zOMGamez!!!!1!11eleven

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.

Speaking of the creator, who seems to go by Mechanically Separated Meat, he (she?) sounds like a very smart and interesting fellow whose blog posts include lengthy discussions on Quantum Physics. His hacked SNES9X code for rendering multiple attempts on Super Mario World is particularly interesting.

PS, I found this guy via TouchArcade. (Bit Pilot is good too!)

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.

Read the article on Photon Storm

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.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!

Suzuki Kizashi Vs. Evil Weather

All design was done by Siltanen & Partners

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