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Daft Punk

My low-res pixelart tribute to the visionary duo

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God of War pixelart demake platformer scene

What would God of War look like if it was an early 90s platformer?

I drew a demake scene to find out!

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80s low fantasy title screen study

I got into a low fantasy retrogaming mood, so with inspiration from Manilla Road and Visigoth songs I decided to draw a title screen for an imaginary 80s game.

The resolution is 128x72. For the first one I did not restrict myself on the color palette, just used what looked better. 

As an exercise in coloring and palettes I then redid the coloring using palettes from different systems of the time to get a more authentic feeling.

                                                 The EGA rendition

                                        The Commodore 64 rendition

                                  and finally the Spectrum ZX rendition

I had great fun drawing this and the palette exercise produced very interesting results.

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New Avatar

I drew my new avatar today. I think I like it. I ll keep it for now, see how it goes.

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Pixelart fantasy medieval swords 32x32

I drew a bunch of medieval fantasy pixelart swords. The sprites and aseprite file can be downloaded from:

https://mastorak.itch.io/pixelart-swords-32x32

You are free to use all sprites in any way you want for personal or commercial projects.

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Asset pack for Awesome Space Delivery Company available for free on itch.io

I just uploaded a pack containing tiles, tiling backgrounds and decorations for all 4 worlds of the game to itch.io.

You can use the assets in any way you want for personal or commercial projects.

You can download the pack from itchio here

Have fun!

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Awesome Space Delivery Company is now free!

No ads, no microtransactions, no monetization whatsoever. Just pure space delivery fun! Why ? Why not? 

Download it now from the Google Play Store

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Cloud city duel in pixelart

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Dracarys in pixelart

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Castle Black in pixelart

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Cave Empire gameplay - Github Game Off 2018 game jam

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Working on my pixelart skills

Recently I started working on my pixelart skills. It is so much fun!

Just drawing for the sake of drawing, instead of drawing for a specific project, is weirdly liberating.

Everyone learning to draw should start with a fruit bowl no matter the medium

A bunch of swords

My Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu

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Cave Empire -GitHub Game Off 2018 entry

GitHub Game Off is a game jam that promotes open source gamedev. I took part in this year’s jam with Cave Empire, a side scrolling RTS game. Out of 330 entries it came our 14th. I am very happy about it as this was my first jam. More info on the jam and full results are available here.

Cave Empire combines the classic RTS gameplay with a sidescrolling   2d view. Gather resources, construct buildings and train your units to wage 2d war against the pixelated evil invaders.

The full source code is available in here

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Awesome Space Delivery Company has been released

Awesome Space Delivery Company has finally been released! It is now available in the Google Play Store.

After a final multi-month push to get all the art sorted out and fix any remaining issues the game is finally complete.

I am very happy with the end result and I am thrilled that I now have published it. This started as an experiment and, now that it is finished, I must say that I really enjoyed the ride. I learned a lot along the way. I hope that you will enjoy the game as well!

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Complete graphical overhaul

I have started working on a complete graphical overhaul. I am drawing everything from scratch for a new art style I am testing out. I really like pixelart but I would like to try a clean cartoony style and see what works better. Hey, I am experimenting here. Anything goes. I have been mostly working on the new assets for the 1st world and some basic UI elements with more soon to follow.

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Deliveries around the galaxy

Awesome Space Delivery Company features 4 different worlds that the player can make deliveries to. Each has a distinct look and feel and increasingly challenging gameplay. Over the course of the game the player can unlock them and jump to them at any point.

First world is Walnut Groovy, home to fundamentalist space hippies. Easiest of the four, this world doesn’t have any hostile presence. A good starting point for any space delivery boy.

Second world is Dumbooine, a desert planet with windy conditions. Things start to get more difficult here with some hostile presence and winds that make flying the ship more challenging.

Third world is Amazonia. A lush green planet that the local government has decided to sell to intergalactic corporations to create all-inclusive hotels. People do not take that kindly. Expect trouble.

Fourth Planet is Capitalismia, a planet run by bankers and intergalactic corporations. The hardest of the planets with threats in every corner.

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Cross platform leaderboard server

Both major mobile platforms Android and iOS offer services and APIs specifically geared towards game development. They support features such as leaderboards, achievements and networking so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They have a problem however. They lock you in their platform. What if you want to have a cross platform leaderboard? The only solution is to roll your own.

That is what I decided to do. I wrote a simple leaderboard server to suit my needs without the overhead of using a fenced platform-specific game ecosystem. I based my decision to do so on three factors:

I wanted users from different platforms to be able to compete with each other

I did not want to support two separate leaderboard subsystems.

I wanted to have my own custom leaderboard filters. Such as daily, national or global.

I based the server on google app engine. The reason was that I did not want to have the overhead and cost of maintaining my own server just for storing and retrieving game score records. Google cloud is free for the use I want it to. You need to pay only if you exceed certain db read/write, storage and computation quotas. Should a game prove so popular that it exceed the free usage quota of google cloud, the low cost  of the service would be easily covered by the game profits.

I have released an open source version of the server on github that you can you modify to create you own leaderboard server. Just make sure to provide your own security mechanism for the services. In the open version I provide some skeletal servlets to use the score record dao, but of course you can hook it to your own web services.

You can find the git repository here.