Fruit Dating - upcoming puzzle game

 One more post today. Beside Shards I am also working on another game. The name is Fruit Dating and my role in the project is programmer. Bellow you can see some screenshots from the game. Very nice and neat graphics is work of Tomáš Kopecký from LittleColor.com.

 The game is logical puzzle and target platforms are Android, bada and new Linux based OS Tizen. The screenshots are taken from working desktop Windows version (through OpenGL ES emulation libraries).

 If you ever tried to make puzzle game you will agree that most of the work is in design of puzzles. It is also valid for our game, but thanks to small trick we saved lot of work. The name of this trick is: procedural generation.

 To create interesting puzzles we created generator/editor. It is written in Java and it can not only generate puzzles, but also solve them. The generator is also focused on aesthetic side of puzzle - it tires to generate more or less symmetric walls. With drag and drop features you can adjust positions of fruit and stones and then resolve the level to check whether it is still solvable.

The second part of the tool is editor where we can decorate the level with trees, ...

 The game will be finished this year and we hope you will enjoy it!

Shards - Work In Progress II

 Here comes our second and last work in progress video. The last one as we are almost finished. The game currently runs on Android, bada and even Tizen - new upcoming Linux based mobile OS.

 Compare our progress with previous WIP video here.

 The game uses our own small cross-platform engine. Beside above mentioned mobile platforms it also runs on desktop Windows thanks to OpenGL ES simulation libraries from Imagination Technologies. For physics simulation it uses great Box2D library.

 And yes ...! That great music is also from Shards.

Shards - Work In Progress I

This is short info on our upcoming game - Shards - we are working on. The game will be clone of well known arcade classic with glassy look and very nice fractal backgrounds. The music in video is just a placeholder I found on the web - it sounds to make me sure the sound engine works.

 Making the game we are using these technologies:

• box2D for physics,
• notice the usage of our universal box2D debug draw that works for Open GL ES 1.x and 2.0,
• our cross platform engine -  the video is taken from desktop Windows while the game runs on Android as well,
• PicOpt - our sprite atlas creation tool that is free to download,
• for Android NDK: textures are loaded through this way, while sound (not too much of them in the game presently) is coded like this,
• for ads we plan to utilize our simple ads manager.

Projects history - Part II: Gameboy, Symbian and J2ME(iPhone) times

 In the first part I went thropugh old Atari and DOS projects. It the second part I will describe history of SBC projects for Gameboy, early Symbian phones and also history of one iPhone game that originally was not iPhone at all will be mentioned.

Gameboy

 In 1999 I left PC and started amateur coding for Gameboy. The reason was simple. While stuck in DOS times changed and if I wanted people to play my games I had to switch over to big world of Windows or to find another platform. Gameboy was still platform where single person could make all the job by himself and the code was mostly written in assembler.

 First finished game was Little Fantasy (needs Gameboy emulator). The game was created for GBDev 2000 compo and according to rules it had to be under 32 kb. Into this limited space I pressed small RPG game in Final Fantasy style with 64 screens and big evil boss Skullhead in the end. The game won in game category of the compo:

 In the same year in the end I took part in another compo sponsored by Bung. Bung was producer of specialised  HW used by amateur developers. For this compo I created game Jumpik. The game was really hard to play. Lot of dying for every small mistake:

 The last GB game was Tom Atom. This was first game where appeared Tom Atom and it was also first game we created with Jupiter together. Jupiter is professional grafician. His graphics raised the quality of game by hundreds percents. We formed small team with name SBC (Small Blue Cube). The game itself was about wandering through land, speaking with characters and fighting with monsters. You could find several weapons and had to defeat five bosses. The main one - Dr.Zloun - escaped in the very end after final battle and so the end stayed open:

Symbian

 One of the first real smartphones was Nokia 7650 running Symbian operating system. Now we could make games that more people will play! Our first one was Deadly Abyss. You controlled submarine and launched torpedoes to destroy enemy ships. You had to avoid hitting civil ships and you also had to dodge deadly mines dropped from enemy ships:

 Next Symbian game called Guns'n'Girls. In the wild west you shoot evil guys who appeared in windows of buildings. Your task was to kill only the bad ones. Some of them looked like good ones until gun appeared in their hand:

J2ME (iPhone)

 After long time and after lot of unfinished projects. We started to work on next adventure of Tom Atom. The game called Horror Labs. It was our biggest game so far and there was plenty of other people working on it. Beside Jupiter there were other graficians (Cobold - most of the tiles graphics, Likandro - big part of characters, Tomboid - characters) and it was also our first game that had really great music by Honza Dušek. We also had publisher that provided testers. The game was completely written under J2ME but in the very end it was decided by publisher to release it on iPhone:

 Conclusion

 This second part is closing history review of SBC and pre-SBC projects. All newer projects have their separate articles here on this blog as these are still alive.

Projects history - Part I: Atari and DOS times

 This is first part describing our SBC projects and also my pre-SBC projects. Today I will briefly go through my very old Atari and DOS works.

Atari

 In 1989 we (me and my brother) got our first computer - the great Atari 800 XL. It was not so common to have computer at home in those times. But fortunately my schoolmate Ladislav Salát had also one. We both had the same interests. Not only we played that good old games but we were also curious how things work. Yes, we were young, wild and in short time we were drunken with power of 6502 machine code! Together we created Music Master 5 (can be run in emulator). It was kind of jukebox where under each letter of alphabet was one computer song ripped from some famous Atari game:

 Some time after that I created simple game with name Kosmonauti (can be played in emulator). The game was really very hard to play... Umm, well ... it was unplayable. Graphics was just pile of rips from other games. But it was completely written directly in machine code. Here are some screenshots:

DOS

 In 1993 we got our first PC. It was 386SX machine with 42MB hard drive and 256 color VGA graphics card. For this comp I first created simple logical game Cases (will run ok in DosBox). You controlled small tank like character and your task was to pick up objects in room. The room was all crammed with cases which you could move:

  My next game was named Bloody Revenge (will run ok in DosBox) and it was frenzy action platformer similar to Atari Kosmonauti. With main character you are wandering from left to right through screens and shooting the enemies:

 There was lot of unfinished experiments and my only last finished game was Požár. It was simple game where you controlled with mouse the platform in the bottom of the screen and your task was to catch survivors jumping out of windows in tree village. The characters were taken mostly from old NES games:

 This was first part of my portfolio history describing pre-SBC times. Next part will show you old Gameboy and Symbian projects and Jupiter, the second member of our small team, will appear on the stage! So, stay tuned...