www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv0NAueoXnI

The point here is that both players see the same view of the game, so that when you outrun your opponent far enough he can not see his bike anymore. Increase the distance a bit more and he explodes and you get a point.

On the other hand, you will not see much of the track ahead when you are in the lead. This provides a quite natural negative feedback loop, which is good. Negative feedback loops means that the player in the lead is given a disadvantage.

What do you all think? Looks fun?

This is a heat pattern from “Mima”, one of the moons orbiting Saturn, you can read more about it here . The reason for this post is not to share space gossip with you though. I was responsible for a nasty scare a few days back. My victim, Profilar Per, has requested various pastries and lazy Monday afternoon diversion as redemption:

• A poem
• Make a mess – clean it up – an inspirational Mac story
• Spy Party

Have a great day and remember to vote for Gore

Joel

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

To decide who should get the rights to the one glorious cream puff (got a better word for it? – let me know) that arrived here at the office this morning, we put together a comp inspired by the contest the Swedish MX site, MX Star, is currently hosting here: “Vinn spelet Mad Skills Motocross”. Feel free to go tease,  push or compete with our Swedish friends.

While competing I realized that some of you might have missed out on last week replay update.

You have to download the game again as the update did not roll out with the autoupdate. Just go to your Mad Skills account , log in and download the new version. In time attack you will be able to check your replays!

The 1 kilo cream monster got us all a bit shaky – 20 minutes of hardcore office swearing and the heavenly pastry was MINE – my stomach aches now.

Before I got to enjoy my prize we had to quickly go through the results though. The competition triggered a couple of wagers, as you can see below, we believed Tobias would win….but he did not:

—————————————-

Have  a great Wednesday!

Joel

I want to let you know about some of the games I play and that I find inspirational. This post is about a game with really, really nice physics: Cortex Command. The developers, Data Realms, also use an interesting business model.

What’s it all about then? Well, it’s not finished yet, but it’s a great sandbox to play around with. It’s got pixel-perfect physics. Also, you know how recent big games brag about “destructible terrain”? Cortex Command has destructible everything. Blow stuff up and watch the pixels and parts flail around, or dig a tunnel with the “digger” to get to your enemy (Worms, anyone?).

Check out the video below, it’s a bit hard to see the details so watch it in full screen. Then go to the official site: Cortex Command

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8gdIcdVkEM

There’s a free demo to try out.

“But”, you are probably not thinking, “What about the business model?”

Well, Cortex Command is not nearly finished and they have been charging for it for years now. The money they get from that helps them keep developing the game. And that is interesting to us. By accepting pre-orders, we could embark on making a bigger game.

But, even more important, they get valuable feedback from their customers. Potential customers might say that they would like to have this and that feature, but do they pay for it? By charging money during development, Data Realms get hard data on what customers really do like as they put their money where their mouth is.

Money and Feedback. Sweet. In Sweden, we call that “killing two marketers with one blow“.

If you save the score for each game session you will end up with a database similar to the scores table below.

The example above has two game sessions. In the game called A there were two players and in the game called B three players. If we look at player 1, we can see that she lost the first game but won the second.

Usually we’d like to look at all the game data we’ve stored and say how many game sessions a particular player has won. But how do we do that automatically with a database SQL query? It seems simple enough since it’s such a small table, but it can be a little more tricky than you would first expect.

Below is one way to do this. The idea is that we calculate the total number of games the player has participated in and subract the number of games she lost.

SELECT total.number - lost.number
FROM

(SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT scores.game) AS number
 FROM scores 
 WHERE scores.player = '1')
AS total,

(SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT my_scores.game) AS number
 FROM scores AS my_scores
   INNER JOIN scores AS other_scores
   ON my_scores.game = other_scores.game
 WHERE my_scores.score < other_scores.score
   AND my_scores.player = '1')
AS lost;

So if you’re making a game that saves scores this code might come in handy for you.

Do you see what would happen if two players have the same score?
Do you know how you can improve the performance?

The spring finally hit Umeå, I’m off to enjoy it

Have a great weekend

Peter

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

We all enjoyed a really long weekend here at Turborilla. I finally got my Braid adventure started, f’n ey that is an amazing game. As Braid our last newsletter got a fair bit of positive feedback. We share one of the articles, a short list of a few really cool games, below.

From the Turborilla newsletter:

“5 games you should check out:

Joel joined us a few weeks back. Among other things he will take care of spreading “Mad Skills Motocross” to the world. As he got to know us we ended up talking a fair bit about which games we were in to at the moment. The list was actually not as long as you would expect and surprisingly uniform. In case you`ve missed out on any of the games at the top five list we compiled below make sure you go check it out:

• Minecraft – Amazingly simple and fun concept. I’d describe it as massively multiplayer lego-building with survival mode.
• Spelunky – As an Indiana Jones like adventurer you will save the damsel on every level, which are randomly generated. Very interesting situations can arise from this game’s simple rules. Windows only.
• Machinarium – Haven’t played it yet? Go do it now. Gorgeous point-and-click adventure reviving the genre.
• Sumotori - The silliest man-made thing to date. Have a good laugh with it.
• Dicewars – Risk, but simpler and more fun. I’ve wasted hours here. There’s a multiplayer version out there when you feel ready.l “

I am off to an exciting meeting with 24MX

Take Care

Joel