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The lost sprites

Pixel artists, I need your abandoned art!

In 2014 I made a game about a broken arcade machine. I am planning to release an extended version of the game and am looking for abandoned pixel artwork to include. This might sound weird - but please let me explain it to you…

Ridiculous Glitching is a hell-spawn derived from the Flappy Jam challenge to “make a hard, almost unplayable game,” and damn if it doesn’t live up to the challenge

Brian from N3rdabl3

The Flappy Jam was initiated in 2014 after the creator of Flappy Bird received a lot of hate for his mobile hit Flappy Bird. Part of the outrage was due to the fact that he was successful with such a simple kind of game but he was further accused of having used stolen artwork (which I don’t think is actually true).

Trying to live up to the premise of making a hard ass rage-quit game not only by mechanic I became inspired by the infamous Pacman kill screen bug. This bug made the game unbeatable once you reached level 256.

I personally really love glitch aesthetics but maybe that is because I am extremely fascinated by the idea of entities inside computers imagined in movies like Tron or books like Otherland. The glitch is an anomaly and beyond it lies an unexplored land

This lead to Ridiculous Glitching being a game gone rogue after experiencing a hardware bug releasing it from the chains of determination set by its creator. From now on its only purpose is to try to punish the player for the humiliation it had to endure while being trapped in its (un)original game loop. Watch game trailer here. Its goal is to hurt the player with every dirty trick in the collective memory of all arcade games. It is glitching perspectives, bending known rules or surprising with sudden gravitational changes.

Ridiculous Glitching uses the established flapping mechanic but adds some variety by offering the player choices navigating through the world. It also features power-ups/downs and local multiplayer up to 4 players. Here is a chart with all the current gameplay elements

When the game was released on itch.io it received some interesting reviews and found a small but engaged audience - some of which recorded their failings.

Strangely enough I still enjoy playing the game after all this time and therefore started to work some more on it to release it for mobile platforms. The game already runs nicely on phones and it seems to be a good fit for touch controls.

That’s where the abandoned art comes into play. I could imagine using those neglected sprites in the game to help them get revenge for their years of deprivation.

Let them be a part of Ridiculous Glitching & fulfill their destiny by being hurtful to players. Please.

If you are interested, please contact me.

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Started working on the mobile version for Ridiculous Glitching again.

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No (Hu)Man’s Yard For the Civic Jam last weekend my friend Luca and me worked together on a game we jokingly called “No Man’s Yard”. We had to name the game only an hour into the 8 hour game jam. Allthough we strarted with this very referential name our idea was quite different from the premise of the heavily referenced title. The civic jam was conceived as an event to bring together game developers and activists. The idea is to have a series of game jams which cover the topics nature, human & machine. The theme of this first jam was nature. As much as I like the idea of games being able to adress serious topics and therefore maybe even having a social impact I felt that this premise was a bit overwhelming considering the 8 hour time limit. To make things worse we could not imagine to create a game mechanic which wasn’t just trying to educate the player based on some eco good or bad decisions reducing the game to basically a quiz with a quantifiable result. Apart from that Luca and me didn’t want to stress out ourselfs too much during the jam (it was also the weekend of the slow jam!!). We wanted to talk about the importance of our only home - earth - in a purely emotional way. I am pretty positive that the climate change denying Trump administrations actions as of late have played a big role in the forming of this idea. No Human’s Yard is based on the premise that there is no earth anymore and it does not matter why. Your home is gone and you are drifting through the universe. You are placed on one of the infinite planets in this Universe.

You need to decide which one to make your new home or keep traveling forever. If you decided to move on to the next planet there is no going back. If you did not stay you have lost this home forever. That’s it. There is nothing to do but to wander around or move on.

Clicking the left mouse button places you on the next planet. Just before you leave the game takes a hires photo and places it in the game folder. You can try the builds here: OSX Win Please post photos of the worlds you have lost and tell me @firepunchd

Simon

P.s. Allthough I find some of the worlds fairly beautiful they are dead of course. Devoid of companions and life. When I played and took some photos something stranged happened. The search for a new home accelerated. The more planets I’ve seen the quicker I moved on to see the next one which might be nicer or more beautiful. Finding a place became less probable. I became more homeless.

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No Man’s Yard

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Gameplay video of Grow - a game made by my 8 year old son and me in 8 hours

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Grow - a game I made with my 8 year old son

I have already made some games with my oldest son who is now 13. But yesterday I wanted to go to the jam with Felix. I had talked about taking him to a game jam for quite some time and yesterday was the day.

Felix has made all the pixelart plants and had the idea about making a planting & growing game. I am quite happy with the result - especially with the fact that we made a non violent game.

In Grow you wake up on a barren island. Some plants are growing but otherwise there is not much to see. When you approach the adult plants you get seeds. Use these to grow more plants and turn the island into a beautiful place to live again. Rumours are there might be a wizard somewhere but so far no one has seen him yet.

Download Windows version

Plants & Art Felix

Music Chris Manthey @calinedmusic

Code & more Me

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Made a short video documenting the game jam process

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Day of the tentacles

This weekend some folks from the Berlin Saftladen Indie Collective and friends jammed with the HTC Vive/Steam VR. Apart from it being incredibly inspiring I was amazed at how fun simple interactions in VR can be. Our team (there were two teams with different ideas) formed around the idea of an “Extreme Boule” game which quickly turned into a giant tentacled monster wrecking havoc in a city. Don’t ask how this happened but I am super happy we stuck with that. The monster is supposed to be just a nice lovesick bloke (see story above) not trying to hurt anyone but everyone had too much fun abusing their power.

Seeing people moving in your VR world, smiling & laughing was one of the best gamedev experiences I had. Thanks so much to the organizers and the teams.

The team that made My Pants, WTF:

@MrLucaGames @RafalFedro @viciousonic  @riadd @doppeltim @firepunchd

DOWNLOAD the jam version for SteamVR

Some vines of people playing

https://vine.co/v/5ug7WX6BPZt https://vine.co/v/5ug7WX6BPZt

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Download a build here https://www.dropbox.com/s/g240mzz8g5pwty3/ToyIncVR_runtime.zip?dl=0

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Just practicing pixelart to add more characters to #ChickenJump

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Remote controlling an electronic toy assembly line with a rewired stereo amp?

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Let this one settle for a while until I had an idea that changed a lot. #Blockocalypse 

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Chicken Jump now has a website.Yea!

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Jump like a chicken – lessons learnt building jumping pad controllers

In February I published an early version of the game Chicken Jump on Game Jolt. The prototype was built in 8 hours at the Berlin Mini Jam in Unity. For those who don’t know about the game I’d like to quote from a review to explain the game:

In Chicken Jump things are very simple and complicated at the same time. Each player that joins in the fun is given only one key that makes his or her character jump. The goal is simple, jump at the right time to avoid being smashed to pieces by oncoming traffic and be the last one to make it out alive. And also survive the biggest number of waves, duh! Alexandru Chirila

Having set the game free out in the wild I was very eager for feedback from the players. When one guy told me he had played the game with colleagues using dance pads and “we had a blast” I got very interested in doing something alike.

The first thing to do was to implement an invert controls switch. In the game you press to make your character jump but if you physically jump you probably want your avatar to jump when you jump and not when you land. The guy on Game Jolt had hacked the input using GlovePie and some scripting but I just added a switch in the settings. Done.

The cheapest way out

Trying to get away with the least amount of work for the setup I started to experiment with a Wiimote as the input device. I taped the Wiimote around my kids feet, hip and chest and visually tracked the accelerometer output. The results were disheartening. Every kid had a totally different curve which mainly had to do with the windup part of the jump. Jumping has 4 parts: windup, jump, descent & landing. The windup is the first part ,the going down/bending knees to flex up for the actual jump. I couldn’t distinguish between windup and jump and sometimes, depending on the location of the Wiimote on the body, not even between the jump and the descent because one of my kids would wiggle his leg at his highest point in air. Even if there would have been a way to implement a better filtering for the movement this wouldn’t have worked for the game.

The jumping game mechanic

In Chicken Jump the player jump action sets a fixed upwards velocity on the player physics object to make the character jump. If the player keeps the jump button pressed, the gravity reduces the speed until the rigidbody starts to fall back to the ground. If the player releases within a certain time, the upwards movement is stopped (actually reduced & inverted) so you can control jump length for later faster waves when have to be able to reduce your air time. Another benefit of this is that you actually have to jump higher / stay in air longer in order to make the character jump higher turning the game into a very sweaty experience.

So if a controller transmitted only one frame of false input, the whole experience would suffer really badly. The player would jump too early or wouldn’t jump high enough. Super frustrating.

But I didn’t want to use dance pads either. It requires some feedback when jumping/landing and on dance pads you don’t really know exactly where you are standing.

And I couldn’t come up with a more mechanical solution with springs because this seemed too complicated and not suited for different weights and heavy use.

Handicraft prototyping

As I looked around in the attic I found an aluminum covered insulation sheet which seemed like a good base for a circuit/switch based setup. I also bought some thin bendable metal sheet for the upper part of the switch where the player will be standing on. The two metal plates/contacts were kept apart with plastic foam slices on the sides and some spots in the middle. The spots in the middle prevent the circuit/ contacts from being closed when without pressure.

Makey Breaky

Connecting the pad to the computer was a different thing. My hopes to be able to use a makey makey were crushed quickly. The Makey Makey data was very random. It seemed that the big metal surfaces were messing up the sensors. I think that someone other than me could have modified the firmware sketch for the Makey Makey Arduino board. I didn’t feel like going that route though.

Loss of control

I went to a store and bought the cheapest game controller I could find. It was a SNES like USB controller which I disassembled. Unfortunately the circuitry was super compact and I had a hard time soldering some cables to the very small areas available. The soldered cables would already break when little force was applied so I used a hot glue gun and enclosed everything in a big blob of glue. I only needed four buttons for the first 4 player prototype and that’s all I could get out of the first controller. It is hard to tell if a controller is usable before you disassemble it. To make the setup more versatile and to have week points if somebody stumbled into my stuff I soldered cables with crocodile connectors to the joypad so there were no fixed connections.

But finally I could test the setup with my 7 year old and the result was encouraging.

Mass production

Preparing for Talk & Play, a bimonthly game event in Berlin, I wanted to “mass” produce 4 pads. Using the metal sheets was too expensive and the result too heavy. Medium-density fibreboard (MDF) coated with some “metal coated foam” material from a roll seemed the better solution.

The Good: These first production pads were perfect when used for the first time. Top part was elastic enough to take all kinds of weights without braking (only high heels hurt the pads very much) and did respond to press and release quickly enough. The pads lasted several days of showcase at A MAZE and Talk & Play.

The Bad: Foam was only fixed to the metal with double sided duct tape and started to fall off on some places but that wasn’t anything major since loads of duct tape around the pads held them together.

The Ugly: The cheaper foam rolls metal coating was disintegrating from the jumping pressure since it was super thin. I needed to replace these for the next events.

Version 2.0

For Join, the local multiplayer summit in August I decided to provide 8 player jumping support. The DIY controller adapter only allowed for 4 players and so I looked for some alternatives. Buying other standard controllers was risky because I couldn’t know for sure if they would provide a spacier layout for easy soldering.

A Canadian tinkerer was selling a 12 buttons 4 directions USB board identifying itself as a HID device on Windows. It was especially made with noob soldering in mind and so I ordered some of these.

Fixing the brittling metal coating required to disassemble the old pads, remove the unsuited material and replace it with something new. I choose to use the same material as I used for the base plus the MDF wood on top.

I also didn’t want to use double sided tape anymore to glue the stuff together because it was tedious to use and not very reliable. I first tried some super industrial glue which stank and was supposed to be very poisonous. But when that ran out I bought Pattex glue which was supposed to be dissolving the plastic foam but actually was much better at the job than the professional plaster. 

Better but worse

I wanted to test the new pads before Join and was asked to bring the game to the Game Creators Summer Party which I happily did. I takes a nice amount of space to setup 8 pads with enough surrounding for the players to jump and wiggle their arms and you also need a projector so everyone can distinguish themselves. But the venue was perfect for that and I could set up everything just fine.

Having reinforced the top part and increased the plastic foam in between posed some problems though. Before, the top was thinner and more elastic allowing kids and adults to play. Now the more sturdy setup made it harder for kids to register the contact due to their smaller weight. Also when a person jumped the going down/windup part of the movement would sometimes register as a release because the stiffer material does reset quicker to its original flat pose and the added foam would even help with that.

The solution to that is fairly easy. Remove as much foam in the middle so that the surfaces can never touch without some pressure.

A little girl was even hanging around the game the whole evening although there were many other games to play.

I was happy.

I very much enjoyed tinkering with these different materials and especially liked improvising with things I can just find at my place. Interestingly the very first prototype was probably the best solution and more planned approaches seemed to need more adjustment.

Building custom controllers for the game was a lot of fun and seemed to resonate well with the players. I’ll keep tinkering with that some more.

!!!!!!!!!UPDATE!!!!!!!!!

Stuff breaks easy!

3 days of kids punishing the controllers when showcasing the game at Gamecity in Nottingham required a new approach. A metal mesh replaces the aluminum sheeting giving the pads a Mad Max vibe. Ready for post apocalypse jumping now.

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Every pixel is sacred on a 40x16 display. You have to make every pixel count. And those pixels sure are big - approx 10 cm. In total this adds up to a display of 3,2m x 1,2m in size. It was was made by jaseg from c-base in Berlin and we really wanted to make games for it.

The coolest meetup place in the world The monthly Unity group meetup in Berlin is held at c-base, a spacestation which has crashed millions of years ago and is slowly excavated and populated by the members of the c-base archeological society. How's that for a unity group meetup place? This derelict space station is accidently also one of the oldest hackerspaces (1995) in the world and home of the display called matelight. The first time I saw the display I wanted to make games for it because it is the ultimate retro hack. And I wasn't alone.

Technical setup The matelight consists of a 40x16 array of mate-tea bottles which have RGB leds inside. The bottles are in crates in groups of 5x4. You can send UDP packets to the computer controlling the leds using the custom protocol called CRAP and use it as a display for a very lowfi game. More on the project gitub. The setup in unity was not very complicated. Have the main orthographics camera point to the scene and render to a 40x16 render texture. Copy the image data to a regular texture. Use readpixels to get the image data, reformat to the crap protocol and send the binary array via UDP to the matelight. Because we had our scene prepared before we had the setup running on the matelight within less than 15 minutes.

Game jamming with the matelight I don't know exactly what makes the display so cool but using it to output realtime action is super awesome. First of all, there is no noticeable lag via Wifi. We were concerned about this when we planned the game jam but controls are very immediate and responsive. The resolution poses some constraints on games of course, but people have been making low res games since the beginning. Just think about Game & Watch games and their simple gameplay. One factor why the display is so beautiful is the color. We could change the RGB leds during runtime with the color picker and bathe the room in the light we wanted. The display can probably handle data up to 50 fps but we were happy with 30 fps for the controls to feel responsive and direct. This is has probably to do with the biggest challenge in making a game for the matelight...

...the sheer size of the display. One 2 player game had the players positioned on each side of the screen - basically 3 meters apart from each other. Physically sitting in front of the display only 3 meters away, the fast paced action of this game made it impossible to track the other players actions on the far side of the screen. 

So coming up with a game for a huge screen with big dots due to the low resolution will be a challenge.

Next times If we come up with nice games we would like to install them on a device at the c-base for other people to play. Ideally an oyua with 4 controllers (low price) could run an android app which serves as a launcher for the games we will make.

The matelight has strange captivating qualities. Huge, colorful, direct, raw, minimalistic, retro, physical etc. Everyone participating was very taken by the matelight and we will continue to have jams using it. Please join us. We'll be back.

Thx to Giles, Luca for jamming with me and especially jaseg and c-base for building this thing.

I uploaded the demo project which you can use to tinker a bit with the matelight without needing the real deal. If you make a game with the demo you only need to change one boolean to have it run on the matelight at c-base. 

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Chicken Jump at A MAZE 2015. Had so much fun watching people play and laugh

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Chicken Jump Youtube playlist

I created a playlist where you can find mostly all the Chicken Jump let’s plays on Youtube. Some are really hilarious. One group uses it for their drinking game, Kira Komrad gets insultet by her sock friend puppet and an asian guy tries to play all 8 players at the same time. I do love all of them.