Over time, I have developed a small portfolio of serious games. Let's make a list. 1. i18n-puzzles.com i18n-puzzles.com is a serious game that teaches programmers how to deal with internationalization problems. Internationalization (abbrivated as i18n ) is the art of making software suitable for an international audience. You can …
I just released version 0.7 of Food Chain Farm, my casual space ecosystem sim. Get it while its hot ! So let's talk about this release. What's new in this release? What have I learned along the way? And when will the game be finally done? What's new? It's fair …
Just a couple of weeks ago I released version 0.5 of Food Chain Farm ! This release has been a year in the making and has a ton of new stuff. Today, I want to dive deeper into one aspect: the improved art style. The game has a lot of …
We tested Food Chain Farm for the 3rd time in a classroom setting, with great results. So, how does that actually work in practice? We use a modified version of the game. The first three "levels" are really just simulations. Students have to watch clouds of oxygen and carbon dioxide …
As mentioned before , my goal is to make an educational game. After more than a year of quiet behind-the-scenes development, Food Chain Farm is ready to come out. It is a construction game in a fun farm environment, with a tinge of biology education. In the beginning, you see a …
Today's post is for the programmers: it's a bit technical. I finally solved a long-standing performance issue in Happy Usagi , and I thought I'd share my notes. The issue This was the problem: Happy Usagi was sometimes a bit jittery or choppy. The graphics weren't entirely smooth, there was a …
This is the second part of my series about Speedhacking. Last week I looked at the reasons why you should participate, now I'm going to give some tips for beginners. Are you going to join a speedhack, or other type of game jam, for the first time? Here are some …
Speedhacks (a.k.a Game jams), are competitions where you design and implement a complete game, from scratch, in an extremely short time limit (typically one weekend, or 72 hours). I'm a frequent participant and organizer of these events for the Allegro community (including the upcoming TINS competition, more on …
When I discussed educational games , I omitted one very common type: games that teach you how to play the game itself. Last week I participated in the Indie Game Show & Tell in Amsterdam . And there I learned about self-explanatory games, and also the fact that Happy Usagi currently sucks at …
Just a quick post to show what I've been working on. I finally managed to get Happy Usagi to run inside an android emulator: This is a huge step! So far I've only made games for Windows and Linux. Getting them to run on Android has been a major goal …
As I mentioned at the start of this blog , in the future I want to focus on creating educational games. The term 'educational game' means different things to different people, and it's also somewhat of a buzzword nowadays. Here I want to explain what 'educational' means to me. What type …
This Easter holiday I took a break from working on a game about bunnies, so that I could.... work on another game about bunnies. Apart from the bunny aspect though, it's actually a very different kind of game. It's a text adventure . The game is called B.U.N. (Bunny's …
" Hallway usability testing" means doing a quick usability test with somebody you found in the hallway, or in this context, my little nephews during a family visit. Let them play and observe how they cope with your software. Can they figure out the game without instructions? Do they get stuck …
As you know, I'm working on a game titled Happy Usagi No Yuki Fortress . The other day a colleague remarked that this sounds a lot like Usagi Yojimbo , also of Commodore 64 fame: Well that makes a lot of sense! Usagi is simply the Japanese word for rabbit. Yuki means …
For the next version of Happy Usagi , we are giving each bunny its own look. I say "we", but actually most of the hard work is done by Olivia, graphic designer and source of inspiration for many helixsoft games. Would you like to hear details on how we draw the …
Come and join me on my quest for the holy grail! Or in this case, my quest to develop and independently publish computer games! Ni! Developing games is my passion. When I was a kid I already wrote my own version of tetris on a ZX spectrum . In more recent …