Unveiling The Palatron!

Posted on: May 3, 2012

Howdy folks! Today is the big day that the Palatron will be unveiled. This afternoon, dozens of fine folks from several creative industries in The Hague will join us for some coffee and a beer. All that to witness the official opening of The Hague’s very own Winnitron 1000!

For all you people living under a rock, the Winnitron is an arcade cabinet with new-skool indie games. It is stuffed with brilliant contemporary gaming gems from all over the world.

The past days have been hectic and we barely met the deadline. But we made it, and these pictures tell it all!

Look, here it is all painted and shiny:

Hmm, still missing a control panel though. I’ve seen it around here somewhere… Ah! Niels is playing with it:

Niels, stop that! You’re supposed to be applying T-molding.

That’s better. Keep up the good work!

Wow! Great stuff guys! Still no controls though. Where’s Tijmen? He’s great with that sort of thing. TIJMEN!!!

Great, guys. Get wiring.

Looking good! Meanwhile in the arcade cabinet…

Niels is making nice progress with the hardware, and small wonder…

He brought his father for backup :-). At this point Tijmen and Guido decided to have some sort of tea party:

After that it was assemblytime!

First a nice glass plate to protect the monitor:

And, of course, the controls!

Niels’ mom also tagged along for that finishing touch :-)

Let’s fire it up!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand…

IT’S WORKING! IT’S WORKING!!!

And there you have it. Our Palatron.

You’ll notice we left in the coin drop-system. We thought it would be nice to maintain a retro-look and figured the coin-drop would help achieve that (don’t worry it’s not operative, you won’t have to pay squat to play the Palatron). We also left this sticker on the back for the same reason:

So everyone can see that it used to be a Mortal Kombat cabinet.

So, the Palatron is finished. Well, it almost is. We still plan to add some graphics to make it even prettier. But we’re officially unveiling it this afternoon. Want to come play it? I, personally, accept all challenges to a game of Super Crate Box. And Fabian claims he can defeat anyone in a game of Nidhogg.

Come and have a beer with us and play the Palatron. You can register for the unveiling event here. Or you can just swing by at your leisure :-)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Fabian has challenged me to a game of Nidhogg.

Cheers!

Peter

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Momonga Monday: Screenshots

Posted on: April 30, 2012

Right now, all of Holland is celebrating our Queen’s birthday. It’s a national holiday, every year on april 30th. The weather today is beautiful and the whole team is enjoying a day off.

But we won’t leave you hanging on Momonga Monday, so here are some fresh work-in-progress screenshots of the game:


Above: Momo crosses the river


Above: First encounter of an owl bandit. Oh noes!


Above: Fry is helping you with bashing these two owls


Above: Bam! Way to go :)


Above: General Kuton lets out a war cry


Above: Attacking Kuton

Next week we’ll be back with more goodies. And now we’re off to honor our Queen! ;-)

- Peter & Derk

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The 8-Step Guide To Interface Design for iPhone Games

Posted on: April 23, 2012

I have found that interface design is one of the toughest parts of creating a game. With so many different screens, and so little screen space, every pixel needs to be thought through.

We have recently redesigned the entire interface for our upcoming game, because we realized the user experience simply did not work as we intended. There was too much information on screen at one time, and without a clear focus, people did not understand what they were looking at. People looked at the screen for about 1 second, then clicked on the “Next” button and started the next level. In other words: The interface simply did not do its job.

The old version of the iphone interface of momonga pinball

Above: The crowded victory screen that is currently getting a full make-over.

For all you game interface designers out there, here is an 8-step guide to interface design – specifically tailored to iPhone, iPad, and Android games.

Ready? Let’s go! :)

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Momonga Monday: Momo

Posted on: April 23, 2012

Yeah, it’s Momonga Monday again! This week we finally zoom in on the hero of the game, Momo.

The Momonga

Momo is a momonga, a Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrel. These little creatures are nocturnal squirrels living in Japan. They have a gliding membrane which is used to float in the air. When this membrane is not used, it is pulled close to the body – this turns them into little fluffballs. Momongas live in trees on mountain slopes, and are insanely cute. They feed on nuts, seeds, leaves and the like. They nest in tree cavities and are rarely seen on the ground.

Above: The momonga, a.k.a. the cutest animal alive.

A little rascal meets the real world

As a young boy, Momo was a little rascal. He loved to play and perform pranks on the elders of the village. His mother’s favourite words were “Momo! Get back here!”. He is an explorer, but is a little naive. He has no experience with the big bad real world out there, and lived happily in his little village.

This ignorance was smashed to pieces when Momo’s village was attacked by Kuton. Kuton’s owls took all of the momongas: In one night, Momo became the only Momonga living in freedom. Momo was rescued by Panda, and has determined to rescue the others. He wants things to get back to normal, even though he has no clue of what he is getting himself into.

Above: The owl attack, and the origin of Momo’s scar, in an early sketch.

Momo is extremely agile. He can float in the air, roll like a ball, and run like no-one else. This nimbleness saved him during the raid. Momo has a radiant blue mark running from his forehead to his tail. This mark is the result of the wound inflicted by general Kuton during the raid. It turned blue after Panda healed it.

Character Design Process

After we dumped the radish and fluffball variants of Momo, we started looking at flying squirrels. In particular, I remembered a picture from CuteOverload with insanely cute little hamster-like creatures sitting in a tree. I did not know its name, so after browsing through 20+ pages, there it was in all its glory: The momonga. We knew that this would be a great hero for our game.

With the general appearance set, Jimmy started design on the other momongas and village. We added cultural elements to the tribe: painted fur, sticks, flags, tents. Momongas are spiritual, gentle creatures who live in harmony with nature.

Among all the momongas, Momo is the hero, and he needs to be recognizable. We kept him as basic as possible, his only real distinction is the radiant blue line on his back:

Finally this translates to the 3D models, and we needed several iterations for that as well:

Above: Early version of Momo in 3D. This model was based on early sketches with a semi-realistic look and feel.

Above: Wireframes of Momo, first and second iteration with Jimmy’s new style.

That wraps up this Monday. Stay tuned for next week – there will be more goodies coming your way!

Cheers :)

- Derk & Peter

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Conspiracies, Clashes and Bloodbaths in the Paladin Team

Posted on: April 19, 2012

This is my story of the game of Neptune’s Pride. We played this seemingly innocent game with 8 Paladins, and it turned into an epic bloodbath that lasted for weeks.

Neptune’s Pride is a strategic intergalactic warfare-game you play in your browser. All players are placed in a universe with dozens of stars to conquer. Only one player can win, and there are no fixed alliances. Each gets assigned a few stars and a number of ships and the battle begins. Build carriers to transport your ships and claim stars. You can then develop these stars on three different levels: Economy (earn more money), Industry (build more ships) and Science (develop technology, i.e. build stronger weapons, faster ships etc.). Players receive money every 24 hours.

As each player expands his kingdom and develops his stars he will soon reach the borders of other kingdoms. Your enemies’ kingdoms. At first this will happen accidentally because a fleet travelling from one star to the other takes HOURS (which causes a game to take weeks). And once the jump into hyperspace has been made, there’s no turning back. The journey must be completed to refuel on the destination. So there will be a bit of quarrel first over which star belongs to whom and what the borders exactly are. Once this has been established, strategy starts kicking in. Alliances are forged and epic staredowns commence.

In our server, there were 6 people new to the game (myself among them) and 2 seasoned players (Fabian and Tedo). Guido was so unlucky as to have been placed in the bottom left corner of the universe, under Fabian (who was placed left) and besides Tedo (who was placed at the bottom). He was soon consumed by the two experienced players. The second victim was Tijmen, he feigned to be my ally and attacked me immediately. I struck back with help from Fabian and Derk. He was destroyed.

Then nothing happened for a while. New borders were determined and old staredowns resumed. Meanwhile Fabian was growing stronger because he had consumend most of Guido’s stars and some of Tijmen’s. Derk (top left) and I (center of the universe) did not like the look of that and decided to join forces and attack Fabian. Thus ending my agreement with Fabian not to attack each other. Meanwhile, on the right side of the universe, Tim and Jens were fighting their own battle. Not bothering nor being bothered by anyone. Derk and I fought Fabian and captured some of his stars. At this point, I was the winning player.

This is what the server looked like then. Ignore the color of the stars, look at the circles I expertly drew with paint.These represent our kingdoms at that time.

Tedo = Yellow, Fabian = Blue, Derk = Dark red, I am the brighter red, Tim = purple and Jens = Green.

Then it happened. A conspiracy the likes of which the world has never seen. While I was in full attack on the left side of my kingdom, I noticed some sturring on the right side. Tim’s ships were popping up on our border. Then I saw that he WILLINGLY surrendered some stars to Jens to clear a path to MY stars. My ships were on the other side of my kingdom and it would take days for them to cross. Also, that would leave my left side exposed to Fabian. So, I did the only thing I could do. I sent Tedo money and better weapons (you can send each other technology) and asked him for help. Help to fight of the conspiring aggressors who, I might add, received a lot of advanced technology from Fabian. Tedo replied: “on my way”. I felt a bit safer.

Little did I know, Tedo wasn’t on his way to my attackers. He was JOINING them. He was attacking me as well, with the weapons I sent him! He was in on it. They all were. Fabian, Tedo, Tim and Jens. Only Derk chose not to take part in this conpiracy, which he later regretted because he too wanted a share of my stars as they were being divided. I was torn to pieces, sent what money I had left to Derk for being the only one not attacking me and quit.

I suppose I should have seen it coming. I was in the center of the universe and the only way anybody could get anywhere was THROUGH me. But such betrayal and backstabbery I never expected, nor suspected. But I shall have my revenge. Luck will have it that most of my attackers are avid fans of the Game of Thrones-series. And it just so happens to be that I read the books and therefor know what is going to happen. And I just might tell them… Maybe I’ll spoil it all. They deserved it, right?

Cheers!

- A bittered Peter

P.S. Tedo won the game after making a pact with Fabian. In the end, Fabian and Derk battled it out for second place, with Tedo focusing on the remains of Jens’ empire. Most of my attackers now regret ever attacking me. “We should have attacked Tedo” they say. It’s a little too late for that guys. By the way, do you know who is going to die in Game of Thrones?… >:-)

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