Blog for Magnus Blikstad at GarageGames.com

Balls of Steel

Magnus Blikstad — 2008-03-12T09:49:03+00:00

Working with Martin and Thomas...
Some of you may have read Martins blog about our little get together just a short month ago. The plan was basically to have something done in roughly two months, well, let's just say we're ahead of schedule!

While using unity have it's annoyances, it does allow you to very rapidly get your game up and running and very rapidly start fleshing out the gameplay (we had the first prototype of the game done within the first 24 hours).

Balls of Steel!
So, what is the game then? The game itself is a pretty simple concept. You have a puck, you have a gun... shoot your gun to move the puck over to the goal. Of course things are never quite that simple, now are they? There's of course an opponent on the other side trying to do the exact same thing!

Without further ado, some screens for you;

menu

Goal!

uh-oh

What's left to do...
Still some bug fixing left before the game is ready, but it's very rapidly approaching being done. We're looking into distribution options at the moment so stay tuned.

IGC photos, Band Jam and The Procrastinators.

Magnus Blikstad — 2007-10-16T15:25:55+00:00

Alright, image intensive post coming up! So if you're on a slow connection you may want to look away.

Even more photos at www.blikstad.com/photo/v/igc2007/. (sorry for the graininess, blurriness and general oddness.... combination of the wrong lens, not enough light, and me forgetting to bring my flash unit with me (again! I told myself to bring it along last year!).

Anyway, was a nice IGC, hello to all the interesting people I talked to, I'll see you all next year.
Oh, and congrats to Randy Condon (well, okay, and me a tiny little bit since I worked on the game too =) for winning the "Players Choice" voting with Gondolier Of Love.

When Orcs Attack artist post-mortem

Magnus Blikstad — 2007-10-02T21:26:57+00:00

Right, there's already two postmortems for "When Orcs Attack" (Jons and Johns) but I figured I'd do one from the artists perspective as well.
(well, okay, Jon bitched at me to do it so here we are...)

For all of the back story etc make sure you read Jons post. The gist of it though; Make a game in 3 months. Or more precisely, make a game in 12 months but with a "deadline" that should result in a separate game of it's own every 3 months.

Instead of doing the regular "what went right" and "what went wrong" I'm going to go about writing this slightly different since most of our decisions had both their advantages and their share of problems. Lets just get on with it shall we?

Let's do the time warp....
Time is obviously going to be a pretty big issue when you're doing a game in 3 months no way to get around that. This will be from my perspective though so I'll just go with that; As Jon mentioned in his postmortem he didn't get me started on the project until a bit too late. With the next game I'll be working on it from the start. Let's just leave it at this; Some things were cut, some things were rushed, a lot of coffee was consumed.

Premade content.
At first Jon was pretty set on using as much "premade content" as possible. Personally I saw the dangers of this right away. It DID (and do) work out great for quickly prototyping and getting the game to a playable level very fast but a lot of the content wasn't optimized properly for our needs, and not all the content we needed was available to license. So the bottom line was that we would have had to optimize a lot of models as well as producing more art that would artistically fit with the content packs.

From my experience it's quite often simply faster to just create it all from scratch in these cases. If not faster so at least roughly the same amount of time and you will end up with an art style that is yours rather than that of whoever made the content packs you started with.

Jon was a bit hesitant towards the suggestion of throwing out all the premade content at first, but quickly changed his mind when I started producing the assets.

Bottom line; use content packs for prototyping, don't do it for the final game.

Plans and anti-plans.
Planning is certainly one of those things that are both a blessing and a curse. In all honestly our planning really wasn't particularly extensive and we were mostly "winging it", both on the programming and art side of things. Most likely the only reason this even worked at all was because I've been working with Jon for quite a while on "Harmonic Convergence" and he trusted that I would figure things out.

Due to the lack of planning I was given a lot of freedom with the art (well "a lot" may be the wrong word. More like "absolute" freedom), as I said; both a blessing and a curse. The good thing with no real directions as to what art is needed is you can choose to do things that you know will be quick and efficient to produce, the drawback is of course there's some time lost to figuring out what to do.

It worked this time, but hopefully we'll have at least a bit more sense and plan slightly more in the future. Some flexibility in the planing is needed when you do a game in 3 months due to features being changed or cut, but having a rough idea of what's needed from the get go makes it easier to schedule your time.

Extremely quick, dirty and butt ugly sketch of the walker robots in "When Orcs Attack"

Tools of the trade.
The choice of using Unity as our 3d engine certainly contributed to the game getting done in 3 months, that and the nice fact that when you have your game in Unity is a no-brainer to export both mac, windows and web browser builds. There's certainly been a few issues and annoyances along the way but nothing more than what I'm used to (I've been working with all sorts of strange engines over the years, there's always SOMETHING that require you to jump through hoops to get it all working properly).

One of the art related things with unity that I ran into was the use of FBX, basically; the 3d studio max FBX exporter isn't that particularly clever. I animated one of the towers in the game using a variation of IK and noise controllers (this particular animation was later cut from the game for completely unrelated reasons), the FBX exporter really didn't like this and instead of telling me that it simply ignored the animation data. I ended up having to write a maxscript that would sample the animation data at each frame and convert the IK and noise animation to regular transformations, shrug.

Another, very big, issue with unity is the fact that it really doesn't play along nicely with SVN (or any available version control system for that matter). We had been using SVN exclusively when working on "Harmonic Convergence" and this made our workflow extremely smooth, I could add an art asset to my copy of the game (as well as write any script associated with it) and it would instantly be in the main repository, or update any art asset and it would instantly be available to anyone working on the project. Without this things just take way longer, works way less efficient, there's all sorts of weird copies of the project files around and a lot of work that has to be recreated several times by different people. Definitely a major annoyance. Hopefully we'll be able to come up with some smoother solution to this in the future.

In conclusion.
There's a pretty simple conclusion here, making a game in 3 months is more than doable. It does require the right people, the right tools, a lot of coffee, some money and a certain degree of insanity but hey; It's possible!

IGC
Anyway, I see you all in Eugene next week. I'll be arriving Saturday evening (but I'll most likely be pretty dead by then after 20+ hours of flying and simply crash), so if anyone is around Sunday morning let me know and we'll go get some breakfast. =)

Also of course if you have anything particular you want to discuss with me at IGC, just let me know. (either there on the spot, or send me an email before hand).

When Orcs Attack...

Magnus Blikstad — 2007-09-05T13:34:34+00:00

Tower models.

When Orcs Attack...
Well, just what you always wanted! An image intensive post!
Been working with Jon on When Orcs Attack! lately, your "standard" Tower Defense game with an awful lot of twists. =)

Anyway, I won't get too wordy, enjoy the images. I'll just paste from the "marketing material".

Casual game, with depth.
Graphics that shame the competition.
Aimed at web, with "premium" download.
Five devastating towers:
--- Arrow
--- Fire
--- Lightning
--- Ice
--- Radiation
Four powerful spells:
--- Teleport
--- Fog
--- Bait
--- Weaken
26 enemy variants.
Four game modes, including a unique Capture the Flag type.
Had to pry laptop away from test audience.

In other news...
In other news, I'll be heading out to IGC next month, got my plane tickets booked so if you'll be there be sure to say hi.

When Orcs Attack, In game

TGB particles, and such...

Magnus Blikstad — 2007-04-10T20:33:46+00:00

Hello all, long time since I got around to write anything here, been awfully busy (as usual I suppose).

In either case, what have I've been up to then? Well, also as usual, lots of stuff I can't talk about yet etc so let's just skip that. I have had a chance to work a lot with TGB lately though, which is perfectly fine with me. There's a lot of interesting ways to "cheat" when you're working with 2d art and effects...

The challenge

One of my recent challenges came when Jon Frisby needed nicely animated grass in his game Harmonic Convergence, I promised him to do a little write up about how I ended up doing it so I figured I might as well put it into a blog here. My first thought was of course to just create a number of animated sprites but I quickly realized this would both take me way too long to get it "just right", require a rather large amount of images to get the animation smooth and most likely have various issues with the animations being obviously looped and such.

Particles to the rescue
The solution ended up being particles! It's of course pretty obvious, but the way I ended up going about it may not be. You could use one particle per "strand", but this would quickly get prohibitive due to way too many particles. What I did was to create one(!) image frame of a couple of dozen of strands (fig 1). (it was created with the 3d studio max "hair and fur" system by the way (fig 2)). The fact that I only needed a single image to make the effect work of course saves on both resources (texture memory, download size and what not) and the time needed to produce the stuff.

Systems a go
This is the particle system I ended up with (don't worry, I'll explain what makes it tick in a moment), there IS a lot of "cheating" going on here. For one a particle can't have infinite life, like a piece of grass (at least not with the TGB particle system they can't). So the "sheets" of grass are constantly being faded in/out, the trick is to tweak the life, size and other parameters just right so it doesn't become too obvious.
As you can see by the image to the right our particle system will play infinitely, the particles will be spawned on the extent of the entity in the editor on the X axis (LINEX) and it's using our single frame grass imagemap for the particles.

Getting all the parameters correct will most certainly take some messing, what you want is a rather long life for your particles and a rather high quantity (not too high though, you have to balance this against the life of your particle so you don't get too many). Further you don't want your particles to move (since grass really doesn't "move" now does it?), you instead give them a tiny amount of spin (notice that I have the limits set to a very, very low amount in the image to the right).

To make the fading in/out thing something you don't really think about I came up with this visibility graph.

Covering up
Due to the spinning of the particles the bottom of the effect will always look pretty horrible, so what do we do when something looks horrible? We cover it up of course! Just adding a big static sprite on top of the effect to make sure nothing shows that we don't want to and we're done.

Here's the finished effect in the TGB editor; I had to use two separate grass particle systems for this particular level (the stuff on the far right is a separate system).

In motion
And since all of this REALLY can't be made justice with just static images here's a video for you too! (it does look a bit sharper in the game, stupid video compression killing it a bit). All the levels in the video use the same basic effect with a few tiny parameters tweaked and the grass image switched out. As you can see you can get a quite different effect with only very minor changes.

www.blikstad.com/gg/grass_particles.wmv

Hope I've managed to show you you can do some very nice things with TGBs particles, this particular system could be used for a lot of things like fur or hair or whatever. I'm also using some very similar ideas to create animated water/waves and nice subtle light beams and such.

Other stuff...
In addition to working with Jon on Harmonic Convergence I've been working with some of the final things on GameSlingers TaeKwonDo World Champion... getting really close to release now.

Then of course we have all that secret stuff I'm not allowed to talk about, but well... as I said before, we'll take that another day... =)

I also of course have to shout out a huge congratulations to Josh and Lara on the pending wedding!

In conclusion
I'm finishing up some contracts at the moment, so, if you have any art that need to be done or any problems that need fixing feel free to take a look at my portfolio, my profile or simply fire off an email (magnus@witentertainment.com) and we'll talk.

Back from Eugene, back to work...

Magnus Blikstad — 2006-10-12T22:07:00+00:00

I'm finally back from Eugene (and starting to recover) after a pretty horrible day of flying. Definitely messier to adjust back to European time than it was to adjust to Eugene time when I got there. Oh well. I should be fully up and running soon enough.

I didn't have any particular expectations before leaving but "IGC" turned out to be a damn interesting event. A lot of interesting and secret things were discussed (probably will have more on that some times later), a lot of beers were drank and a lot of games were played.

In either case, not sure I even have to mention it but I had a great time meeting all of you. (Not going to bother mentioning names, as I'm sure I will forget someone). It was great seeing all the fantastic looking games out there too like Switching Gears (wonderful design, just weird enough... and heck, that bubble gun is just too damn much fun), Screwjumpers (okay, okay, I suck at the game, but hey!), MiniGolf Mania, Determinance and of course Eric Hartmans various strange-(but interesting) things (Blockland, Age of Time). I'm certain I'm forgetting something but that's the way things go.

Oh, and I got to finally play Guitar Hero for the first time ever too... If all else would have been a failure (which it obviously wasn't) that would have still made it all worth it. =)

I had my camera with me, but unfortunately I somehow ended up being pretty busy so I didn't really get around to do a whole lot of shooting. Oh well, I'll make an effort to get it right next year. =) (you can still find a few photos by clicking the images at the right).

Bork, bork, bork

Website host moved.

Magnus Blikstad — 2006-05-03T12:42:24+00:00

I just wanted to drop a note to say we changed host for our domain (www.witentertainment.com). It should all be working fine now but everything including email etc was moved so if you mailed me and never got a reply just try again.

As for things I'm working on.... can't really say at the moment. I'll be sure to let you know as soon as I can talk about it though. =)

Minions of Mirth load test.

Magnus Blikstad — 2006-02-12T04:35:34+00:00

Just to make up for the fact that I had no images in my last plan I thought I'd post some of the shots I snapped from todays load test of Minions of Mirth!

According to Josh there were about 50 players in the same zone and the server had no problems at all dealing with it. Nice.

Associate status and website updated (finally!)

Magnus Blikstad — 2006-02-09T00:58:00+00:00

First of all I just wanted to say thanks to all the people at garagegames for the confidence of making me an associate, I'll try to be nice. Promise. =)

And I've _finally_ gotten around to update my website! It was only 2 years since the last update.... well, better late than never, eh?

In other news, I'm finishing up some work at the moment so if you need any art done let me know. I'll be available for new work very soon.

(sorry, no images this time)

Wednesday Dec 14 21:56

Magnus Blikstad — 2005-12-14T21:56:51+00:00

Yay, as most of you probably already noticed Minions of Mirth 1.0 have been released!

It's been one hell of a ride, I was brought into the project in early April when Josh and Lara only had been working on the game using Torque for a few months. I have since then modeled, animated and textured nearly 50 different creatures, critters and characters. I still have some work on the project ahead of me that will most likely find it's way into the game as either "expansions" or updates through the live patching system but getting it this far is definitely a major milestone. It's actually DONE! I still can't quite believe it.

A huge shout out goes to Josh and Lara who have done an amazing job of getting this beast of a game done in just short of a years time. It's been a blast to work with these people all along. Of course all the people who have been around contributing to the game in one way or another deserves a mention too, so thank you everyone for making this a damn fun project to be part of.

And just since no plan should be without pictures here's a few random in game snaps for you (click to enlarge);

Moving along, what's next for me then? Well, right now I'm still recovering a bit from the final crunch and as I mentioned I still have some work left to do with prairie games. I also have some other things in the works but in either case I'll soon again be available and looking for something different to sink my teeth into. If you have anything in the works and are looking to contract out any of your art needs don't hesitate to swing by my (still horribly out of date, I'll fix that eventually. Promise) site www.witentertainment.com or fire of an email to me at magnus@witentertainment.com.