Gameport
New website! Plus some news.
So it’s finally up! Like two years overdue, but hey, better late than never. It was supposed to be launched together with SPACEMAZERACE, but things rarely turn out as planned around here. There’s still some quirks to be ironed out, but overall most of it seems to work.
Some progress updates then:
Nimbus+ is coming along just fine, there’s been no real problems so far. There have been quite an up front tech investment for the ps3 port, however, and we’ve spent some time on fixing stuff properly so the tech can be used for future projects. While not necessary for the completion of Nimbus+, the extra time spent on that stuff will be a big time saver in the future as it will let us re-use the code. Also, it will be a while still before the game runs and renders as intended so we can start showing off some of the new stuff in the game.
The game also recently got a major deadline. We don’t want to say the exact date at this point, but it’s a bunch of months away and we’re looking to have the game complete by then.
We’d also like to release another free mini-game in the spring or early summer, but chances are that the workload on Nimbus+ will get so big there will be no time for prototyping. Besides, our next major project is more or less decided, so there is no real need for prototyping a new concept at this point. But we will see what happens!
Article source: http://noumenongames.com/?p=272
Flaskpost!
1 week ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
Ahoy mateys!
Time for this weeks Flaskpost, and time to review some of the important and interesting
things that have occurred since last time. First and most importantly, we are closing in on our current project for Blekinge Institute of Technology! Yesterday we pulled some playtesting muscle from our friends across the room, 12oClock. They are currently housing two interns from a local high school who both made extraordinary test subjects. Besides being sharp and having a eye for detail, they also fit the games intended audience.
We have been picking up SoulCalibur V here at Gameport, we have decided that everyone in the building should have at least one custom character. That way it will feel that much more personal when one gets beat up by our in house SoulCalibur sensei Felix, at Noumenon Games.
Also, we hope you notice our webpage got itself a facelift, we thought – keep it simple stupid =)
Have a good one until next time!
Sincerely,
Marcus
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=665
SPACEMAZERACE
A while back I was repping noumenon at a game jam at BTH, a local university. Memory is getting fuzzy but the time frame were 24 hours and the theme was a free interpretation of an image of space printed on a piece of paper. The next day, after about 13 hours of work, I called it done and didn’t touch it again. I actually wrote a blog post about the event, containing a download link to the game and detailing the development of it and some stuff around it, but apparently forgot to post it, heh.
Anyway, some month ago we started building a new website for noumenon and thought it would be cool to launch it together with a small game. So I fixed up the jam game.
We named it SPACEMAZERACE and it sort of plays like asteroids on a race track with simple side objectives (shoot and loot). The game is only seven short levels long, so consider it a bite sized mini-game or prototype. It’s made in GameMaker 8.1 (an excellent tool for rapid prototyping) so I have little knowledge about how well it works on platforms other than windows. Probably not at all unless you hack around with bootcamp or whatever, sorry guys.
SPACEMAZERACE.zip (windows) 4.76mb
Jukio Kallio, a good friend of mine made the music for it and the sound effects were made with bfxr.
So what about that website that was supposed to go live with the game? Well something broke and sebastian, who codes around here, had to leave for a trip over the weekend before he had the time to fix it. It’s up on monday instead, probably.
Article source: http://blog.noumenongames.com/?p=257
Jag vet vad du gjorde förra fredagen!
I fredags var vi högst vetenskapliga och konstaterade att det är skillnad mellan en liten kopp (till vänster i bild) och en stor kopp (till höger i bild) i volym, däremot verkar det som att en liten stark kopp är starkare än en stor stark kopp. Det godaste kaffet är alltså en liten stark kopp.
Det var sista dagen för vår prao Oliver och han var den första som låst upp achievementen “GamePort PRAO” som den mycket kompetenta PRAO han var så stog det härliga till med kladdkaka och glass till 16:00 fikat!
Vi var även ute på äventyr och gjorde oss av med cirka 25 stycken CTR-skärmar och massa kartonger som har stått runt och skräpat i olika vrår på kontoret.
Alla på kontoret hjälptes åt att lasta släpet fullt sendan var vi fyra tappra kämpar som tog oss till mitt ute i skogen och Mörrums återvinningscentral för att bli av med gårdagens framtid.
Ahoy! Flaskpost!
2 weeks ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
Captains log, earth date: 3/2 – 2012
So here we are again. It’s Friday, Marcus and Mario is playing around in 3D modeling programs trying to learn a thing or two. I’m playing around in Unity trying to create a thing or two.
On Monday me and Marcus boarded a train in Denmark and went back to our small peaceful town of Karlshamn after a weekend of jamming with awesome people.
The rest of the week has mostly been spent on consult work but we actually managed to get in some work on Mailstorm too. We taught Mario how to create map blocks with our system and he made some sweet stuff. Some bugs have been found and written down as well and are now waiting to be exterminated.
Since most of the tech stuff on the consult job is done I’ll probably be able to work a bit on Mailstorm next week.
Fredrik out.
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=579
Reporting back from Copenhagen!
3 weeks ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
Ahoy!
As we promised, here is a small chronicle of our trip to Copenhagen this weekend!
Nordic Game Jam is part of a larger international event known as the Global Game Jam. The Nordic Game Jam is the single biggest Jam with 290 registered developers in 2012.
Me and Fredrik took the train on Thursday, one day before the event started. Aboard, we met up with our friends Olle Lunddahl, Simon Gustafsson and Niklas Ström from Redgrim. It just happened to be Olle’s birthday so we made the entire train ride into a birthday party, complete with balloons, Champis, party hats and cake. We were off to a good start!
Despite of living less than three hours away, I’ve almost never been to Copenhagen before. The coolest thing we discovered almost immediately: Robots in the metro system. There are no humans operating the trains from a cockpit, it really gives the impression of a semi-intelligent master system. Very cool and a little creepy, it makes Stockholm’ metro system feel like that of a a third world country.
We installed ourselves at our hostel and proceeded to the IT-University of Copenhagen, where an introduction party was being held. We met several Danish developers as well as other former swedish students from BTH. It was all good fun and the eveneing ended up in one of the muskiest bars in all of Copenhagen – “The Moose”. Suffice to say, it was quite the feat to get out of bed the next morning, especially if your name was Olle.
Friday was filled with inspirational talks in the university, we listened to Petri Purho talk about making games with highly stylized and simple graphics. We also sat in on a talk about rapid prototyping in Unity, something that will come in handy this summer since I’m probably going to hold a course on the subject on BTH.
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=553
Third Flaskpost
3 weeks ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
This flaskpost is a bit early for the simple reason that Nordic game jam starts tomorrow and Coastalbyte will be there. This afternoon we will board a train to Denmark and traverse the Swedish forests, villages and finally cross a gigantic bridge to the legendary land of Denmark.
We might make a small update from the jam, if nothing else we’ll make an article to sum up our experience once it over.
In other news so have we been working on a consulting job. It’s going steadily forward and next sprint we will probably start working parallel with Mailstorm so we make some progress on that too. Mario have been learning some Unity as well. He made a Skyrim clone where you shoot golf balls and climb mountains.
Oh yeah, and Rasmus made that sweet flaskpost image.
-Fredrik
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=533
Gameport Tournament – Arkadstickor
Femton tappra kämpar från södra Sverige, vissa så långt bort ifrån som Ängelholm, anslöt sig i Gameports gamelab för att se vem som skulle koras som fightingspelens mästare.Nu är stickorna invigda på riktigt!
Efter lite småmissar i tidsplaneringen var alla på plats och tävlingen kunde sätta igång.
Spelen som spelades Super Street Fighter IV – Arcade Edition och Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 i samma turnering!
Winner bracket körde SSFIV medan Loser bracket körde Marvel vs. Capcom.
Innovativa Blekinge fick vara med på ett hörn då projektkorten användes för skriva upp namnen på deltagarna till dragning om vem som ska möta vem.
När tävlingen började närma sig sitt slut var förra turningens finalister, Mario Gryth och Felix Eliasson, i kamp om finalplatsen mot Rickard Remelin som gått obesegrad genom Winner Bracket.
Efter en tung strid blev det ett tungt fall för Zangief och Felix när Mario landade segern och gick vidare till finalen.
Så i final, Rickard Remelin mot Mario Gryth, Blå Ryu mot Vita Ryu!
Det var en hård strid med många Hadoukens och Shuriukens från båda parter!
Med två vunna matcher så var det avgjort, Rickard Remelin är inte bara en hejjare på att odla skägg, han är även vinnaren av Gameport Tournament #2! Stort grattis till Rickard!
The First Flaskpost!
1 month ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
Hey, Fredrik here.
Marcus and I have been pretty bad at updating the blog lately. So we figured we would do weekly progress reports on how the projects are going and just plain awesome stuff that have happened.
Week 2, 2012
Last week ended with my laptop deciding to die on me. Luckily, the hard drive survived and no work was lost. Though it meant I had to work from home for a couple of days.
Mailstorm have stood still this week, instead I’ve been focusing on a consult job we’re doing. There isn’t much to say about it, it’s a small flash game. We decided to work in the Flashpunk library. So I’ve been spending my time reading through the documentation and started with the basics of the game.
Meanwhile on Marcus side of life:
Marcus have been writing a business plan and been off on a CEO-workshop in Malmö with other people from the Swedish Game Incubator Network. Both sharing and gaining knowledge, tips and tricks. When he got back we started setting up a plan on how to optimize our work process, which we will start using next week.
So while work on Mailstorm Express was put on hold for this week it feels like we got a lot of important things done and learned a lot.
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=513
Flaskpost Update
1 month ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
This is the second flaskpost update and much have happened since our last post.
First off, we have redesigned our office here at Gameport. We may have intruded a tiny bit on our fellow studio Forgotten Key’s space, but they so far they haven’t complained.
Second, we took the beginning of this week to actually sit down and hammer out a new way of organizing our work. We have really adopted and integrated google docs into everything we do, even for cloud storage. But that isn’t really fun to read about now, is it? In that case I’ll continue with announcing something completely different – we have a new addition to the team!
We at Coastalbyte warmly welcome Mario Gryth into our little troupe. Mario has worked with us with Mailstorm Express, composing the games music and sound effects. He is most known for hiss efforts as a sound- and game designer over at 2Play Studios working with their flagship title Bloody Trapland. Needless to say, we are very happy to have him!
Finally – this is the last update before Nordic Game Jam, which we will attend in Copenhagen January 27. Me and Fredrik plan to keep record and document the experience and share it later, who knows, we might even actually have a game to show for our efforts!
Be good and live well!
/Marcus
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=522
