Rising Star to publish Fragile in Europe

Rising Star games has announced it will publish tri-Cescendo’s Wii title, Fragile: Farewell Ruins in PAL territories.

“Fragile has a great team of creative designers who in turn have brought to life a beautiful art style that pushes the limits of the Wii console without compromising on gaming quality,” said Tyrone Walcott, product manager at Rising Star Games.

“This announcement will delight European gamers and the Otaku community. Rising Star Games has again shown its commitment to bring the best games from Japan.”

Just the kinda news I've been hoping for. Finally a reason to dust off the old Wii again.

Spring cleaning

Well it's that time again. Time to do some cleaning. Mostly this means I'll clean up my google accounts, fix my google ig page, I really need to organize my links better.

A couple cool stuff picked up this week, this blog, which is kind of design'ish related, I dunno, mostly gone through the stuff filed under typography so far, but I'll keep checking it out. I found this nifty font resource through that blog.

A friend sent me this link, which says Tales of Vesperia is coming for PS3. And it also mentions a new Tales of game for the Wii; happy days. Hopefully not related to april fools, most likely not as a PS3 release of Vesperia has been kind of a given.

iPhone GUI elements nicely separated and laid out in a photoshop file, only chopped up imagery, no recreated effects or such for the most part, nice to check out if your into interface design.

That's about it, happy easter. Time for another go at Folklore before bed.

DeeTexGen

This is an old project I found together with a few others, it's a simple texture editor created with win32 api and absolutely no classes or real structure behind it. I picked it up again however and added some new features, next thing to add is correct bitblit'ing of the bitmap instead of putting pixels as I had originally implemented the texture display drawing, you can actually see the drawing happening as it is right now :)


The current version can be downloaded from mediafire. It's a debug build and hopefully not all too unstable.

My future intentions for this app is to use it as an editor for a custom procedural texture format. Any new progress will be posted here.

FFXIII

The Final Fantasy XIII release date is closing in, especially if you live in Japan; Europe will have to wait until next year however, and here I was, waiting for an official release date sometime this year. Oh well, atleast there's a Square Enix Europe teaser site out there for FFXIII.

I'll just have to get back to Fallout 3 meanwhilst, Pacific Rift and TimeShift should drop in any day as well.

Back to reality

Yup, 2009 is here, happy new year and all that.

Must admit that this new years eve felt a little awkward and I wasn't really looking forward to going back to work; but now I'm here, after a couple of weeks off doing nothing but blowing off some steam.

So, now it's back to everyday life, resuming projects etc. PowerCell is closing up to a first official release; I'm currently modeling some levels for it so we get some content which makes the game worthy of release, it's really the only thing missing - more content.

Another game that's in development, slowly but surely; is "Minigolf 3D" - there's a blog here about it, maintained by the main dev.

I'll also resume the 2D game pretty soon, I do have a couple of guys that depend on me on that one after all.

That's about it, really, I've also embraced the fact recently that I am a gamer, and there's nothing wrong about that; I'll post some more thought on that in the future - I even have another project planned regarding the topic of gaming that I have "scheduled" for this summer; we'll see how that turns out.

2D Game Development

I've been working on a 2d engine in linux and windows, ever since I started playing Cave Story I've had the urge to create a 2d game; and I'm currently writing an engine with a game/editor ontop which should be pretty versatile and support any kind of 2d game project. Below is a current screenshot from the editor in action in Linux.

PowerCell follow-up

Yes, there is continued progress on PowerCell.

Currently PowerCell is developed 100% in Linux, and even though my initial goal for the game was a free, easy to pick up and play game, I have a couple of other guys working on it now who might think otherwise. It's too bad though since I think the linux community could use more free, open source games to forward and expand the linux gaming community.

There's also been talks of a PowerCell sequel with better graphics and physics. The current version of PowerCell is nearly complete as is, it just needs more content and a few final touches here and there, but overall I feel that the current engine is more than enough to create a release.

The first release should be coming soon enough, and in what scope that will be remains to be seen. I'll probably do a post-mortem on the game as well.

PowerCell

PowerCell is my most recent hobby project, I'm working on it alone when I feel like it, it uses Irrlicht and FMOD.

It's meant to be a small and lightweight project, with brainstormed gameplay elements; my primary goal is to make it fun to play and replay.

PowerCell gameplay preview 1 at YouTube.

It's been a while since I uploaded this video, and since then the game hasn't seen many updates. What I've been tackling since is mainly two things, the movement system which I've been trying to get to work properly scaled by time rather than FPS, and compiling and running it in Linux.

Linux is once again my main platform at home and while compiling and running the game in Linux have been pretty straight forward, converting the content to a Linux friendly format hasn't. The main problem is that I've been using IrrEdit as my main level editor, which is only available for windows presently. The XML files saved from the editor of course can't be opened with a default text editor in gnome since it doesn't recognize the format, not a major issue since vi takes care of that, so after going over the level files and changing case sensitivity issues, paths et.c. I've run into another issue, which is with the models themselves; it seems some of them have lost polygons on the way somewhere. Most likely a normals issue.

Now I just have to find a different way of getting 3d content into PowerCell, CSG modellers have crossed my mind and even the possibility of creating my own level editor for placing elements. Though the easiest and most painless way right now seems to be a windows partition where I can still run IrrEdit.

I might have to find a willing programmer to help me with the character movement issue and possibly adding a better physics engine.

More updates to come. I'm not ready to drop this project yet, unless it starts to deviate from my main goal.