Quick roundup of what I’ve been up to:

Bytown Lumberjack launched back in March is currently selling up on XBLIG. Got a bunch of cool reviews and videos about it. Neato.

Even cooler was that Kevin Gadd (aka @antumbral) elected to use the game as a test for his new tool that can port .Net projects to JavaScript. You can read all about his process over here.

I then spent about two weeks re-writing Gabe’s game The Archer in C++ until the project was put aside into unknown stasis. So if anyone wants a OpenGL based tile engine with a GameMaker style editor, drop me line!

Finally I’ve been spending the past 3 weeks or so working on another XBLIG game which has no name since the name I had was already taken on the marketplace. Should be finishing that up and putting it into playtest in the next 1.5 weeks or so. There’s a few screenshots up here.

Eric also set up an awesome new press page for the Dirty Rectangles, so you can go over and see what that’s all about!

Yeah! Games!

Game complete! So our first foray into month long development cycles worked out. Overall the game came together pretty well and I had plenty of time to test on the console so hopefully getting through XBLIG review won’t be as painful as the last game we put up there.

Once we get through review we’ll figure out a release date and get a trailer up for everyone to see. The game will be priced at 80 MS points and should be out before the end of March (hopefully much sooner).

Hey! My friend Gabe (of Welkinhold, Two Weeks, Dino ‘Splode…) and I have started work on a new game, or series of games if all goes well.

Our goal is month long games for XBLIG that have a bunch of fun ideas in them. It’s very nebulous and I’m excited to see what happens. The first such game is currently titled “LUMBERJACK” and you can check out our devlog for it here.

Just returned from an awesome adventure in Toronto with the rest of the Dirty Rectangles. We spent the weekend attending the 3rd annual Gamercamp event. A great time was had by all and it was really interesting to be at an event that felt so different from the atmosphere at MIGS. Gamercamp was way more focused on the community and game players themselves which helped me disconnect from the ‘developer’ mindset I’m usually in.

Big thanks to the organizers Jaime and Mark for having us. Looking forward to next year. You can check out pictures of our adventure here.

Video now available here!

Returned from Montreal on Thursday and have spent the past weekend hiding in isolation and attempting to revert to my introverted state after forcing myself to be social for three days.

MIGS itself was fairly enjoyable compared to last year, although the second day was essentially a write-off with the exception of Jason Rohrer’s keynote. The real goal of the trip was bringing together Prince of Arcade 2011. It ended up going amazingly and a huge turnout. I was filming the whole event and should be posting a compilation video within the next week or so video now available here!

Below you can see some of the pictures I grabbed along the way of us working on our Ottatron games and the machine itself. You can check out the full album here.

At last Wednesday’s Dirty Rectangles meeting me and my girlfriend Katie showed off a little game thing we’ve been working on for the past few weeks.

It’s titled ‘The Shooting Party’ and mainly focuses on Katie’s hand drawn art in the setting of an English game bird hunt outing. This was Katie’s first foray into game development and gave me the chance to work on my various 2D systems I’ve been working on since starting Welkinhold this time last year. It was also a chance to work with hand drawn art which is something I haven’t touched yet in relation to games.

In addition to building on my sprite drawing and screen manager system I also started a 2D skeletal animation system similar to the one used in my first game Dino ‘Splode. I added in the ability to constrain joints by length and by rotation radius as well which takes a lot of the tweaking out of animation since once you get the skeleton up and running the FK takes over and you just need to drag to the poses you want. The bones will interpolate to the best of their ability.

You can download the build that I showed off at the meeting at the link below. The resolution and fullscreen flag can be customized using the settings.ini file. The editor is also available in game as well by hitting the tilde (~) key when you are in the level. I’ve been working on getting it running on as many different systems as I can (it should run on hardware as far back as OpenGL 1.2), so if you have trouble running it let me know the details and I’ll see if I can work it out.

Link to build

That's me in the corner.

My band King’s Quest had our first show at the Avant Garde in Ottawa this past Friday. We had an awesome time, and I want to thank everyone who came out (there were a lot of game devs there). We’ve got another slightly larger show in the works that should be coming up sooner rather than later.