First week of Astronaught funding passed.

Ok, so it's not exactly one week, but i'd like to make these updates on Sundays.
The campaign has been running since Tuesday, so let me post some info on how it went so far.

Let's start with the Youtube video. It got around 1300 views since then. This is rather amazing, and the highest view count i achieved to get ever in a Youtube video. The analytics on it are interesting to analyze:
The spanish game portal anaitgames.com covered Astronaught with a short article which resulted in the biggest source of views (nearly 300). Thanks for covering it anait!
The second biggest source of views(nearly 200) is indiegamemag.com who first covered my game in a news post, and it seems to origin of all the other (p)reviews on blogs. Thanks Priestman for the great article!
Almost the same amount of views comes from reddit. Thanks @slushy_ to post it there!
The remaining views are spread across several sites, link-portals and of course the 8BitFunding campaign site.

So what else did i do for publicity. I went to different forums i frequent like TIGSource and GPWiki and a few other smaller places. I created a project site on indiedb.com but the news didn't get approved to appear on the front page yet, so the resulting views and feedback are very few.
Lastly i obviously post updates on Twitter and a lot of kind users are retweeting it for more exposure. Thanks a lot guys!

So let's get to the juice!
This weeks earning through the campaign were 65USD by 6 people in total, averaging in around 11USD. This translate to 42EUR after substraction of the 8BitFunding and Paypal fees. Pretty good for a start, but not anywhere close to hit the goal (~0.5%). Judged by the amount of Youtube views (100 / (1300 / 6) = ~0.5%) it extrapolates to the estimation that i need a total of around 300,000 views to get the total amount of funding. Although it obviously doesn't work like that.


TL;DR
While it looks like a good start, it doesn't even get close to the goal given the time and duration (5 out of 56 days).
In the remaining 7 weeks i need to implement and show off more core features the game will include, create new art and get a decent gameplay video up to convince people that it is worth contributing.
You all obviously play a big role in it! The more you can spread this by word of mouth (or typed in that respect) the more likely this game will become realized eventually.

Finally, i want to thank everyone who tweeted, blogged, talked and contributed (!) about it so far. I hope i can do your hopes justice and deliver a great game!

Special thanks fly out to Jourdan Cameron who made a good effort of advertising the campaign on several blogs and forums!
http://blackmannrobin.com/2012/03/08/8-bit-outer-space-horror-meet-astronaught/
http://bitmob.com/articles/8-bit-space-horror-and-why-the-industry-needs-to-take-bigger-risks
Thanks man, it is much appreciated!

Astronaught went public

Around 3 weeks ago i had a blurry recollection of something that might have been a dream after waking up. The image in my head was a little pixel astronaught running around in a space station. I am not actually sure why i dream in 8bit, but i sure liked the impression.
I started drafting first sketches of the character and a walking and jumping animation. The day after i started a mapeditor with some placeholder tiles and basic box2d collisions.
The coming days i improved on each the tileset, the mapeditor and the game mechanics and went ahead to build the lighting shader. For now it is simply raycasting with a fall-off value to get some nice light rays. So this is the current state development in a nutshell.

So yesterday i started the 8BitFunding campaign and  got a really nice review over at the Indie Game Mag. I will dedicate the next few days on some more promotion of the campaign before i can concentrate on the project again. More info on future plans will also follow in the coming days.

Into Beyond

I haven't been updating this blog in a while. Mainly because i was writing journal entries on the Ludum Dare page for progress. So if you're curious what happened the last month, you can head over there and see for yourself, or read this small recap:

The Ludum Dare October Challenge got me quite pumped about my project Into Beyond (formerly titled Space Hunter). I've been busy solving some technical challenges within the engine, and implementing new gameplay features to get a solid proof of concept up and running.

Here are the latest updates:

This is the latest gameplay video i uploaded, showing some basic gameplay. It is already out of date, but my current pc-situation won't allow me to record videos with fraps.

This is a more technical demonstration on how shaders can be edited and recompiled ingame, which is a big help when finetuning them.


So that's mostly what happened last month.
I will now keep updating this blog in favor of the Ludum Dare journal as the challenge is over.

Adventures with Triangulation

Oooh, blogger has a new interfa.... err getting distracted again.

So, as i mentioned i am currently working on The Collapse, or rather, i am kind of redesigning it. I was brainstorming with Lateman this weekend and he had a nice idea for a graphical design concept. But more on that in another post.

To be able to achieve what we had in mind i had to redesign the leveleditor from scratch. No more boxes, cubes, and spheres.
One technical hurdle was getting convex triangulation with holes to work. I was scrolling through a couple of papers earlier today, and i got a good glimpse of... well i wont be shitting you, i didn't get most of it. I currently don't care much about how it is solved technically, considering that it is quite a complex topic, so i further ventured through the internet looking for resources. Eventually i found this.

I am using the C# version by Erwin Perik, ironically the High performance version by Salvatore Previti, well the sample anyways, was pretty slow. We're talking about ~1 second for around 150vertices slow. Kind of curious since they both are derived from the same base code.

So what am i gonna do with it? I am feeding it a series of vectors in order to receive a generated surface i can texture.

Simply simple

So far so good. The problem is though, i dont have randomly scattered vertices like shown above.
What i am looking for is, after all, a concave polygon with holes. So when feeding it with proper data, it was more looking like this:

Oh, why you be so convex :(

Just then i was remembering a rule to determine if a point is within an arbitrary shape or not, which is: draw a line from a point you chose to a point anywhere within the shape, and make an intersectiontest with every bordering line segment. Is the amount of intersections even, the point is inside the shape. Is it odd, it lies outside.
So what i can do now is simply define an anchor point within the shape, calculate the center of each triangle, and do intersection tests with the border segments, check the amount of intersections and voila:

Concave, with holes, not all that complex after all

So i guess this is kind of cheating, but it works, and quite fast too. I worried that it might take a week to get it working correctly, but thanks to the internets it just took a couple of hours \o/


If you have questions, let me know below

The Collapse - A Ludum Dare Entry

I was participating at the Ludum Dare Game Compo this weekend.
I started on a basic prototype idea on Saturday afternoon, pondering about a concept. After a few lines of code i had a random generated maze out of differently sized cubes, and some enemy entities with a basic homing ai.

Very unspectacular

I kinda liked the physics based movent around the obstacles, but getting decently playable levels out of random generation is quite the effort, and i wasn't sure of success. So my decision was to develop an editor that is capable of designing custom levels.
While i was at it, ideas kept flowing in: different types of geometry properties like bouncyness or stickyness, moving platforms, and some more i didn't want to consider at that point. It is only an 48 hours compo after all.

So i started on the basics, having the ability to move and scale cubes to form a level, and advanced on editing features like rescaling or translating specific objects to not start over on a misplaced object.
Most of the work went into the editor, as the gameplay features were pretty simple and quick to implement.

In the end i am fairly satisfied with the result. I was able to implement all the features i planned for it, got a catchy tune, some ok'ish sound effects, and the graphic effects (apart some minor issues).

However there seem to be a few bugs in the engine, as i received some messages that it won't work, or crash on startup. I need to look into that.

Anyways, heres the gameplay video of the submitted version

While developing this i came to like the concept pretty much and i have a couple of ideas that can be implemented to have a more versatile gameplay; depending on the feedback i will consider making a full game out of it.

So yeah, thats all for now. If you  have questions, or if something doesn't work, please let me know in the comments or on twittor.

Download:
You can download the Ludum Dare release here.

I made a small fix that might cause a crash on startup depending on your systems localization. Also improving the Physics/game update, resulting in a better gameplay performance, and fixing the issue about not loading levels for some, also showing the goal model. I strongly suggest you download it instead the official ludum dare release!
Download the fixed version from Dropbox.

You need the .net 4.0 framework or better to run this.

The humble bundle

If you're a gamer, you should buy the humble bundle.
If you donate money for charity, you should buy the humble bundle.
If you like to spend money, you should buy the humble bundle.

You can pay as little as 20cent or as much as $$$ to get Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds:Survivor and two more games. They cost around $50 when you buy them in the store, so go for it and grab 'em while they're still hot! The offer is available for another 4 days.