Turborilla » Highlights

Moonstone Gore Mode?

Joel Smedberg — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:45:44 +0000

Turborilla is proud to be Bloody Bills's friend. We recently discovered an old Mad Skills suggestion of his and got excited: He points out that crazy crashes calls for crazy blood splatter. We are thinking "Moonstone gore mode":

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5CZ6TqCgps

Unfortunately the post got lost in a pile of changes going on at the time. What do you guys think?

We really want a "gore mode" ourselves so if we get 20 comments, from different individuals, saying "Yej - give us a Bloody Bill mode", we will give you (and ourselves) a "Bloody Bill mode" as a thank you for patiently waiting for the multiplayer (and to Tobias for working really hard on the multiplayer):

I am taking the rest of the day off as I have to prepare for a weekend long NHL 2010 war by zoning out to "Mogwai fear Satan"

Take Care!

Joel

A simple tip to keep a programmer sane

Tobias Andersson — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:49:59 +0000

As you may know, I am working on the upcoming multiplayer feature of Mad Skills Motocross. I really think this will take the game up to a whole new level of bone-shattering fun. And, it's fun to make.

There are a lot of design decisions to make as to how it should work. Different modes, options, buddy lists and so on. I'd like to share the prototyped game modes we are testing: Chase, Race and Trick as well as a tip that have kept my head straight and focused over the last couple of years as a developer.

Before that I'd like to thank Bloody Bill and Joel (who still struggles with "Sinks") - the last couple of days of harassment related to Bloody Bill's amazing race and Joel's big mouth has fueled the current dev phase. We're closing in, well on our way and maintaining great speed. Bloody Bill - keep practicing, you'll need it - Joel, shut up!

The three modes as follows:

Chase

Both players see the same view, as if playing on the same computer. This means that when one player gets a significant lead the other player will be left behind and even out of the view of the "camera". When that player's bike is not visible anymore, because it left the screen, it explodes and the leading player earns a point.

Then both bikes are reset at the same place and the chase starts again. Get a certain number of points to win.

Oh, and several tracks are chained together into one big track.

Race

Just a regular ol' race, first to the finish line wins. Exploding bikes might make an appearance, just for the sake of it.

Trick

Win the race by getting more stars than the opponent.

Oh yeah, the tip: Set a time for ending the day's work, at the end write down what you have done today and what you are supposed to do first thing tomorrow - doing this is the reason I am still sane. Very simple.

Take Care!

Tobias

Timestepping

Peter Sundqvist — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:52:56 +0000

Hi, this is my first dev diary entry even though I've been working at Turborilla for a while now. I plan to make more frequent posts in the future and tell you about what I'm doing and get some thoughts on programming out there. Currently I'm working on a half-secret project so I can't say much about that just yet.

However, if you're a games programmer you might find this interesting. I've wanted to write that article for quite some time and now I finally got around to do it. It's been bugging me that no other article on timestepping talks enough about vertical synchronization.

Read our Timestepping Article

In shot it says that you should use a fixed time step and strive to enable vsync. Then it explains what you should think about when making your timestepping algorithm based on that goal. It covers the problem when vsync rate is different from the targeted framerate and the likely superflousness, lag and unevenness (frame time variation) of interpolated draws.

Don't worry if you didn't understand the paragraph above. The non-programmer version goes like this: It makes your game run smoother.