http://www.byfernando.com

Also this week a game I’ve been working on with Miguel Ángel Pérez Martínez and Mattias Häggstrom Gerdt was released.

Previously known as Cubesome, Cardboard Box Assembler has just gone live on the Adult Swim Games portal. Give it a spin!

After months of waiting, my first independent game, Dependant, is finally out on the internets.

Play it here, and let me know what you think.

It’s a game about making seamless loops by changing tiles that affect how the characters walk.

Try it out!

I hate starting posts with this but, I’m sorry for the lack of updates. Busy, etc.

This last time I’ve been working on getting Cubesome, now called Cardboard Box Assembler ready for next week’s launch. It involved a lot of endless hard work but now everything’s ready (and my brain is quite wasted). It will go live on march 17th in an awesome site I’ll reveal at launch.

Also, my now forgotten first independent game Dependant is also coming out next week! After a lot of waiting without knowing when the hell it was coming out, my sponsor finally decided to launch it. It will go live on march 15th. Yeah, weird.

In addition, I’m taking vacations and going to Mexico next week. So, everything will happen at once and my head will explode.

So, I leave you with a timelapse of a game jam we had this last weekend. I made a nifty Unity prototype that I may or may not continue working on. And yes, half the video is nothingness, but enjoy the music.

As always, it’s a jam game, a lot of it is hacked away, but a few friends asked me about the trails drawing method I use.

While helping my team, I also worked on a game for Winnipeg’s “So Many Rooms” jam, about making a small game wich would be a part of a larger game that combined them all.

I couldn’t think of anything quite innovative, so I just did a sort of shooter with crazy stuff.

Play “You are not dreaming, messenger” by clicking the image, or here, and when it ends keep playing to check out the rest of the entries.

A timelapse should be available soon (when Vimeo encodes it…). UPDATE: Here it is.

You can edit the initial configuration and watch it evolve. The same rules of Life are applied, only a given cell’s amount of neighbors calculation includes the cells in its above and below layer.

I’ve fixed it in a 16x16x16 grid, and it gets quite chaotic easily.

Try it out in different flavors:

I’m quite happy at how quick and straightforward I could get this running, with no knowledge of C# whatsoever.

Click to play

This is my first EGP entry ever after wanting or attempting to make something for the previous ones for a long time. Though there’s a lot more I wanted to do with this one (mostly adding content) I’m quite happy with the result, and I can say the prototype works for what it is. A prototype must answer a question, and I believe I answered my question with the game in its current state. Anything added to it would be just content, not gameplay.

One of the first builds

I made the game, in total,  in about 3 or 4 days, scattered in a couple of weeks of working on it on some afternoons, between other stuff.

The initial question, put in a poetic way was if I could make an “ecosystem that is interesting to watch and interact with, and at the same time draws something beautiful“.
The idea was to make a pseudo autonomous system made of different entities (bugs) with unique behaviors, and each bug would have a sprite (its body) and a brush (as in Photoshop) that draws a color into the screen. The bugs would each move with a unique pattern (e.g. fly following the mouse, walk through a path, fall) and would draw its path.
There would also be relationships: when a bug eats another, it would morph into another bug with another behavior, perhaps a combination of the two.

Fanart by _mindscout when I implemented trees

I managed to get the system working with just a few creatures. Also, some of the creatures crap seeds while walking/flying that create procedurally generated trees/bushes when they touch the ground.

I intentionally made it so that you don’t directly control the bugs. You just influence the system. For example, the flies follow the mouse, but in an erratic and mostly unpredictable manner. You don’t spawn any creature except the flies, wich later spawn the rest of the creatures.

Testing a black & white palette and a path "bleeding" effect. (The background made a huge difference on how the game "feeled")

I guess the hardest part was to make what you drew good-looking without feeling repetitive. To do this I used a lot of controlled randomness in the movements of the creatures, I made a little randomized flood-fill algorithm and a procedural growing tree generator. Also, I made custom brushes for the creatures and limited them to use four different colours in their lines and patterns. After this I found the game looked a lot like this japanese painting.

I found it very interesting to play with the system and tweak it to change the behaviors of the creatures. I’m happy with the end result, but I guess you can’t really “draw” something, and given that there’s so few creatures every time you play it you end up with more or less the same image.

So, if you like it (or not) let me know what you think, and send me some screenshots! (Press S to save a PNG file) I’d love to see what people do with this.