But we weren’t really satisfied with only those platforms, one is sorely missing. You can’t really call a launch ‘multi-platform’ unless it’s on the ZX Spectrum! So without further ado, here’s a snapshot from the game in its full glory. 16 colors, 8*8 tiles, no transparency – the way we all really like it. Stay tuned for a release date.

Image1 – Screen shot of the game before we added lights.

The last time we worked on project Ittle Dew it looked something like in image1.  There’s nothing wrong with this picture, it’s still a nice looking game, but we wanted to do something more. We wanted to get rid of the flatness of the graphics and add some dynamicity to it. We accomplished this through lighting as it is one of the keystones for compositing a great looking image.

Lighting in games can be troublesome. For example, games are dynamic in nature it can be difficult to keep the lighting of the scene perfect in all scenarios – maybe the player destroyed the light source, maybe he/she moved it. There are also some technical problems – how do you shape the light to fit the environment. For example; Light can be represented as a sphere, brightest in the middle and fading as we get further away from the center. But what If that light is on a wall, we would have to account for that wall and change the shape of the light to a hemisphere so that the light doesn’t pass through the wall. Further still, what if there is a ceiling right above that light, we’d have to reshape that light to a quarter of a sphere (see image2). And what if there’s a suicidal robot frog just next to the … you get the picture.

Image2 – A sphere representing light being reshaped to fit the environment.

Since project Ittle Dew is a game in two dimensions and its level design is built up from cells in a grid the problem with lighting gets easier. First of all the light would be represented as a circle and not a sphere and secondly the grid based level design means that level objects always blocks one cell of light (not one and a half, not a third, etc). The solution I came up with was to draw a line from each light source to all the cells within the lights circle and check if that line is colliding with an object. If it is then it means that something is in the way of the light and this cell won’t get lit. If not, it means that the light has a straight line to travel and will make this cell brighter. Finally we added some fuzziness to this to allow the light to pass slightly through corners – to add the illusion that the light is bouncing on the objects.

Image3 – Left: The cells of light the fire creates. The brightest cell is in the middle of the fire, the darkest cells are where no ‘line’ of light could get to. Right: Smoothing out the cells over the actual game creates this result. 

Watch the before and after below!

Image 4 – Before

Image 5 – After

In the graphical department, Anton and I discussed the best way to set a rotating chainsaw on fire. We can’t have clusters of them flying through the air with the fire coming out the wrong end – that would just be embarrasing. For some reason there’s also been an increase of frogs in our concept art and games lately.

During lunchtime and after work, Anton, Mattias and I play assorted fighting games and argue over the superiority of MK9, SSBM, GG:AC, and MvC3, not to mention arcade sticks vs gamepads. It’s the nerdiest time of day, and I think the more “serious” companies in the corridor wonder if we ever work at all. Every time they walk by our room, I happen to be staring at the screen or stretching my arms (such as right now), which probably doesn’t help.

Anyway, developing for the 3DS means a fine balance between interesting use of graphics and plain gimmicks, and in some cases opinions differ. We don’t really “think in 3D” considering that both of our games are 2D, gameplay-wise, so we rather use it as an extra feature. Same with the stylus, it’s just another way to navigate the menues. I may be oldschool, but I think buttons often work best.

Why did we include an Xperia Play in a 3DS post?

That’s it for my introduction – next time I’d like to go more in-depth with one of our games. “Designer” is a fuzzy job title, so I might also just talk about what I do here at Ludosity, and what you can expect if you want to work at a small game studio.

Really Shooter and his mother Poor Mama are running a cleaning service business, with Really taking commando jobs on the side. One day, aliens invade (!) and Really doesn’t hesitate for one second, he heads over to their mother ship and begins to mow down the invading forces with his trusty machine-gun. And of course, as usual it is up to Mama to clean up the mess after him.

Clean House features dynamic two-player gameplay where Really takes care of business while protecting his mother, and Mama cleans up the mess and support her son with ammo. You can play with a friend or with AI, (or play both with one controller in hardcore mode). There’s Story Mode and Survival Mode with online highscore, all for less than a can of soda on Xbox Live Indie Games!

Me and Daniel started talking about this idea way back when we chose our bachelor’s project in uni, but we didn’t realize the idea until NoMoreSweden 2009, where it pretty much cleaned house (even though it was called poor cleaning lady then..) Since it turned out so fun and unique, we’ve now decided to bring it to Xbox in full HD!

It’s coming along really well – in fact it’s almost done! It’s currently in playtest phase and will go into certification early next week.

In the mean time, check out these wallpapers our lovely artist Stefan has put together!

Just wanted to let you know if you have some cool heavy metal-kind-of-music that you think would fit our upcoming game Mama & Son: Clean House please let us know! We are looking for musicians that can contribute to the game project. This is for you guys who already have songs finished so we can put them songs in as soon as possible. We are only looking for free tracks since the game itself had had very small budget. Off course you will be in the credits if we use your music!

The game is feature complete and Daniel Remar only needs to tighten up the graphics

Anyhow. Mail me! daniel.kaplan at ludosity.com

Me and Daniel go back since we first met at uni 4-5 years ago, and we have worked on several games together. We entered Yoyo-Games winter competition with Garden Gnome Carnage and won 2′nd place! (Beaten by Frozzd by Jesse, who I later made Shoot Stop Lollipop with)

Now we have brought Daniel into our offices to build GGC for flash and it’s already progressed really well! Hopefully we’ll have some vids for you up soon. It’s super fun to work on these fun, small titles, and we hope that it’ll hit the interwebs very soon and blow your minds =)

Stay tuned!

/Joel

We’re wrapping on the next free DLC now, and everything is moving along quite nicely. With four brand new VR Missions and a new, fun Sandbox level, Bob Came In Pieces has now a total of 25 levels, easily clocking in well over 5 hours even for the experienced player, and more likely 10 hours to play the game from beginning to end.

Also new is the long awaited Gamepad support! We now have official support for Xbox 360 Controller, and any old gamepad should work really.

Stay tuned for more info!

So..Hi gamer!

My name is Daniel Kaplan and I’m currently running the office here at Ludosity. I was born and raised in Skövde (this is also where the office is situated), a small town in between the two big lakes in Sweden.

I have played games my whole life and my first memories from games comes from Super Mario Bros 2 and the NES. I remember playing the game day and night and actually wanted to be Lugi because he had weird feet movement when jumping which I found to be hilarious at that time. And so it continued. My mother has later told me that I said at the age of 5 that I wanted to work for Nintendo and create games. Ludosity is not Nintendo, but I have had great fun here at Ludosity! (If you see this Nintendo, please contact me). Anyhow, one of my favorite games are TetrisDS and Street Fighter 4. I have played a lot of TetrisDS and it is just a crazy game! The best part is when you have played it for a couple of minutes and you just feel that you are in a flow and everything just happens by automagic. Can you bet me? I have played to level 167 in TetrisDS.

At Upper Secondary School I studied at the Natural Science Programme and it was all about maths, physics and chemistry so I thought that programming would be my thing! But later on I found out that I wanted to try something completely new. So my actual creating-games-experience didn’t start until my time at the University of Skövde. I studied to become a 3D artist. It turned out that I liked animation and my bachelor thesis was all about analyzing animation. At the University I have had the chance to work with/get to know a lot of cool guys and some of them are Erik Svedäng (Blueberry Garden), Daniel Remar (Iji), Ola Holmdahl (Battlefield 1942), Mårten Brüggemann (Fret Nice) and Emil Berner (also Fret Nice).

Prior to starting up Ludosity I have worked on games such as Flipside of the Divne (created with Erik and Björn) and Det Goda Livet. Small projects that got quite some media attention after their initial release. Flipside of the Divine won a big game dev competition in Sweden. I also did some freelance work for a design company called Nooka.

We have been testing out Bob Came in Pieces and it is coming along fine! We will release the Mac-version of Bob Came in Pieces in about one week! So hold your horses (and dollars) for a little while.

And for you PC guys and girls all over the world, we have something for you too: A patch! The patch will be released soon too! Changelog will be released here too.

And one last thing. Our friend Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström won the IGF Nuovo award for his game Tuning. Congratulations Jonatan!