Longtime readers of the blog will know that I’m a big fan of skeletal animation. I wrote Demina because I couldn’t find an existing software package that would let me create animations and export them to a format that would let me get them easily into my games. Better software has finally arrived, and Demina is officially retired. Happy Piggy! will be the last game we ever use it for.
That’s because now Spine is available. It’s almost embarrassing for me to compare Demina and Spine, because they support every single feature I had, and quite a few I hadn’t even considered that I’m already really fond of. Even better, the guys at Esoteric Software have already started releasing code to help people load and render animations in their games.
It took me a couple of days, but I’ve got animations up and running on iOS devices, and I don’t have to keep jumping back to a Windows machine to edit them. (Because Demina only ran on Windows.) I’ve even got transitions working, have a look:
Longtime readers of the blog will know that I’m a big fan of skeletal animation. I wrote Demina because I couldn’t find an existing software package that would let me create animations and export them to a format that would let me get them easily into my games. Better software has finally arrived, and Demina is officially retired. Happy Piggy! will be the last game we ever use it for.
That’s because now Spine is available. It’s almost embarrassing for me to compare Demina and Spine, because they support every single feature I had, and quite a few I hadn’t even considered that I’m already really fond of. Even better, the guys at Esoteric Software have already started releasing code to help people load and render animations in their games.
It took me a couple of days, but I’ve got animations up and running on iOS devices, and I don’t have to keep jumping back to a Windows machine to edit them. (Because Demina only ran on Windows.) I’ve even got transitions working, have a look:
Surprise! We’ve made a new game. This time we’ve tried our hands at making a game for kids. It’s called Happy Piggy!
Happy Piggy! is an educational spelling game for kids, ages 2-5, for iOS devices. Words drop from the top, and the player taps the piggy carrying the next letter to spell the word. If they pick the wrong piggy, he makes an amusing oink and runs off the screen.
My daughter Ellie is three years old now, and she loves playing games on my iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed a regular problem with some of the games I’ve bought for her. If I let her play by herself for a few minutes, she’ll bring it back to me really upset because she’s stuck in a complicated menu or she’s hit a screen selling downloadable content, and ended up back at the App Store trying to enter a password. Some of the games are really pushy with their upselling, even games that aren’t initially free to play.
For Happy Piggy! I made the decision to avoid all of that. The game is 99 cents up front, and there are no in-app purchases available. Some friends have suggested that we might do well financially to add DLC for more word packs (harder words, proper nouns, alternate languages, etc.) but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’ll gladly pass on the opportunity to make a little money to save kids the frustration. For that same reason I didn’t even include a Third Party Ninjas splash screen or a credits screen.
We’ll be uploading it to Apple for review very soon.
Here at Graphite Lab, we have begun to work heavily with Unity 3D game development software. Unity is currently one of the most well-known cross platform game engines. Right now, it supports: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Playstation 3, XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii, and also the Unity Webplayer, a web browser plugin for easily sharing [...]
Ready for the next one? We’ll have a mid-year jam from April 26-28, 2013 at Simutronics. Official registration is not open yet, but you can still indicate interest at the Meetup page. More details will be posted soon!
We’ve launched a brand new website for our friends over at PlayDate Digital. It is a beautiful and simple introduction to the new company. Drop by to meet the team, or just to play with the bubbles in the background! We used some interactive HTML5 animation here to keep the user engaged, and because it [...]
Big post on Gamasutra that is! Our “friend to Game Jam” Sam Coster wrote up a sweet-ass blog about what participating in a Game Jam teaches you and how his Jamming experiences have fed back into making games as part of his company, Butterscotch Shenanigans (one of our sponsors!). READ IT NOW!
In other blog news, Scott has written up an outstanding blog on some of the things he learned making music for this year’s jam. The best part is the imbedded music he made for four of our Jam’s games. READ THAT ONE TOO!
And finally, I wrote up a little piece on my personal site about the game my team made. READ IT IF YOU WANT TO!
Over the weekend of Jan 25-27, 2013 I co-organized and participated in the St. Louis Global Game Jam 2013. See my posts over at http://www.stlgamejam.com for more posts by me. I’m particularly proud of this post: http://www.stlgamejam.com/everyones-a-designer/, which is about what the role of a designer is at a Game Jam.
Our jam site was the 19th biggest in the world, and the 4th largest in the United States. We had 143 registered participants, and created 20 games altogether.
My team consisted of me, Andrew Rauscher, Clayton, Maxwell Oldt, Jordan Covert, and Giovanni Baldi. We team used Sifteo Cubes as the target platform. I bought a set in December, and I’ve been thinking about how having three cubes would make an awesome two player game where each player has a cube and the third cube sits between them as a scoreboard. This was a perfect opportunity to create a game like that and learn a bit of C++, which nobody on the team had ever coded in before the event. It was challenging to move outside of my comfort zone, but it was extremely gratifying to learn what I’m capable of learning and producing in just 48 hours.
The theme of this Game Jam was “sound of a beating heart”, and our team interpreted that as the feeling of being in love. As a result, the game we created is Love Tester 1985. It’s a game that’s meant to be played by lovers/potential lovers. Love Tester 1985 is structured as a series of cooperative mini-games where a pair can only win by communication, knowing each other, and working together.
The game begins by having the players put their cubes together to form a heart. When they do this, the game notices and a heart on the scoreboard lights up. A few seconds later, the first game begins. This gets the players used to interacting with each other using the cubes and gets them in the mood to play cooperatively.
The first mini-game is a question that tests how well the players know each other. Each of the cubes displays “Me” and “You”, but one of the words is upside down so the player has to flip their cube over in order to highlight their answer. For example, if the question is “Who is more ‘experienced’?” one of the players might hold the cube so that it reads “Me”, and the other would hold it so that it reads “You,” and when the players press their cubes together they would win the mini game. The hope is that the couples talk about the results and get to know each other better or playfully fight about the answer.
Next up is a super fun cooperative dexterity mini game. In this mini game the players’ cubes show a different color on each of the four sides and the center cube shows a solid color. The players need to push their cubes together so that the color of the touching edges matches the color of the center cube. When they do this, the color on the center cube changes and they need to quickly rotate their cubes to match again. This is really fast paced and fun! We got this game working on Friday night and immediately knew we were onto something.
Next up is another question round, just like the first game. This is followed by a communication game where each player’s cube has a four-sided shape that they hide from the other player and attempt to explain which edge fits into one of the edges of the other player’s cube without peeking. This is a unique use of the cubes, and an interesting design since it relies on the players willfully hiding information from each other to be fun.
When the players are done with this game, their total score is tallied up and they are given a “Love Tester” like label, such as “Hot Stuff” or “Frigid”.
This is as far as we got during the Game Jam, but ideally we’d like to polish some of these games and make even more mini-games. Thankfully, we might have that opportunity! There’s a contest that I’m using this post to enter, and if we make it to the second round, Andrew and I are going to put some time into making these games even cooler and adding in some of the other mini-game ideas that we liked.
If you happen to have a set of these cubes you can download and install our game right now (it doesn’t play well in the Sifteo cubes simulator):
A big thank you to UMSL and the rest of our sponsors! We had about 130 attendees and made 21 games in one weekend.
The global theme for this year was “the sound of a beating heart”. Until they’re added to this site (probably next week), you can find the games that came out of St. Louis right here:
Worldwide, we blew past every record from last year. From 47 countries to 63 countries. From 10,000 participants to 16,000; and instead of making 2200 games, we made 3000! There were 320 sites around the world, of which the St. Louis location was one of the largest, 19th overall in the world, and fifth largest in the United States!
The facilities at UMSL were fantastic. Everything from WiFi to security went totally smoothly, and everyone on staff was extremely friendly and helpful. We really couldn’t have asked for anything more.
A huge thank you to everyone that helped make the event a success, and we’ll see you all on April 26-28 at Simutronics for the next St. Louis Game Jam!
STLGameDev was created to help collect and centralize all the latest information and events happening in the St. Louis area that focus on game development. You can always find a countdown to the next GameJam, Meetup Details, Contests, and of course an aggregate of local blogs and other feeds. If you should be included on this site just let us know!
KingLord's Blog
Daniel Eichling
Agile video game software development leader with strong interests in gamification, production methodologies like Scrum, game design, emerging markets, innovative technologies and the just plain random. Co-founder of the Social Competitive
