Gravmari Released!

After fifteen weeks, Hubris Arts has completed its first game, Gravmari, directed by Max Rebuschatis.
The game is a journey through the depths of space in a strange and alien ship called the Playertoid. It was inspired by Katamari Damacy, Kubrick’s 2001, the efforts of NASA, and, most importantly, dreams of floating through the cosmos. We [...]

Collision Detection with Enneatrees

Many of my games boil down to, at some level, a large collection of circles (or spheres) interacting with each other. I use circles for collision detection, and otherwise whenever I can for organization, because the results look more natural than using boxes. If you organize using boxes, your simulation will tend to [...]

New game: “SpaceBattle”

Over the last week, I took a break from Dana and wrote a Geometry Wars-style action game. The main idea the game explores is virtuosity. Essentially there is so much to control that our puny human brains cannot comprehend it all for a long time; the game is engineered to have a very [...]

Braid!

I just had my mind blown by the trial of Braid, by Jonathan Blow, which just came out on XBox Live Arcade. This is the most interesting puzzle game I have played in many years. It’s a platformer about playing with time, and in incorporates this very effectively to allow clever solutions to [...]

Making Twilight Imperium a bit less random

Twilight Imperium is a marvelous board game introduced to gamedev by Hagan Koopman (“King Koopman?”) some time ago. It is ridiculously complicated, has a 60 page dense rule book, and takes 15 hours to play if everybody already knows how to play. I used my roommates’ TI parties as an excuse to go [...]

Git Revolution

I’ve been learning about git, and have generally been excited about the distributed model. I mean, I used svk, but a robust distributed model is quite exciting. Tonight I had a completely crazy idea: to make a game around git.
I brainstormed and I brainstormed, many brains rained. And then it hit me: [...]

Fregl: an introduction to FRP

I’ve been mentioning quite a bit about my latest FRP implementation. First things first: You can find it here. The implementation is called “Fregl”, for “Functional Reactive Game Library”, roughly. But I thought I would take a moment to describe it and some of the directions I plan on taking it. [...]

Sleepless Night

It’s one of those nights again. A night I am tired enough to sleep, but I just don’t want to for a reason that evades me. Instead, I’m staying up watching bad movies and wasting time. One way, I thought, to waste time would be to write some nonsense in my blog.
My [...]

FRP: What’s the big deal?

I really have to get to bed, but I just did a little test and am so excited I need to say something:
AFRP sucks. The incredible amount of trouble I had to go through just to implement extremely simple physics with a dynamic number of balls within FRP (none of that cheating by factoring [...]

Revolution Revised

We playtested Revolution at GameDev tonight. Despite the very vague rules, and the GMs mostly making it up as we go along, the playtest went pretty well and showed the game definitely had potential.
After the playtest, I rewrote the rules incorporating a lot of the stuff we settled on (and some new stuff).
It was [...]