This post is not about game development, 3D stuff or anything like that. It's about the app.net platform. For all of you guys who don't know what app.net is here is a brief explanation. In general app.net is a twitter like social network. You can post stuff with up to 256 characters (I like that nerdy number), follow other people or get followed. Very similar to Twitter. At the same time it offers you space for photos. So you don't need an external photo service like img.ly.

The interesting thing is, that it was built with developers in mind. So no twitter-like restrictions on the API. The downside: As a developer you have to pay $100 per year. As a non-free user it's $40 annually and as a free user you can only follow up to 40 other profiles. So yeah, it's a freemium service, but it doesn't bother you with advertisement. That's a thumb up.

But what about the Google+ effect as I like to call it. Everybody registers, no one posts. Yes! This effect is clearly visible. I searched for developers (game developers in particular) and found a number of interesting profiles, but all without any posts or just a single "Hello World" post from 3 months ago. Even game dev heroes like @notch just reserved their profiles, but never posted anything. That's really unfortunate and brings me back to my personal conclusion, that a new social network is not needed in the next 10 years. But maybe then it will be possible to create something for the young generation that don't wants to be on the same old, boring network their parents used to use. 

app.net is currently in alpha and you can add me here, if you own an account (shameless self promotion).

Just some 3D work I've done yesterday. It's nice to do something different from time to time. This graphic is for a website I am currently working on. It's not game art, but I like the idea, that with some work this could become a quite decent game (yes, I already designed the whole thing in my head). But due to the lack of free time I think I won't be able to make it.

Yes, that sounds a bit strange. But it happened. You can now play a game, while you play a game. Valve just rolled out the beta for their "Trading Cards". Of course these shiny little things are virtual, but you can trade them with others or make badges out of them. You get cards by playing actual Steam games. Counter Strike or HalfLife 2 for example. Up to half of the cards will drop during gameplay, "the other half is earned through your collecting prowess". Yeah... Whatever that means.

So basically it's an advanced achievement system where you get rewarded for playing games on steam. The point is to not only collect all achievements cards, but to trade them or craft badges out of them. Through badges it's then possible to fill up your experience points and get a higher "Steam rank". Also... Whatever that means. 
In short: You play a game, while you play games.

Of course the whole purpose behind Valves strange "card trading game" is to bind gamers even tighter to their selling platform Steam. It also seems that they somehow got inspired by the X-Box achievement system. But hey, trading cards are so much cooler, than regular awards. So let's have both!

The system is currently in beta, but you can easily join it by clicking here.

A few weeks ago I held a life stream session on modeling something with Cinema 4D. I didn't have a plan and just wanted to play around a bit.
The result is a SciFi Bar called "ProgressBar" (You are now allowed to laugh) on a platform in outer space. While I did this modeling session I did a lot mistakes. (forgot to save, the program crashed, etc...). But after 1 and a half hour I ended up with something.

I saved the live stream on twitch and due to lack of input for my blog I decided now to embed it here. So watch me doing 1:33h of amateur 3D modeling with random electric music in the background.

This model is one part of a future game for the one game a month competition. In this game you have to manage a spacebar. It won't be a huge simulation but you have to do several things like hire stuff, buy ressources (drinks, food, furniture), upgrade things, set prices, etc...

Generators are awesome. And there are a lot crazy generators. Newspaper title generators, computer graphic term generators, social media marketing bullshit generators ... you name it. Most of the time they are just funny, but not very useful. "Gigster" from LudoCraft is not only a useful game idea generator, it's also a very beautiful. So if you need a game idea, you can get it here in just one click.

I finally finished my little "let's learn XNA" game called Monsterjump. You can read more about it here. It's missing some kind of menu and if you lose (and you will lose) you have to restart the game to play another round. I know, that's not called a finished game, but I'm way too excited about my next game. So I decided to make this one playable and put it on onegameamonth.com as my february game.

Monsterjump is only playable on windows and you can download it here.

The sound is made by "Sudocolon" and published under the CC-BY-SA license on opengameart.com

So I took part in the global game jam for the third time. And as always it was a great but energy-sapping weekend.
This year the theme was a sound-file with the sound of a heatbeat. Well... better then the theme last year.

So our team (@omme, @sgrueling, @theeleas and me) thought of a game where you control a thief which is afraid of the darkness (crazy, right?). If you stay too long outside the light your heartbeat will increase until you get a heart attack. But if you stay in the light enemies are able to see and attack you.
Our weapon of choice was (as always) Unity.

My part was the design and rig of the characters and some other small assets. I also did a bit of programming but really just a few lines.

We ended with a game in - well let's call it "prototype" status. The basic concept was quit good and the gemplay could really increase the heart bpm of the player, but we lacked in polishing, story and some really good puzzles. Maybe I will adapt the gamplay for one of my games this year and create something more polished.

You can download the game for Windows and MacOS here: http://globalgamejam.org/2013/timid-thief

Sometimes I struggle over a bug for a time. Usually something between 5 and 15 minutes. But this time it was one of the darkest weekends I've ever had.
I implemented collision detection for some moving patforms so my player-figure moves with them. Not a problem, I thought. I'm new to XNA, but hitboxes are a pretty basic technique. And the .intersect() Method makes it even easier. So I coded for 15 minutes, pressed F5 and jumped onto my first platform. And then my little figure sprite began wobbeling around and didn't react to the jump command anymore. I tried to figure out why. First I thought I didn't reset the velocity of the figure when it hits the ground, but that wasn't it. On Sunday evening I finally figured out what happened.

I just forgot to add the current speed to the player position BEFORE doing the hittest. I mean how basic is that? And I wasted two fucking days of my life because I implemented the whole thing in wrong order. After I figured out that I failed so hard I considered if I should switch my profession to something easier. Collecting garbage in the park or working at the post office... 
Of course I won't change my profession. But it's hard to make such stupid, little mistakes after several years of programming experience.
Well at least I will never ever make this mistake again :D

Today I played a bit with Procreate on my iPad (a really greate app). I don't consider myself a great artist, but what I created today I could imagine as the style for one of my onegameamonth games. Mixed together with some atmospheric sounds and some puzzles it could make a quit cool game. 

But first I have to finish my January game. It's going quite well and I think I can do it this month. Especially because it seems that I won't attend the global game jam. There was no confirmation mail of the cologne game lab in my inbox yet. Well I still hope it will come...

In the past days and weeks I read a lot about code styles and what is considered ugly or beautiful. But somehow in all of these blog posts, papers and guide lines I stumbled across things that were described as beautiful that are totally ugly in my eyes.
For example doing a space after opening and before closing parantheses.

// That's ugly!
if( i == 1 )

// And that's just total shit...
if ( i == 1 )

// That's better
if(i == 1)

Of course it is only ugly for me. I code with a monospace font (as presumingly everybody does) and that already gives me enough space before and after the parantheses to keep the code readable.

Another thing I came across a lot is indenting and setting curly brackets. Well... All programmer with more than two days experience should already know that there is more than just one way to handle these topics. You can Indent or set spaces, set the curly brackets in the same line as the statement, a new line and even indent them. But again I think something like this is the most readable solution:

// I like it that way:
if(i == 1)
{
    ...
}
else
{
    ...
}

// but this is confusing:
if(i == 1){
    ...
}else{
    ...
}

So you can find statements and the corresponding brackets easily by just looking up the row. I waste maybe a few lines of vertical space on my screen, but well I'm not coding on an 15" screen with a resolution of 800 x 600 anymore. So that should be okay. 

There are many more little things I disagree with a lot of experienced programmers. In CSS for example I like to use underscores for my class names, while it is normal to use hyphens. I write classes with lower case letters at the beginning. Why? Because I also write filenames all small. And I like matching file names and class names. I try to avoid namespaces and use unique but yet descriptive class names instead.

There are of course a lot coding "standards" I follow. Using descriptive class- function- and variable names instead of overcommenting everything, dividing my code into as many small functions as possible, making use of common patterns like MVC, avoiding global variables and static methods if possible and so on... 

In the end I think it's more important to find a style that makes YOU happy and (here comes the important part) follow your rules. Be countinuous with your style. Don't use camel cases the one and underscores the other day. Of course it's different if you work for a large company with hundereds of developers or on code that's so important that lifes depend on it. The NASA has a coding style guide that actually prevents unwanted behaviours like infinite, blocking loops.
So if you find yourself struggling over your own code it's a good indicator that something went wrong.

I already tweeted that I won't use Unity for my game(s). Instead I will discover C# and XNA. After playing around a bit with basic sprite and movement stuff I created the concept for my game. Do you know Icy Tower? It's a game I played a lot in computer class back when I was in school. It's simple and fun. You just have to jump from platform to platform to get higher in the tower. If you fall down you lose.

I want to adapt this Idea and add a few things like power ups and a different setting.

The little purple blob is the player. The "darkness" is coming from down below. If you touch it you will die. After a while the "darkness" will become faster and the game harder.

I hope I manage to get this done...

The old dac-xp.com was in german and just a blog about random stuff. And since I decided to go deeper into game development I also made the decision to rebuild this blog. I took the opportunity to completely redesign it and use my own CMS based on CodeIgniter.
This site is not done yet. Not even the blog part (tags are missing yet).
Also I want to implement a section for my portfolio and maybe even a small shop for stuff I sale for a few bucks. Templates, models, graphics and other bits and bytes.

Another quite noticable change: Everything is in english now. Why? To improve my english writing and to reach more people in the awesome indie game community. Well... english is not my native language so I hope you will forgive me the one or other flaw you may encounter in my textes. If you see some strange language quirks don't hesitate to write a comment.

So my first game could be the one I will make on the global game jam. But I decided to make a small "warmup" game for January first and submit the GGJ-game as the February one. That means for March I have a bit more time. Sounds like a plan.

My January game will be a racing game. Well more or less. All you have to do is press right and left to avoid obsacles you are heading to while you rush through a dark tunnel. You will go faster and faster as time passes and it will be harder to avoid the barriers. Eventually it will become so hard that you will fail anyway. But how long will you last? Will you break the highscore or crash at the very first block? 
The style will be Tron like. Please don't sue me, Disney...

I will use Unity for this game so I can easily deploy it to PC, Mac and even to the browser. I think this game would be a perfect fit for Android or iOS... Sadly I can't don't want to afford the corresponding Unity-Versions. Maybe later this year. Who knows?

The racer you can see above is not the one I will use in the game. It was my first concept, but to make things even more easy for me I decided to create a Wipeout-like racer without wheels.

I took part on several game jams (global game jam, ludum dare) and really enjoyed the feeling to build a whole game from scratch in just 48 hours. On these events I began to realise that I always wanted to be a game developer. Honestly. When I saw the first computer game my father played, I couldn't imagine something cooler than to create my own worlds and stories. But many years later I somehow got into web development and didn't think about making games anymore until a friend of mine asked me if I would like to go to the global game jam in cologne with him. He asked me on the same day it happened and I was still at work. So I hesitated a bit but eventually registered, packed my stuff and drove to cologne. One of my best decisions this year. It was awesome. We created a (not so fun to play) game with two other students we didn't know and had a great time. 
One year later I didn't have to be asked again. And in the end of 2012 we also joined the ludum dare game jam.

Then I heared about onegameamonth.com and thought "Well... that would be a challenge".
Challenge accepted!
I joined the site and immediatelly thought about small game concepts (and also created a little prototype for my first game). 

Beneath the challenge to create 12 games in 2013 I also challenged myself to leave my comfort zone. So I will use Flash for one game and XNA for another one. One game will be in pixel-style and another one will be more atmospheric without a real goal you can reach or a highscore you have to beat.
Why? Because I should. Leaving your comfort zone is the most efficient way to increase your knowledge and hopefully the quality of your work.

Today is the first of January in 2013. I created this blog to keep track of my #onegameamonth progress and to share my experiences. Hopefully it's going to be an awesome year and in 2014 I can proudly say that I am now a real indie game developer. ;)