Working on my 2d bone editor...

Awesome tiles

I just found this page (Lost Garden) which has some awesome graphics available for indie projects :D

Image from the

Manimator

I'm currently going through my old projects and sorting out the useful stuff from the broken crap. Found this useful little tool for managing sprite animations (nevermind the name - horrible pun).

Marker World

Dark Patton vs The Darkness

This is actually an old article, but I forgot to publish the link until now :P. Seems like Mike Patton is more than just a great musician, but also a promising voice over actor (at least for disturbing voices ;). Now if only the game's as cool as it looks.

Image taken from futuregamez.net

Dawn of War hacking again

I haven't had the time or effort to code much lately - the job's taking up most of my daytime and I'm usually too tired to code when I get home. But I've managed to dedicate a couple of hours the last couple of days to try and make some advancements on Soulreaper. Lately I've been thinking about the possibility of making the game 3d. I've not decided to go with this option though - I'm just checking out the possibilities. As a part of this, I've removed the dust from my old project of hacking the DoW texture, model and animation formats, and added texture preview capabilities to my model viewer.

Models and textures are taken from Dawn of War by Relic Entertainment

Ultimate Duck Hunter

Boring Games

I just read an interesting article over at Gamasutra.com about how games are still considered an exotic media, and how making it more mundane probably will increase its mass appeal and give them a more important role in our everyday life.

More Starcraft

The official gamplay video is here!! You must check this out!

edit
You can now watch it directly from gametrailers.com!

Blizzard.. how could you?

starcraft2.com

You've taken away my life the past couple of weeks with WoW and now this? Starcraft II is finally announced and it's gonna rock my world. Damn... there goes all my ambitions for the upcoming year. Here are a couple of teasers. You can find trailers at starcraft2.com or at gametrailers.com.

Wet Dreams

BioShock is one of the games I'm definitely looking forward to! We know that it's got a powerful rendering engine since it's based on Unreal Engine 3, but what makes it stand out is its custom water rendering. Irrational Games have just released another teaser and this time around it's all water rendering - check it out.

If you're interested in water rendering then check out these link:

• Animation and Rendering of Complex Water Surfaces
• Gamasutra - Deep-Water Animation and Rendering
• Gamedev - Realistic Natural Effect Rendering: Water I
• Gamedev - The Water Effect Explained
• Realistic Water Rendering, by Yann L
  

I chose life!

I got home from work and was feeling restless. I needed something - but I didn't know what. Was it beer or cigarettes? Food or perhaps even drugs? No, the feeling was different. But What? It was the oh so familiar feeling of computer game cravings!

I have been too busy to play any computer games for a couple of weeks. I've been working a lot, and all my spare time has been spent either with my girl friend, my homies or at home working on something game related (coding, blogging, drawing).

I looked through all my games, but I couldn't find one that I wanted to play. Dark Crusade or perhaps Neverwinter Night 2? They would be great if I has someone to play with, but my internet connection is provided by the university and their firewall is a real Fort Knox.

But what about World of Warcraft? All my friends are playing it, and I know it works on the network! So it was decided, I would at least install it and poke around. After all, I am trying to develop games so I should at least check out the most popular of them all.

So I downloaded the download application (got to love that) and ran the exe. It seemed to work ok, so I read some different RSS feeds while waiting. But I was rather disappointed when I checked it after a short while - it baaarely progressed. I inspeced the different download options I had, and after a short while I realized this game wasn't meant to be downloaded by me - at least not using the official means.

I figured I'd try to find a torrent. There shouldn't be anything illegal with this (though you never know :P) since the game's already downloadable, and you pay for the game using credit card if you've downloaded the binaries. But I could of course not find any fast torrents either so there I was, stuck without the one game I wanted to play that evening.

So what's the moral of all this?
I chose life - but only 'cause I had no other options!

Final Fantasty XII Potion

My Prrrrecious Retrolicious!

If you're like me and remember the adventure games of the good ol' days you'll be pleased to hear that Sierra are re-releasing Kings Quest, Larry, Police Quest and Space Quest for modern PCs (now where's Quest for Glory?)! I'm not sure how they plan to make them run on modern computers and operating systems, but it seems like they're using technology from DOSBox - so I'm excited to see if they just bundle DOSBox with the games in their original DOS versions or if they've got some sort of exe-wrapper to make it all a bit more neat.

Here's the original article from dagbladet.no (in Norwegian).

R.I.P

I've just played R.I.P 3, and it was a disappointment after playing Crimsonland. The game is unbalanced, I don't find the graphics as appealing and it generally lacks the omph. If you're going to test just one of the top-down shooters I've listed, I'd recommend Crimsonland!

R.I.P. 3: The Last Hero

A couple of days ago I found this game. It's a top-down shooter with 6 different characters to choose from, level-ups and even vehicles at your disposal. I haven't played it yet, but it seems like it might be another top-down shooter for the Soulreaper inspiration list.

Crimsonland

I've just found a couple of more top-down shooters to add to the list (I'll add more posts later). Crimsonland is developed by 10tons, published by Reflexive and you can find a downloadable demo of the game here.

Now I wonder why they call this game crimsonland - could it be because it's the color which dominates the ground after playing the game for just a couple of seconds? If you like the game then you should try the two-player mode; it's excellent. A friend of mine and I played it with one 360 controller and a mouse/keyboard combo and both control schemes worked great.

War Angels

I just found a new game which uses a top-down view. It's called War Angels (as the title states) and it's still under development so I haven't tested it - but it seems cool!

Watch the teaser online here or download it here!

Evil Invasion

I've just found another top-down shooter! Evil Invasion is an rpg-meets-vertical-shooter (a bit like what we're aiming for with Soulreaper) created by VH Games. The gameplay is quite enjoyable even though it feels somewhat crude.

Baboo Violent 2

It's good to see another group working on a game based on a top-down view. Babo Violent 2 is a free multiplayer top-down shooter developed by RndLabs. I haven't tested it yet but it seems really cool.