Also, Syndicate got released a few weeks ago. It is the game I worked as level designer/artist for the first 1.5 year of pre-production/production, until I left to work The Ball fulltime.

Otherwise I am still occupied with teaching and education. I am handling the internships for last years students and some day to day business at my school Future Games, and tomorrow I am starting a 4 day UDK course at a University in South Stockholm.

Couple of weeks ago my students over at Future Games completed their second Game Project of the year, again running on UDK.

Like previous times:

People in Sweden who interested in our school can attend our presentation March 22nd. We take in just 36 people a year and all of our teachers are industry people.

Goliath

Goliath is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with a shooting element. Play as a seek and rescue bot as it tracks a distress signal deep into the wreckage of a downed mother ship and discover where you are and how you ended up there. Overcome hazards and enemy turrets as you progress through 4 distinctive environments to reach your objective.

Memento

A man, old and dying lies jacked in to a machine designed not to save his life, but to judge it. He is being forced to relive his memories, both joyful and horrifying, in the largest public trial since those of Nuremberg. The whole world watches with horrified anticipation as the hated old man spends his final hours reliving bloodstained fragments of his dreadful life.

Rennfahrer

Rennfahrer is an high octane racing game set in the near future. Burn through a stunning city vista high above the clouds while trying to stay alive as the cities defense system tries to hinder you from reaching the goal.
With games as “Wipeout” and “Trackmania” as inspiration, buckle up and get ready for adrenaline pumping speed and insane jumps as you race against the timer and drive for your life!

The Box Project

The Box Project is an environmentally puzzling platform adventure where you control a swiss-army box. The box contains all the contraptions needed to save the over-polluted world that remains, now that the humans have left for newer worlds. Spring over the junkyard, float through jets of steam, and collect fairies on your path to cleanse the world and make it anew.

Alex the axolotl

You play as Alex, a axolotl. You and your family gets taken from your natural habitat by man.
Set in a aquarium where you will have to swim through dangerous environments to try and find out what happened to your family.

Bad Luck

Bad Luck is a game which involves two different types of gameplay, a fast paced side scrolling shoot ‘em up, and a top-down logical puzzler. Each level swaps between these two modes in a challenging and different way, always keeping the players mind and reactions alert. You control a character whose bad luck has left them stranded alone on a planet, trying desperately to make their way to the surface. Unfortunately, bad luck keeps sending you in the opposite direction. With the help of the character’s various abilities (shooting, grabbing, dashing and manipulating time) it’s up to you to reverse the players luck and make your way out of this predicament.

This new system, written by Marko Permanto, and based on James Tan’s UI Kismet system allows you to build, control, and animate menus and HUDs through nothing but Kismet!

Get it now.

I’ve never gotten into Scaleform. I’ve always thought it is ridiculous to require someone to get and learn Flash and Actionscript just to get a little image to appear on the screen. When making indie games and prototyping concepts you need to be able to get result as fast and as easy as possible, and these Kismet blocks are a major step in the right direction in my opinion. I can make stuff appear on the screen again! Hurray!

We will be using this system in the upcoming UDK game Marko and I are working on – Unmechanical – Join us on Facebook also! We are hard at work at getting the game done at the moment so for the time being we don’t want to spend too much time yet on releasing screenshots and videos and all that, but we will soon begin ramping up our media efforts :)

At Future Games we are convinced that the best way to learn game development is by doing it. Theoretical knowledge is important, but at the end of the day you learn the most by trying things out, and by experimenting. Like many other developers who’ve started out before the era of “game development educations” I got into game development by making one level after another, one mod after another, and so on. We are trying to capture that spirit of proactive practically focused entrepreneurship many game developers in the industry have, in our education. If anyone in the vicinity of Stockholm would like to visit us, we regularly organize informal evening get togethers – follow the event on Facebook for information on when.

Either way, here are the results from our 35 new students and two weeks of work:

Knugen

In the age of knights, honor and treachery, the black (and merciless) king has been ruling the green lands of Landora since he slew the white kings father, who had been a just king for decades. Now the white king is eager for justice and to reclaim what (he believes) is rightfully his! Can he succeed? Or will the black king continue to rule it with an iron fist?
Knugen is a turn based, strategic two-player game where you affect your opponent, either by griefing him or helping him, by grabbing the goodies on the way to the throne. One must also beware, the race for the throne will awake blind spirits of fallen warriors from past times to fulfill their pledge to defend the throne from intruders!
Swipe in the direction you want to move and stomp your way through your opponent and the ancient, beautiful hallway to claim the throne for yourself! A quick and fun game with unlimited replayability to play whenever you want to show your friends who the real king is!
So, which king will prevail? The fate of Landora is your hands.

Mischief

“MISCHIEF!” is a family friendly multi-player game that features classic gameplay, that fans of traditional board-games will appreciate. Control one of four mischievous goblins seeking to earn their riches, and purchase the four mystical trinkets from across the realm. If things aren’t going your way, throw down a ‘Mischief’ card that will mess things up for the other players – Steal their items, teleport them away or just make them lose their precious gold! Featuring simple intuitive controls and cure colorful graphics, “MISCHIEF!” should keep you, and maybe your own little Mischiefs, entertained for hours!

Polarity

Polarity is based on a boardgame we all remember from our childhood: The Labyrinth, more commonly known as “the one where you tilt the board around to avoid the ball from falling into holes”.
Contrary to the original game, tilting the iPad has little effect on the direction of the ball. Instead you are to travel around the board attracting and deflecting yourself from the magnetic power plants by switching their polarity.

They See Me Rolling

Experience the next generation of labyrinth games! They See Me Rolling brings new life to an old genre, using open environments, dynamic obstacles and a revolutionary advancement system. Controlling a lonely and previously immobile rock yearning for the power of flight, you must navigate unique environments on your quest to steal the sandals of Hermes and finally fulfill your dream.

Jungleprod

Jungleprod is the latest sensation to hit the iPad! Using the iPad’s touchfunctions you will get a truly breathtaking experience swiping through the jungle! Tread carefully because the jungle is as lively as ever. Beware of Crocodiles, monkeys, and other jungle critters on your way to the treasure!

Also, the 3DSMax Batch Export script has been updated with a small bug fix – Thanks “Keen”!

Currently going through my yearly fall and winter teaching sessions at Future Games in Stockholm. First thing I had the new class of students do this year was to build a UDK iPad board game, after just three days of teaching. The results were impressive, I will put it up here in my news later this year!

I have written a step by step walkthrough tutorial on:

nDo2 is a new tool that hooks into Photoshop, and allows you to paint and draw normal maps directly in Photoshop.

That aside, I recently read through a couple of game design books for my course at Future Games.

Spending the month in the Philippines at the moment of all places. Vacation. Great place. The climate is a bit too warm perhaps but life feels free and relaxing here. Flying back next weekend, and then I will begin teaching my regular yearly courses at Future Games until February.

In this DVD Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong continues his series and goes through the entire production of creating an iOS game using UDK. Sjoerd starts with a blank scene and immediately begins placing custom meshes and then goes into mobile materials, particles, sounds, and fog. Sjoerd then demonstrates setting up the plane, creating a joystick to control the plane, adding speed/fire buttons, creating destroyable ground targets using prefabs, adding a scoring system and time limits, creating the full HUD and compiling the final. Finally Sjoerd goes into great detail demonstrating how his team ported “The Ball” from PC to iOS.

You will also learn from an Unreal Master exactly how to create or port your games to iOS for playing on iphone/ipad devices.

Send me a mail – me@hourences.com – if you are interested and want to hear more!

And I came across a couple of interesting articles, books, and a program:

Dave’s Mapper – A top down map generator. Can’t really use it for anything serious, but it may give you some inspiration when you try to come up with a floorplan. It is actually remarkably UT’ish/Quake’ish what it generates :)
Modular Environments in UDK – A tutorial from my friend Thiago Klafke on creating modular meshes for use in the UDK (or other engines if you wish).
Motivating Players in Open World Games - An article on game and level design in open world games from someone from Bethesda.
Spacescape – Free star texture generator.

Also I just bought a couple of books, two most notable ones are:

Pictorial Encyclopedia of Historic Architectural Plans, Details and Elements – Reference guide with nothing more than side and top sketches of parts of historical buildings.
Architecture Form, Space, and Order - Very readable. Just enough text, and thousands of pictures. Really nice book if you want to developer a better understanding of architecture and you don’t want to read hundreds of pages of heavy academical text.

Also have two game design books to still go through, and a book on castles. I figured since games are usually about assault/defend, lets read some in-depth info on castle design.

I made some changes to the site. I removed a directory with images that were normally no longer used (I hope) and I fixed a few broken images and bits of text that messed up when it got ported over to WordPress. I also moved all large images back from the secondary host to the host the website itself is on too, after someone complained he could not see the externally referenced images. They should also load faster now. Let me know if some images ported over incorrectly.

I am currently working on some mobile Unreal Engine projects. I am working on a small kismet only mobile game that will be used for a new video for Eat3D, and we are porting over The Ball. We got it running at 30-40 FPS all the way through the first 3 levels actually, so that is really promising and these mobile devices are getting really powerful lately. More on that later when things solidify a bit more. Will also be traveling a lot later this year for a long vacation, and I will be back to teaching at Future Games in fall, until late winter 2012.

Quite a few stories popping up lately about excessive crunch and other such scandals. First we had the LA Noir Credit scandal and the stories about management and excessive crunch, now horror stories about Gameloft in New Zealand surfaced. It is really disgraceful, criminal even as far as I am concerned. I read a story of a a guy who was made to work 16 hours every day for almost half a year long while having a 3 month old baby at home… That shows just how incredibly immature the industry still is. Meanwhile the IGDA which is suppose to represent and defend our interests as developers has proven yet again that it really does not care for its members and is unable to stand up for us. This is just one out of many scandals that they have failed to respond to (Tim Langdell anyone? – and check out his amusing performance in court too), making me wonder exactly what its purpose really is…
There seems to be growing awareness of the excessive crunch problem though, even among junior developers, and each and every one of these stories that surfaces will further our cause, but there is more to be done. We need an increased awareness and opposition. Excessive crunch without a solid and fair compensation package is absolutely unacceptable!

A website dedicated to the topic popped up a few days ago: I Love Crunch