Its not often these days that I post about games I have been playing, usually I leave that sort of stuff in the realms of Twitter or social networks.

For “From Dust” however ill make an exception. It’s also not often these days that I see some tech in a game and wonder to myself “how the hell did they do that?” or just “wow I have never seen that done before”. From Dust made me think both those things this week.

From Dust is a god game that follows in the heels of other god games such as Populus and Black and White. The reason why it has attracted my attention so much is the incredible tech that the game employs.

Check out this tech-demo / trailer for the game:

When I watched that earlier in the week I was amazed but skeptical that everything shown was actually how it was in game. After downloading and playing it on xbox this week however I can confirm that everything shown in the above video is in game and more. Not only that its actually fun!

The water flows from the top of the mountains realistically, over time it erodes the landscape to form rivers. Water pressure builds up need harder rock causing bends in the river that threaten your villages. You have to think ahead about how to divert a river one way but making sure not to flood an area downstream. More often than not it takes several tries to get it right.

Lava is great. Several missions have volcanoes that you must be swift to tame else they can easily threaten your villages. The great this however is that there are many ways you can choose to solve a particular problem.

You could just manually suck up all the lava and drop it somewhere else, a somewhat temporary solution. You could try to build a channel for the lava to follow however lava has a habit of melting through any channels you build. You could use one of the spells your villagers to supply to aid you. You could divert the course of a river to cool the lava as it nears your village. You could use a “water tree” to cool the oncoming flow of magma. The choice is yours.

I have been pondering over the tech and thinking how they managed to get such a complex liquid simulation to run in realtime. Infact, how they managed to get several complex liquid simulations to run in realtime. The sand, the water, the lava and the rock all act as liquids with different properties, however they all interact with each other in different ways. Not only is the liquid tech impressive, the vegetation propagation and the fire mechanics are all seamless, and from what I could tell not a single frame was dropped.

It must be a GPU based liquid simulation (particularly as the xbox CPU is weak), however I didn’t think they were good enough to do something like this. Perhaps they are using some optimized Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics such as that employed by Fairlight from the scene: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

Anyways, the game is available for download right now on xbox or if you are like me and are pc-inclined then it should be available on PC from the 17th of August.

Okay well its not quite complete, the waves of enemies could do with some more work but I have my mum coming up from London to visit me in 30 mins so im gonna call it quits here.

So, finally it has a name, I have called it “48 Hours Later” Its not technically true as I have only had 40 hours to do it, but oh well!

Overall im pretty happy with my first Ludum Dare entry, im very tired right now and have a banging headache, but thats all part of the fun right?

So onto the game. First some shots:

Okay so if you have been following waaaay back my original intention was to make a game with the same sort of art style as World of Goo but with the game mechanics of Boom Stick. I think I have stayed pretty true to that original idea.

Basically you fight against waves of enemies that float across the screen. There are currently only 10 waves, I would have liked more and with more variety but oh well

The theme of the competition was “Enemies as Weapons”. I have incorporated that theme by having the enemies drop giblets when they die. You then have a certain amount of time to pick up those giblets and fire them back at the enemies. Enemies as weapons!

So as a disclaimer: im sure the game has many bugs and things, I have run out of time to do much in the way of testing and optimising. If you find any bugs however drop a comment I would love to hear about them as I plan to release this to a few flash portals, so would like to get those bugs fixed

Anyways enough jibber jabber. A few more shots then the game is below:

EDIT: I have now made a youtube gameplay video and timelapse of development, check em here.

Tools Used:
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Flash Builder 4
Adobe Flash CS5
SFXR
Chronolapse

The theme for the competition is “Enemies as Weapons” which is actually a better theme than what I was expecting “Technology in the wrong time period”. I havent got an idea yet but im sure something will come to me

Anyways, here is where all the magic will be happeneing over the next 48 hours:

I have ChronoLapse setup to capture a screenshot every 60 seconds so hopefully we will get a nice video at the end showing my progress (or lack of ).

I will be updating at regular intervals throughout, mainly to break up the dev process a little as 48hours is a long time!

Wish me luck!

Dont think I have blogged about this yet, so im doing so now.

Im planning on entering the 18th Ludum Dare compo, starting this sat. This will be my very first entry and im quite excited!

For those not in the know the Ludum Dare competition is a competition for Indie Games Developers. You have 48 to make a game (practically) from scratch. Its a solo competition so I cant call in my partner in crime olip.co.uk to do the artwork for me.

Rules are as follows:

The themes for this edition of the compo are currently being voted on here.

I doubt I will be able to come up with much in the 48 hour limit, but im hoping to get at least something remotely playable!

I cant believe I haven’t talked about this yet.

I spoke about 6 months ago about joining a new startup called Playdemic as the Lead Flash Developer. I couldn’t say much at the time as we were in stealth mode. As our first product has been out for about a month however, I think its about time I wrote a blog post on the subject.

Gourmet Ranch is Flash game for face book that follows closely on the heels of the other Facebook game successes such as Farmville and Cafeworld. The premise is simple, you grow crops and animals in your fields and then when the time comes you harvest them and use them to bake recipes. Those recipes are then served to your waiting customers by your waiters.

As the lead flash dev on the project its my responsibility to code all the engine and game play elements. Despite my several years worth of experience with flash games this was a challenging project . Making a game that is a multiplayer game but not a multiplayer game (no client pushing) is definately not for the feint of heart.

Despite the challenges and the occasional heated moment during development I think the product we have produced is excellent and is superior to many of the similar games available on Facebook. The stats for the first month of the game are impressive as can be seen from the data gleamed from AppData.

The main challenge now is to continue the early growth we have seen and retain the existing users we have won. So that means players of the game should be looking forward to regular updates with new content and bug fixing

Anyways if you wanna check it out head over to facebook –> http://apps.facebook.com/gourmetranch/

I used to spend hours and hours playing the custom maps released with Warcraft III, I still log in every now and then to check out how its going and am suprised every time to see people still making new maps. Some of the most popular game genres in existence today wouldn’t be around if it wasnt thanks to be map making community in WC3. Genres such as Tower Defence (TD) and Defence of The Ancients (DOTA) were born there.

So it made me extremely happy to see this video on YouTube showing that yes custom maps are possible in SC2 and yes you can make TDs with them, horaay!

This is my first post of what I suspect will be many on the subject of SWFt.

What is SWFt I hear you cry? Well in a nut shell SWFt is an Entity-Component based game framework powered by Dependency Injection. Still confused? Well basically its a really nice neat method for making flash games. Still interested? Read on!

First the history, if you arent interested in this then just skip on down to “What exactly is it?”

History

It started off as an idea I had while playing around with some RobotLegs code. For those not in the know, RobotLegs (RL) is an awsome Inversion of Control (IoC) or Dependency Injection (DI) MVCS framework for making Rich Internet Applications (I wrote a post on it here). IoC and DI were new concepts to me and I was fascinated and excited by the power that they had especially when couppled with something like AS3 Signals.

At the time of this discovery I was working on a game that used Push Button Engine (PBE) and Mate as the basis for development. Feeling dissatisfied with PBE and Mate I wondered if there was a way I could take all the cool things I was playing around with RobotLegs and apply them to some of the cool aspects of PBE.

The first thing I did was to check to see if anyone else has had the idea of using DI in a component based game engine. It looked like it hasnt been done in AS3 but it looks like it has already been thought about and documented in Java. There has been a paper written about it here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1658866.1658872, I managed to get my greasy mitts on it and enjoyed the read however I think there was definitely room for improvement in AS3.

The next thing was to seek advice on whether it could even be done in RL. I decided that I should go straight to the source and I emailed one of the contributors to the RL project, Stray. It turns out stray is a very nice lady who is also from the north of the UK. She had some good words of advice but she recommendation that I repost my question to the RL mailing list where the other contributors to the project tend to lurk.

So I wrote up my query and posted it. I added in some diagrams of how I thought it may look:

To cut a long story short, after several months of posts back and forth with many excellent suggestions and contributions I felt it was time that the project migrated to its own home as not spam up the RL list too much. As such SWft – Game Framework mailing list was born! Its still very new and as such there arent many posts yet but I hope for that to grow as the project progresses.

We also have a website: http://www.swft.co.uk but its meerly a holding page for now.

What exactly is it?

Okay so I promised I would talk about what SWFt actually is. Well without going into too much detail (more posts will follow that will flesh out examples etc) SWFt lets you make AS3 Flash games in a modular component based fashion like you do with Push Button Engine but it lets you keep the strict-type, compile-time checked game structure like you may find in Flixel or Flash Punk.

Its still very alpha and has alot more work left to do on it but you can follow progress on our GitHub page here: http://github.com/mikecann/Swft and some examples can also be found here: http://github.com/mikecann/Swift-Examples (the red-blue circle experiment is currently broken)

As I say, its still very early days, but I have been wanting to blog about it for a while as its a very exciting project im currently working on

Contributions

If you are interested in contributing code or thoughts or anything then shoot a message on the mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework

Expect more posts in the coming weeks!

Its Oliver and my latest game. It was supposed to be a quick re-skin of BlastWave, but as usual “quick” was a word that got lost during development as we got excited about it and decided to add more and more features.

The Art by Oliver Pitceathly follows a simmilar style to MonkeyMines. Hope you like it!

Stumbled across this game this morning and was blown away by the beauty and complexity of the game, I dont want to think about the amount of code that must of gone into making this beast!

Play Here

My partner in crime Oliver P has just  released a little game. Its catered for a very specific, yet popular, crowd. Yes yes its a dress up game, but it has very nice graphics so I think its definately worth a mention