This video detailing the struggle to find the perfect SimCity plan is both beautiful and frightening, the same feeling perhaps one might feel witnessing the detonation of a nuclear bomb or a grizzly bear slaying a fawn. The elegance of it is undeniable and it seems to be underlain by a confounding universal harmony that could elevate one’s mind as easily as it could tear it asunder.
This game was entry in the Experimental Gameplay Project‘s 10-second game theme for March. You control Jesus, our lord and saviour, helping him to run as fast as possible and do “Jesus Things”. My description shouldn’t be longer than 10 seconds so please enjoy!
Jumpman, (no, not Jumpman), is a game for Mac/PC/Linux/iPhone with the look and feel of an Atari-era puzzle-platformer but with a few interesting twists thrown in. It’s fun! You can download it for *free* and give it a whirl. If you like it, consider shelling out a mere $2.99 for the iPhone version to support the creator.
This isn’t a new article, but it touches on a topic I’ve heard a lot about recently. That is, pixel ‘blitting‘. Blitting is an old school process used in sprite-based games of essentially erasing a spot in a bitmap image based on a sprite’s alpha and using a bitwise operator to draw the sprite into that bitmap image. Most graphics systems do this transparently to the user in some fashion (pardon the pun). 8-Bit Rocket has a good introduction to these concepts with regards to Flash, but read on for the important part of this post.
The article shows that Flash Player is already fairly optimized for graphical composition operations when compared to blitting. Both showed similar framerates. However, the cacheAsBitmap operation caused an exponential increase in memory consumption when the number of sprites on stage increased. Ironically, the comparison was run by the creator of the Pixel Blitz library who, I’m sure, had a difficult time presenting the results.
There are some good details in the article so if you’re interested, read the whole thing before you decide if you agree.
Have you done any work with bit blitting or sprite sheet animation? Have you found it to be beneficial? Tell us your thoguhts.
I recently created this video game for Suzuki to promote the Kizashi’s all-wheel-drive performance. I threw this together in about 2.5 weeks starting with some code I wrote for the Global Game Jam. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the work.
Indie developers from such popular titles as Braid and World of Goo are taking a new approach to funding indie games that encourages independent game developers to stay independent. We’ll find out more at GDC next week but in the meantime… IndieFund.com
I’m very pleased to announce that one of my latest projects has just gone live. The Deepening – Select Your Own Adventure Edition has just gone up on Atom Films. Go give it a look, it’s hilarious.
The video is a Good Cop / Bad Cop action show where you get to choose what happens next. It was created by the brilliant Duncan Brothers who asked me to help build the Flash portion of it. Enjoy!
I’ve somehow managed to maintain a living room absent of the 23 lbs of plastic required to play Rock Band (or Guitar Hero or whatever variation on the theme) since the first game came out, but I have such a soft spot in my heart for the Beatles that I surely won’t be able to resist this…
