Bouncy The Ball
Bouncy The Ball

Bouncy The Ball

Scope:ca. 2 months
Technology:C#, Unity, Android
Link:Google Play, Facebook

My kids wanted to play one of my games. But our titles are targeted to "elderly teenagers". So I developed a small and simple android game together with a game designer and an artist. About 100 downloads so far... but hey! At least I can continue bragging when one of the most-asked party topic comes up: "Do you also develop games for mobile phone?"


Modding Tutorial for Dungeons

Dungeons - Modding

Scope:ca. 1 year
Technology:LUA, Scintilla, C#, Windows Forms, XML
Link:Wiki

In my free time after work, I extended the modding framework for my first game at Realmforge Studios: "Dungeons" quite a bit.

I extracted the integrated level editor from the source code and provided a stand-alone download. (A copy of the game is still required for the assets.) The peak of my modding efforts was an fully integrated LUA debugger based on the Scintilla editor framework.

The internal Dungeons "file system" was completely virtualized, so every asset could be changed, deleted or extended by mods. Scripts are written in LUA. Due to LUA.NET, the complete .NET library could be used.


Short Demonstration of Nightwatch
Title screen from Nightwatch
Title screen from Nightwatch

Nightwatch

Scope:ca. 4 months
Technology:DirectX 9, C++, VS2010
Link:ZIP, SVN, WWW, AVI

The idea is simple: Good humans are on the left, bad undead are on the right. If the bad guys reach the left border, you loose. Humans get several units, buildings and traps to defence the city.

Nightwatch started in January 2010 as a Java program, but I rewrote it in C++ and DirectX very quickly. From the beginning, the main purpose was for me to learn game programming techniques.

The Particle Engine is based completely on templates. A debug console (^-key) enables easy observation of game states. Pathfinding is based on A* with a path smoothing algorithm.

Sssh.. secret: I am currently rewriting nightwatch together with my two kids (7 and 8 years old) using Unity3D. Not finished yet...

Massive Multiplayer play per Email: Clan
Massive Multiplayer play per Email: Clan

Clan

Scope:ca. 1 month
Technology:Java, Swing, Sun Java2D
Website:clan.sf.net
I was fascinated from play per email games like "VGA-Planets", "Eressea" and "Orks" (german PPEM around orcs). Together with a friend who did the artwork, we started the computer game "Clan". The world was designed for hundrets of players without having to fall back to separate screens for "cities" and "continent" etc.

The tile engine can display maps with several million fields. It supports continous zooming and scrolling. The terrain display is parametrized using a noise function. A in-game help system based on HTML has been implemented.