made his first acquaintance with Clickteam through their game making environment STOS. It came complete with a lovely scripting language and a sprite editor! In it he made many feeble attempts including the legendary ninja game where the shuriken was on the same sprite as the character (what was he thinking really?)…

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All of us have different ways of maintaining the glamourous life of independent game development, such as part-time jobs or standing at the corner friday nights. thewreck’s method is to study “Interaction Design” in Malmö. Every now and then, they make installments that are intended to make people interact with other people, as well as with the installments themselves.

The most recent mischief they’ve made is a “LED door sign,” which could be changed by various switches, placed on the toilet doors at a night club in Malmö. They recorded the event with a camera, and it’s quite fun to see people reactions when the “lady’s room” and “men’s room” signs switch places.

You can read more about the project on this link, or follow the jump to see one of the clips. Noteable highlight: the guy in the beginning (testing the signs) is thewreck!

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