Hey there

The blog is online again. Have been lazy in keeping it up and running and though google page rank might not like me for it, I don’t think anyone got hurt. Anyway, two blog posts got lost. The first being a “I’m taking a break” message and the second one being a guest post by Doidel, a member of bbgamezone.net.

From now on I will occasionally update the blog with new content and I’m going to take a little more care of it.

Here is the post by Doidel again so you don’t have to miss out on his little tutorial:

Creating Spells with Photoshop

Many browsergame developers sooner or later come to the point where they must create spell graphics, may they be for attack, defense or buffing teammates. So did I, and my chosen tool turned out to be Photoshop 7, an old yet adequate version for a beginner. Though no knowledge of painting nor using Photoshop you’ll be able to create two spells alike mine within less than 3 hours. Just follow these four steps:

- Run through this tutorial (10 min)
- And run through this tutorial too (10 min)
- Read this in order to use “Lens Flare” with transparent backgrounds (5 min)
- Create your own spells (1 hour per spell in my case)
- Check that your image has a transparent background, then click “File – Save for Web” and choose “PNG-24″ from the format list. This will save your image with a transparent background (By now, all modern browsers display PNGs correctly).

How to create an animated spell for my browsergame?

The basic idea is quite simple:

Either…
With javascript, preload all spell frames (A frame is a single image in this case, played one by another they become an animation) and iterate through them. These pictures will be displayed as a series for the user, and still you have a PNGs quality and transparency. It is recommended to use “Sprites” in this case, i.e. having the frame series within one picture. Use the css background-position property to iterate through the frames.

Or…
Use a javascript framework (e.g. jquery or mootools) and use the Fx libraries. With them you can move objects around, let them fade, resize them and much more.

All the best
Doidel

Have you seen the news today? Anything about politics? Anything about Muslim extremists? I saw the news today. I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw people, both male and female, talk in riddles and ask the same questions over and over again without listening to the answer. Those people, politicians, Muslim extremists, anti-Muslim extremists, journalists, … They didn’t care about who they were talking to. They didn’t care for the answer. They didn’t care for the message. The didn’t care about building something valuable with the person they were speaking to. They only cared about making a point.

Read more…

While there was a competition over at BBGameZone we started an irc channel for the developers to talk about their games and to review the competition. This irc channel was so much fun that, after the competition was over, we decided to create a more general #bbg channel on freenode. Untill now it has been more a thing for members of BBGameZone, but now I’m inviting you to join us!

I added this to the “Projects Page”. Here is a direct link (fill in a nickname and #bbg as channel): http://webchat.freenode.net/

Via Twitter, @tjgillis asked his followers for any links on building game maps. I’m still planning to do a more in-depth article on programming game maps for browser based games but for now I’m sharing these bookmarks. This list is only about a few aspects of programming game maps so if you have any questions please leave a comment, I’ll be happy to answer it.

Definitely check this out:

// Tile Based Games

// Pathfinding

// Isometric and Tile-based Games

If you need more:

// Drawing isometric game worlds

// ISOMETRIC GAME – PART 1

// Isometric ‘n’ Hexagonal Maps

// Implementing Iso and Iso Hex Grids

// Moving sprites between tiles in an Isometric world

// MoveableMap

// Javascript Programming

// Path Finding on Tile based Maps

// Game Boards

// Traversing an Isometric Ground Map

// There’s some stuff on maps at Amit’s

// Mouse Maps for Isometric Height Maps

I justed checked in to TED talks to get my weekly portion of awesomeness. You just have to see this.

There’s much to think about here. Instead of sharing my own thoughts on the subject though, I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions. Please leave a comment with your thoughts!

Just a lil’ something of my own, Summary:
1. We need to create more games that engage players to change the real world.
2. How are we going to do this? How do we create that ‘link’ between the real world and a virtual world?
3. How can we get the most out of it? How can we step our game up from experiment to full-powered life-skill-teaching game?

One of my concerns lately is the quality of new browser games (facebook, Evony, …). I’m afraid that money will always be more important than good education…

I just cleaned up and commented a basic game map. It’s for you, free to use. I hope I can help some one by giving away this code. It’s nothing “big” or “difficult” but it might help some of you who are really starting out in making browser games. Also, I’m giving away my hand drawn tile set for free. I hope you like my programmer art ;D.

Any feedback, suggestions, bug reports and requests are more than welcome. Especially I would love it if people would take my basic map and do a lot more with it. At the moment I have a slightly more advanced version for the General’s Map prototype, which has unit movement and AJAX calls — but I thought that giving away this basic map would be a lot more useful for most people.

Disclaimer: It’s only tested with Google Chrome on windows.

Features:

• Tile rendering in multiple layers
• Clickable objects
• Movement by using the arrow keys

The HTML file

The javascript file

Free Hand Drawn Tileset

Demo

Hope you like it!

I run this blog for no money and I ask for no money, and I try to keep it add free, because I love what I do. I’d love to see the PBBG community work better together to create better games, that’s exactly why I’m doing stuff like this. That said, if you really want to donate I wouldn’t want to take away that from you, so here’s a nice lil’ button:

The browser based game zone competition, I announced a while ago, has ended. Sadly a few entries couldn’t finish in time, due to different reasons. The final entries and their score you can find here.

The winner

Wicked Dead came out this competition as the winner and it is a fun game, you should definitely check it out.

Learn from the process

The most interesting about the BBGameZone competitions are not the finished games though but it is watching the process they went through. So if you want to read through the game developers’ updates check out this page.

Chris, a reputable member on the BBGameZone forums, was so kind to “write down” his view on the development of his game during this competition:

Read more…

Perhaps you are reading this blog because you are looking for some inspiration, tips or guidance in game design. That’s very good but sometimes I meet people (on bbgamezone for example) who want to know how to design a game. This is a silly question. Game design is not hard. You only have to do it.

This is just a very short blog post to remind you that game design is not hard. There is no right way to design a game. There is no magical success formula or machine to master. If you have played a game you can design a game. Off course it won’t be a good game design, yet.

You don’t have to learn game design and you can’t master it. You can only improve.

Read more…

It’s one of the most important questions you can ask a game designer. Still every designer will have a different answer. I think this answer may just define what sort of designer he is, what drives him and what his goals are. So if anybody ever ask you this question, be ready to give your own answer.

“What is a good game?”

Read more…

If you are having a hard time to finish your PBBG projects and if you are looking for motivation you should listen up! The bbgamezone community is organising it’s second PBBG competition.

There are no prizes to win but the competition should motivate you to code your game a whole lot faster. Your objective? Create a working game in one month! This should motivate some people to start coding their game and also to prototype neat ideas. If you check out the people that already started in the competition you will see that there are some very interesting ideas.

The use of code snippets from previous projects is encouraged. So if you have a very basic game already you can probably join in too. If you are not joining the competition you should at least follow the people updating on their progress. Very interesting!

For more information you should check out the bbgamezone forum:

Official competition 2010

Competition progress

Everybody can join but be fast since the competition has started already!