Today we proudly announce the release of Steamworks for Unity on the Unity Asset Store!
It makes integrating Steamworks for your Unity game a breeze. It’s a fully managed .Net C# wrapper – meaning we have gotten rid of all the fuzzing about with C code, DLL’s and getting everything up and running. It will work out of the box, using C# instead of C.
We currently support the following API’s
Achievements
Leaderboards
Cloud
Stats
More API’s and features will be added free of charge as users request them!
Lastly, in a day or two we will also launch a Free version that fully supports Stats – no nags, no limitations! Completely free!
As can be seen in the latest trailer, we have gone from Hoagies to Hearts as the health-metric for the games heroine.
We don’t try to hide the fact that we’re hugely inspired by the Zelda-series for the development of Ittle Dew, but we do try to take it forward where we can. For example we have carefully decided on 4 items that work extremely well together, so we can get rid of the Item-menu and the item switch mechanic that we feel is cumbersome.
However, when we can’t really improve upon the formula, we don’t. There are a number of areas of design where we went around in circles for days before ending up with a design that’s very similar (if not identical) to how Nintendo solved the same problem back in 1991. This goes for the perspective, doors, some monsters, etc, etc.
We will probably have to defend our Zelda-homage more than once for being a rip-off. But I feel there are way too few good action-adventure games out there – see this as a counter-balance to just another FPS about pending doom in four shades of gray.
I guess most of you are aware of the IGF Competition (you know, the one someone from Sweden wins every 2′nd year) – and the deadline for the 2012 submission is tomorrow! We’ll be entering Ittle Dew, so I have stocked up on soda and biscuits here at the Ludosity offices for a nice Sunday Crunch.
Ittle Dew isn’t the only thing we’re crunching today though, we’re also putting the final.reallyfinal.3.test touches (game artist joke) on the 3DS titles aswell, as they are due for master submission early next week. Busy busy!
With our two 3DS projects being in the final stages of development we felt that we could move a human resource away from the 3DS projects to our backburner project: Ittle Dew. As I am that lucky resource I thought that I would write a blog post about the project – and my work on it – and steal some of the limelight from the 3DS projects. Being a programmer one would think that my blog post wouldn’t be interesting (just a bunch of math – amirite?) but this week I’ve been working on one of my favorite and also the coolest subject within game programming – shaders.
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.
Have you been dying to kick some robot alien butt on your new shiny Nintendo 3DS, but feel that this particular genre has been underexploited on the miracle 3D-machine?
Yesterday we went out on a field trip to Skövde University to set up a playtest and invite some game students to try our new 3DS games.
Many of us at Ludosity went to this uni ourselves, and I’m very fond of the place. So this was a wonderful opportunity to reconect and meet some of the newer students. It was very fun and hope to return soon and do it all again!
This was the first time we went public with our new title Alien Chaos. That’s the title for the follow-up to Mama & Son: Clean House that we released for XBLIG a while back. We have revisited that universe once again (third time now), and have added a wealth of new features, aswell as redesigning some core features.
In the original there was a dynamic relationship between Mama and her Son, and that was so central to the gameplay that you could never play with just one character. You either had to team up with a friend in co-op, or let the AI take over.
Fredrik enjoying some Alien Chaos!
In redesigning for the 3DS we had to change some stuff around. Some because of the format, and some things because of time restraints. Initially we wanted to keep the dynamic co-op gameplay on the 3DS, but that meant either doing networked multilayer or AI, or both. Neither was within our time budget so we prototyped new gameplay using only one charcter – Really Shooter.
What we found out though, was that this change actually enchaced the game.While the dynamic co-op was novel and fun, the (slightly) more traditonal gameplay of our new game is more long-lasting, less confusing, less annoying, and just plain fun. We still have all the cleaning up and recycling that is the series staple, only it’s just one guy who’s doing it. And it just works.
Our playtesting went great, and we got some very nice feedback. We will return in a couple of weeks for another round, and we hope the game will be even better then! See you there!
Last weekend, me and Daniel Remar traveled to Stockholm for the annual No More Sweden, that ambulates from city to city – this year in our capital, and right during the Pride Festival to boot. In fact, the parade was right outside our windows =)
Anyways, we hung out at Future Games Academy for 3 days, listened to awesome talks, held awesome talks, played awesome games and made awesome games. Each year, the jamming part of NMS is less and less pronounced, and that’s a good thing IMO. We put focus on interesting talks / presentations, and actually hanging out with eachother, as opposed to cramp up around a computer screen each and hack away, each in our separate bubble.
It was extra fun that Doug + Co from CPHG Game Collcetive playtested a couple of tactile games (no screen, focus on motion) that were very fun.
Me and Remar teamed up. We got the three words Rest, Control, and Confuse. We started out with a sheep-herding game with some trippy drug-induced randomness in it, but it didn’t turn out any fun. We started over and made it into a multiplayer game between a shepherd and a thief that competes for a pack of sheep. It turned out pretty good, and we even won the jam!
I tried to meet new people this year, and made new acquaintances with people from Italy, Denmark and of course Sweden.
Look, I love Nintendo. And I love the Zelda series. But I fear the princess is in another castle.
I’ve been playing Darksiders quite a bit lately, and I really dig it. The exploration might be a bit too hub-ified and tube-ified for my taste, most other elements of the game are top notch. Controls are on the “advanced” side of the scale, but I’m pretty hardcore myself so I don’t mind.
In all parts except combat and presentation, Darksiders is a Zelda-game. You find new items which acts as keys to new pathways, fight bosses, find heart pieces, open chests, get annoying help from Navi, ride your horse on open areas, etc etc. It’s Zelda, just with different names for stuff. But what’s really interesting is that Darksiders pretty much nails every single elements they have borrowed from Nintendo, and does it better.
Today I feel the mainline Zelda series is heading in the wrong direction. While I adore Wind Waker, it was also the entry that started to introduce mind-numbingly annoying stuff like displaying a two page long text window each time you pickup a rupee! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, there’s just no end to all the annoying “help” you get in that game. This runs rampant in many Nintendo games such as Animal Crossing (5 pages of text every time you buy something even if you’ve bought it before) and Mario Party.
In Darksiders you run up to a chest, PUNCH it in the face (if it had had one), and then run away before the contents have even started to fly to you automatically. No text, just a 1 second animation. You can do it mid-fight to replenish health without even losing focus on your enemy. When you want to go faster you press two buttons to summon the horse and you’re automatically mounted and in full steam ahead in less than a second. Compare that to Ocarina, where you take out your instrument, play a tune, call the horse, find it, mount it, and then start to ride. All this because you wanted to go faster.
Twilight Princess introduced an innovation that I, in my fanboy-tastic naive and gullable hope, interpret as a sign of things getting better. You see, in Twilight Princess, you only get the two-page text window once per session and rupee type! So if you have run over a blue rupee during the same session before, you no longer get the message. But of course, when you play the game again the next day, you have obviously forgotten how much “blue” means, so you need to see it again.
Hey, Nintendo. Ever heard of ‘floating text’?
Mess up the next installment and I’ll leave you forever.
So what do we do here at Ludosity? What kind of skills would you need for this kind of prestigous, minimum wage job? Let’s find out!
Gustav, Mattias, Dan and Stefan are the coders, creating everything from gameplay features to file converters, and working out low-level memory managment. Let’s take a closer look at these people’s brains.
Daniel: Please describe in one sentence what’s it like developing for the 3DS. Gustav: Interesting but challenging. Stefan: It’s cool. Dan: Death tractor. Mattias: Is it my turn to have the devkit yet? Daniel: Explain with a metaphor what working at Ludosity is like. Everyone: (Long silence) Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Gustav: The source code contains dialogues between us, and a reference to Office Space – not just a random comment, but a part describing the code.
Joel is part boss, project lead, economic department and public relations… a lot of executive things. He’d like to be more involved with the games though. Sometimes mysteriously disappears, and returns with either a publishing deal or bags of fruit.
Daniel: On a scale of having tea to wrestling giraffes, how difficult was it to start up a game company? Joel: Really easy. I didn’t do it myself, it was first started by Arcade and Jesper, and then the team has gradually changed, so it rather fell into my lap. It still doesn’t feel like a “real” company due to our low wages, help from the business incubator and loans. So it’s basically as easy as brewing coffee. Daniel: What have you done today? Joel: Gone to a meeting with a bank, bought snacks, worked on legal documents for our new LLC and put a game up on the website. Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Joel: That Ittle Dew’s normal-sized breasts make people mistake her for a guy.
Anton is the artist and produces 2D and 3D graphics and animations, using Photoshop, Maya, and currently Nintendo’s development tools. All day, every day.
Daniel: What does an average workday look like? Anton: I sit here and make a lot of art. That’s all I do. Daniel: How many of our game characters are completely sane? Anton: Hmmm… none? Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Anton: Our level editors contain minigames.
Fredrik is in charge of QA (Quality Assurance), and is incidentally also the entire QA staff. The 3DS’s 3D feature gives him motion sickness in ten seconds flat, and he’s currently going through 100 levels and writing down which ones crash, rebooting the console in between each one. Let’s make his life even worse for a bit.
Daniel: Please describe in one sentence how stable our games are right now. Fredrik: Haha… “Not.” Daniel: How fun is your job? Fredrik: Better than any other job I’ve had. QA is fun if you turn it into a challenge to find as many serious bugs as possible. Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Fredrik: That the armadillo is impossible to kill. He’s gigantic and there is no escape. If you try to jump, he just follows behind you. He covers the entire screen. It’s impossible.
I (Daniel) am a designer, but it’s a fuzzy word – since I started working at Ludosity I’ve been coding some flash games and level editors (hence the inclusion of minigames in our editors, ed. note) for our games, but mostly doing levels, design documents, prototypes, gameplay ideas, particle effects, gameplay tweaking, menues and menu animation, 2D animation tweening, trailer recording, 2D graphics, some project lead duties and sound editing. And the weirdest thing is how doodles on the whiteboard turn into features and characters in Ittle Dew.
It makes integrating Steamworks for your Unity game a breeze. It’s a fully managed .Net C# wrapper – meaning we have gotten rid of all the fuzzing about with C code, DLL’s and getting everything up and running. It will work out of the box, using C# instead of C.
