Follow the development of Mad Skills Motocross. Screenshots, videos, implementation details, gameplay ideas. http://turborilla.com Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:20:25 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/riding-a-snowmobile/motocross-hybrid.html We enjoyed a wonderful day on Sunday, the sun was shining and the snow glittered. Also, it wasn't very cold. A perfect day for some motocross riding. A friend of mine have bought a snowmobile traction mat kit for his motocross, along with a ski for replacing the front wheel with. Thus making the motocross able to go in very deep snow like a snowmobile. The kit is called The Explorer (http://www.explorermoto.com/).Check out some pictures where we take it for a spin on a motocross track: We should make a game out of this :) Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:00:40 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/mad-skills-motocross-forums.html Finally we have sorted out some proper forum software for discussing Mad Skills Motocross. There always was a forum here on Turborilla, but we didn't really promote it and it was messy and buggy. Now we have fixed this with a brand new install of Simple Machines Forum, and we are pimping it all over the place. Please help us get some discussions going, since it needs interesting conversations to pull people in and it needs people to provide interesting conversations. Catch 22 in all its glory.So, without further ado: Brand New Mad Skills Motocross Forums (forums/) Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:06:36 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/multiple-use-labor-element.html manual (http://www.planetmule.com/how-to-play) or seen the (soon to come) instruction video you won't have a chance to understand this game. It's probably the genre furthest away from Mad Skills Motocross.About a year ago Blue Systems contacted us with the idea of a remake, and since then we've been working on it. Now it feels great to finally release it. The development has been a bumpy ride where we've tried lots of different play styles and graphics. What we settled on is what you can find here: www.planetmule.com (http://www.planetmule.com/) . As I'm writing this Planet M.U.L.E. has over 2600 registered users and the number has been growing steadily since the release. With all the good feedback from the fans we're now working on getting an update out to improve the game. Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:27:37 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/grappling-hook.html It's hard for indie games to get attention in today's saturated market where games that cost more than a bag of peanuts gets hate-mailed into oblivion. Therefore we need to stick together, and do a bit of cross-promotion now and then.Me and Christian of SpeedRunGames made a deal: I review his game, he reviews mine.Now, don't think I am going to go easy on him just because we have a deal, that would make it all pointless and ruin everyone's day. So let's get on with the review of Grappling Hook.Grappling Hook Demo (http://ghook.speedrungames.com/)QAn9mw5wPNo Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:11:43 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/the-next-feature.html The results of the poll? In strong favor of Online Multiplayer: As you can see, not many voted. So, for the next time you know that your vote really makes a difference. So, time for me to dig down and start working on those ip-numbers, packets, NATs, latencies, TCP, UDP and what have you. I'm pretty good at this stuff and I think I'll enjoy most of it. The boring part will, as always, be the GUI code. Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:02:22 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/most-wanted-feature.html Mad Skills Motocross was released two months ago, but that does not stop us from updating and adding new features. However, we are uncertain as to which way to go now. So, we thought, we need quantitative feedback from fans and customers.Please, help us. Multiplayer or different difficulty levels? Sharing tracks, or scoreboards? Cast your vote now (http://www.madskillsmotocross.com/most-wanted-feature) .Thanks for helping us making Mad Skills Motocross even better. Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:45:09 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/mad-competition-at-loading.se.html Loading.se (http://loading.se/), a swedish gaming website, recently held a competition. The challenge was to get the fastest time possible on the track 'Andover' in the demo of Mad Skills Motocross (http://www.madskillsmotocross.com/). The five fastest times won a free full version.I don't know what I was expecting really, but the skills of the competitors blew me away. They crushed my best time by almost 10 seconds, and I bloody made the game. Check out the five best races in the video below:uJBBCjqeTiYResults: Lövet (33.29) Avgrundsvrål (37.73) Troppi (38.14) RoadHazard (38.38) Narcissus (39.36) Congratulations to the winners. PS. I think a combination of RoadHazard's first few seconds and the rest Lövets race would be able to push below 30 seconds Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:16:08 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/mad-skills-wii-remote.html As you may know (http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/) it's possible to connect a Wii Remote to your PC. The guy doing our gameplay videos (hello Lars) did this recently and configured it for Mad Skills Motocross. This was his impression:Shit, it owns to play with the Wiimote :D. For the sake of thefeeling I've also added Rumble on the gas. (H) You notice thedifference much more in Turbocharged. It's real lovely to do abackflip and then straighten up before landing by turning your handsinstead of pushing a button.Have a look at the video below to see it in action. If you have a Wii Remote and are interested in how to set it up for MSM, please drop a mail to peter@turborilla.com (mailto:peter@turborilla.com).eV8Ft2shnu0 Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:00:25 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/mad-skills-motocross-coming-soon.html I know you have heard it before, but a release date has been set for Mad Skills Motocross. This time it is for real though, and we have even gone live with the website. Check it out, if you want to know the date of release: www.MadSkillsMotocross.com (http://www.MadSkillsMotocross.com)The game has both grown and shrunk in scope since the first plan was made. This is always the case in games development, I think, because a very large part of developing a game is to experiment and see what works and what doesn't. Keep reading to find out how the game is structured nowadays. Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Thu, 16 Jul 2009 07:38:18 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/inspired-by-braid.html Part of being a game developer is the chore of playing other games to find inspiration and ideas. The much-hyped (for an indie game) Braid (http://braid-game.com/) was recently released for Windows, and I just had to try it. Did that, and bought it immediately. It's a brilliant game and you should all try out the demo at least.So what has this got to do with Mad Skills Motocross, you ask? Stop playing around and get that game finished already you lazy bum, you say.I agree. However, I did get an idea from Braid. It has been done before, but this got me thinking about it. In Braid, you can play the next level even if you didn't manage to complete the previous. The mere action of playing a level unlocks the next one, so you are forced to try the levels in order, but not to complete them in order.Frankly, Braid would have been unplayable without this particular feature of its meta-structure. The puzzles are really intelligently constructed, but you still get frustrated sometimes when you can't complete them. All you need to do is continue playing and bend your mind around a few other puzzles, and then go back and complete the unfinished ones.Invaluable, because otherwise I would have shut down the game when I got frustrated. Most likely I would have returned to it later to bang my head against that particular puzzle again, but it is so much more fun to keep playing other levels than to stop playing.So that's how we are going to do it in Mad Skills Motocross, I believe. When you play the first race the second race is unlocked, and so on. But to continue to the next division, you have to win all races in the current division. So when you get stuck, just play the next race to improve your skills.What do you all think of this? Sounds like a good idea? We'd love to hear your feedback in the forums (forums) or by mail (contact). Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:50:47 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/timestepping.html 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 though 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 (timestepping.html) 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.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 is: It makes your game run smoother. / Peter Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:52:56 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/backflip-bonanza.html A commenter on newgrounds (http://urkel.newgrounds.com/news/post/283049) had this to said after watching the trailers: looks like every other motocross game where you can lean forward and backwards but never quite pull off a flip So I had to make this video to shut him up:TMtkc6Kpe8I Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:07:50 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/time-attack.html Right now we are working on the Time Attack mode. In this mode you can race against yourself, at least against your previously best time. This is the shit, It really is, it's just so much fun trying to shave a few tenths of a second from your previous time. But what if I activate the nitro before instead of after that jump over there? Let's try it. Oh, regarding the nitro. In an earlier diary entry (developer-diary/october--07--spices-and-menus.html) I said that nitro doesn't add anything to the gameplay because it's all about skill. Well, it turns out that now that we have one Arcade mode and one Simulation mode, we can happily add all sorts of crazy power-ups to Arcade and still keep Simulation intact for the purists. This was really the best solution I think, since the testers said that the game is crazy fun but will get a bit boring without new stuff coming up all the time.So now we have the Jumparoo, Nitro, Glider and Jetpack. They are all great fun, and more or less useful. I think we need one more, because they are so much fun thinking up. We have had some great brainstorming sessions over here Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:21:46 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/how-to-get-a-free-beta.html We have decided to release a free beta version of Mad Skills Motocross. There is a catch though, we won't release it until we have 1001 fans on our Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mad-Skills-Motocross/58755926184). So if you want to get the beta version of Mad Skills Motocross when we reach the magic number of fans, just go to the fan page and become a fan. It is very important that you actually become a fan, otherwise we cannot contact you to give you the secret download link. Hurry up, things can happen quickly on Facebook.On that page we have also uploaded concept art, screenshots and videos. To check them out, just go there (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mad-Skills-Motocross/58755926184). You don't even need a Facebook user to access the page. Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:32:44 +0100 http://turborilla.com/developer-diary/vimeo-doesnt-like-games.html Apparently, Vimeo (where we hosted our latest trailer) doesn't like games. We received an email today saying that our video was removed because it violated their upload rules. Vimeo does not allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, or any other video gaming video that simply depicts individuals playing a video game. I don't know why they do that, but it also happened to Wolfire (http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/vimeowned/). Developer diary - Turborilla Developer Diary Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:07:02 +0100