What do I do when I landed here?

Hello there, brave reader! You have reached one of the countless blogs in the internet! Congratulations!

See the new posts right after this!

To make things as easy as possible for you, here is a short breakdown: Here are games to download, we want you to do so and comment, so we learn how to improve our games. So go and click on the little “List of Games”-link here or on the right side of the page. There, you have a neat list of the games with a quick summary. If you only try one game, then try Audience Artist. Or the first game. And then, comment! And if you like it, tell your friends! All in the noble quest of making our visitor-counter reach a two-digit-number!

We’re currently hard at work on a bigger, better project, and we update this blog with news and lessons we’ve learnt. Thank you for stopping by, and we hope to see you again! Now go, play some games!

Update

It’s not fun. Awww.

Well, it happens. The good thing about prototypes is that if it happens, you didn’t waste all that much time on it. Plus, there might be a way to turn it into something fun still…

So, back to the drawing board, I guess.

. . . . . In Standby.

Prepare for more posts, maybe. There might be another prototype. There might not. This entirely depends on how much fun it is.

Are you excited? (You don’t need to answer, we know your answer. By now, we really only need to look in your eyes.)

Sorry.

For not updating. I know we should do that, but… you know.

It’s kind of stressful right now. This is a problem if you do this as a hobby. Always those phases in which you can’t work on it! Since gamecreation is something that you need to put a lot of time into, this means there isn’t much progress in code done by me, and I hate myself for that, considering that other people, say, for example, T, work on this – and with great success as well! I love looking at the shots and levels he creates! And even though he has a lot of stress as well. Which makes me feel even more guilty.

So… please consider this an apology to you, dear reader. Sorry for not providing you exciting information. This will become a lot better soon! So hang in there.

Running Food finished, no longer called Running food

Can you believe it? Pappenheimer has finally finished his new game Running food – although its now not longer called like that. You really should check it out, because that game is – there is no better word for it – fascinating. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the few who share a bit of the knowledge about all the code, material and hard work behind it, it boogles the mind to see the whole thing coming together so well. It manages a very nice balance of difficulty and accessibility, and its definately not on the same scale as most “educational titles”. But then, while also aimed at kids, there are so many elements in there that one might not fully understand unless one has reached a certain age – because some of his philosophical messages might just need those rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia – I really think that he managed to create something incredible.

Mind you, I haven’t completed the full game yet — but what I’ve written above is my impression of the playtesting I’ve done.

And with that… it seems that I am now the only one from the group of people I’ve worked with for a long time who hasn’t finished a full-scale project that you can buy. This results in a weird, hard-to-describe melancholy-kind-of-thing.

Siiigh. Oh well.

:(

Damnit.

Merry Christmas! Also: Take part in a contest!

Merry christmas, everyone! Enjoy the holidays, have a great time, and enjoy the time away from all that stress.

Blah, blah, yaddah, yaddah, whatever. You know you want to torture challenge yourself to something as awesome as my very own Experiment which resulted in PROJECTION – the most amazing puzzlegame ever that you, along with, oh, the entire universe ignored . But whatever, it’s okay, nevermind that. There is going to be a contest this weekend – and it’s no plain ol’ boring contest – it’s a contest that encourages new, innovative games, quick prototyping, and on top of it all, we will see the different workflows of different people and engines. And to make it even better, there are cool prizes up to grabs! Follow this link and see the details – we’d love to see you on board!

Here is a quick overview:

Experimental Experiment One: RESULT. Projection.

See the original thread at the Conitec-forums!

It’s time for another game! As you may have guessed, it’s the result of my Experimental Experiment. What are we talking about, exactly?

Projection is a puzzle-game (aren’t most of my minigames puzzlegames?), and, as so often, you will have to build something.

This time, we will show you exactly what you have to build. Oh, and we’ll limit what you can use to do so as well! Pretty easy, huh?

Build something!

We know you love building things, we all do. And since we love you, we will give you lots of stuff to build with! Use Cubes, Pyramides – and more – to build a structure! Simply chose your part and click where you want it to go!

Create a Structure!

Build something special!

Okay, so don’t just build whatever you want. Use all the avaible parts and build something that has exactly the silhoulette specified! There may be more than one silhoulette to match – but you may choose any position to look at your structure in order to reach that. Sounds easy, huh?

Simply click that “SWITCH”-button to go to the comparison-mode.

Compare the silhoulettes

There is a tutorial included, as well as ten puzzles! Go solve them all!

DOWNLOAD: Kindly hosted by Pappenheimer:

http://www.puppenheim.org/Projection-081221.zip – Please also visit Pappenheimers site and buy his new game “Würfels Welt”!

DISCLAIMER: If it blows up your machine, it’s your fault.

Thanks for reading – we can’t wait to hear your comments!

Experimental Experiment No. 1

Hello!

This is going to be a small experiment, which may fail completely, or which might be amazingly awesome. I’m going to update this post throughout the day, and I hope that I may finish this today or tomorrow. But before I start, let me give you some backstory.

You may have noticed that there were only very few posts in the last few months. The thing is, we all have lots of stress right now. However, now that christmas is right around the corner, traditionally you get a few days of free time and thus, I want to spend a bit of time with working on the game. That is not to say that I didn`t work at all on it, because I did. It’s just that I didn’t work that much on it. So to get back in the swing of things – and because I really can’t help it – I’m going to create a small minigame. Estimated time for this: One day, not more than two days.

This is going to be the experiment: Create – or more like, change and finish, one small minigame. It’s going to be a concept that I already have explored (but not in one of the released games), and I will try to make it into a playable, fun game. It’s a puzzle game, and we will see if its going to be fun! Expect several updates to this post with exciting news and maybe even lessons from development. I will also mention stupid mistakes and what-have-you. Hopefully, it’s going to be fun!

Hi there!

We’re still alive.
We haven’t updated in a while.

We’re sorry.

Dot dot dot

I think that by now, I’ve established that the story and dialogs play an important part in our game. And with that comes, obviously, also the discussion about voice actors and what not. And I know the usual pros and cons that are thrown around in internet forums across the globe.

It makes the characters more believable, and allows some dramaturgic things that just aren’t possible or only hard to do without voice, the different tones alone are basically a great reason for it.

But what if you don’t find talented people, if their voices don’t match the characters? And, for me as a hobbydeveloper, the whole time-issue is even more important: Obviously, I can’t pay professionals to do it for my little (yet textheavy) game, and aside that, how would I record all those voices, anyway? I’d be lucky enough to even find people with matching voices (who do have a talent for that – for example, I couldn’t record the whole thing by myself, since, you know, my voice is not necessarily amazing for that stuff).

But no, I haven’t reached a definitve decision for that. It’d be easy enough to include in the code, its really only about the question: Will I find the necessary amount of people, and how do I go about recording all that? So with these factors, I had to look for an alternative – maybe just for now, but an alternative regardless.

And what else could I mean but the typical “beep”-sound whenever a letter appears, seen surprisingly often in Nintendo-games. I know what you’re thinking now, but I have to say – it works. It’s obviously not as smooth as spoken dialog, but it does add to the experience. It seems to me that it works as sort of a placeholder for the voice. For example, pauses in speech before were simply a short pause in the appearance of the letters. Now that there is the beep-sound, you can actually HEAR a pause, and that does add a lot to the effect. The frequency is altered for different characters, so they now actually sound different. I know that it might sound crazy, but its true – the beep alone works, as if our brain would interprete it as the correct voice.

Sure, you still need to read, and it won’t tell you anything, but at least there is some kind of sound when the mouth opens and closes. I’d recommend to try it, if only as a placeholder-thing.