So I'm working on a new project.

I'm all about physics, particles and awesome shooters - as you should know from Madness: The Stand . As simple in form it was, it was more advanced than your average 2d shooter(especially in flash).

I'm using the 'engine' I developed for it as a base for something really great. I already switched to latest box2d and implemented a humanoid ragdoll system which creates a body on the fly, allowing to seamlessly switch between an animation and ragdoll. It also has joint stiffness now. Awesome death animations incoming!

I also updated my box2d particle system a bit so it allows to make much more effects like a physics based explosion. It's a small step before a total overhaul bringing my particle system into box2d world without use of any bodies as a particle itself. Raycasting in box2d 2.1a will be very useful.

Right now i decided to write a skeletal animation system - i don't know if it will make to this game(i already have most of the character animations done inside flash ). It's a really complex task but i'm optimistic.

Next thing would be a simple map editor. I have a few ideas for how to do it but about that - later.

I want to finish it it by the end of the year. Next step will be the best game ever - Intruder single player experience.

I finally updated the game. All known bugs fixed, rebalanced, improved spawn mechanics etc. I added a score table so you can show how awesome you are!

GO PLAY IT!

PS: i wanted to use the newgorunds api but had some problems so i went with mochi. sorry ng - love you.

First of all I would like to thank Tom and all of NG staff for the madness day contest and honoring me at the 2nd place among the best games. Also all users and everyone who shared their support, enthusiasm and critique towards my game. You're the most awesome people in the world!
Enough gay stuff. :)

I wanted to share some thoughts about Madness: The Stand.

I felt bad after two summers of no submissions by me and I really wanted to participate in some NG-organized event. Around 1 month before madness day I decided that I'll make a game for it. I've done all art (going into Krinkels's style was fun) and animations(pure pleasure) in 2 evenings and started gathering all my previous code in order to connect it all. I didn't have much time nor occasion after that and 14 days before the deadline I started to work full time on the game at a very high pace.

My starting point was simple: particles, physics, gore. For me madness is all about shooting bad guys and doing brutal things to their corpses and a destructible ragdoll can never go wrong. At first i I wanted to make a deathmatch-type game but I also really enjoy a defend yourself horde type of game and so I decided to choose option # 2 and I'm really happy i did that.

Due to limited time I had to cut some really awesome features (I'll leave them to myself right now as a leverage in my next project(s)) as I literally wouldn't finish the game on time. I had only 1 day for each major feature. I played the game as you know it for the first time the exact day madness day started! (good that I'm 6 hours ahead) I actually finished fixing bugs and adding some quick features like pause, pseudo hud and weapon selection shortly before uploading it. My head really wanted to explode.

Obviously because of this the game has some flaws but I was happy to see that only one major bug snuck in - kill the last enemy in a round as he kills you and you're stuck in limbo(worse than dying in your dream under heavy sedation ;) ).This week I wanted to upload an updated,rebalanced version of the game with NG api (i had some problems with it earlier, also - why the NG madness preloader doesn't show up in my game?) but I couldn't get to it. I'm actually sick as I'm writing this but whatever.. yesterday's news made me happy as a child.

As small this game seems to be it has a lot of nice features and it sums up a year (actually a small part from it cuz I'm lazy sometimes :( ) of me learning and experimenting with as3. In a nutshell the game has a:

- particle system
- box2d particles
- box2d wrapper
- projectile system integrated into box2d (bullets are not box2d bodies but they can react with any body with graphics anyway :) )
- simple AI (take cover behind physical bodies in a dynamic environment)
- animation management
...and some more.

Things I wrote allow me to quickly create effects and build bodies as I really hate writing many lines of repetitive code. This allows certain flexibility and I could focus on some more interesting things like mines or taking cover by the ai. There's a lot of things to improve but I'm really optimistic about the future. Hope that all this doesn't sound like I'm a douche or something. ;d

My next game is under consideration and hopefully next week I'll tell you what I'll be working on.

cheers!!

Also:

.
/* */

...for the Madness Day.

Few words: madness, gore, physics.

Hope I'll make it.

Ha, got you.

I'm working on the game, it's shaping up pretty well. I'm having mixed feelings about the art style but I'll experiment a bit and I'm sure it'll turn out great. I want to finish it in next 3 weeks and find a great sponsor for it.

Meanwhile I bought a new domain for my site: mmankt.com , it's worth adding it to your bookmarks and visiting daily, cuz there's a lot of stuff coming, maybe you'll catch an early 'beta test'?

I made an awesome lens flare effect for the game: CHECK IT OUT
I also made smoke trials for explosions: CLICK!

Have a look at some nice screenshots from explosion testing: EPICNESS HERE

See ya in a week!

Hello.

Been working pretty hard lately.

First of all I restarted my blog . This time it's pretty complete and will be updated very often. If you're interested in what and how I do you should swing by every other day.

I'll be writing on it on regular basis, you'll find everything from news to development updates. You can have influence on the content as well!.

You should take a look at my animation page - some info about my work
I was also working on shade, a quick info on some progress here
I released a very useful class which I call quick MovieClip manager.

The aim of this 'manager' is to speed up and streamline the creation process of my game/games. It's great for beginners and basically anyone who'll find this useful.
While making my game I got to a point when I needed to add many MovieClips that should play their animation/just appear for 1 frame and get removed. But it was a boring process to write new functions and manage them without any major control. I also got many bugs that I had to workaround

tutorial and download HERE

I hope someone will use this well like i do.

I got a lot of great books on AS3 , one dedicated to the drawing API in flash so everything I'll do in the future will benefit a lot.

I'm stretching my muscles right now to make it to a May release. Keep your fingers crossed! cya.

PS: randomized explosions, is this beautiful or what?

Hello.

I promised a weekly update so here it is. I've done some work on the game but as usual I didn't have too much time for it. Anyways there's some progress and that's always good news.

I've been working on some pure gameplay mechanics. When I decided to let the player only control the guns I had to figure out how to make it fun. So far you can get overrun by enemies and even if you're an awesome shooter they'd destroy you. So i had to figure ways to let the players defend themselves. I'll have to make a few changes in the code but with weapon and ship upgrades it should make sense. I'm also planning to force some basic strategies from the player. I'll be going into details soon hopefully.

I also changed/improved some explosion gfx and it's a first step to unifying the whole graphic style in the game.

I've been working on some particle stuff this week and by mistake I made a very awesome effect. I went further and created some more effects. They're all customizable and look pretty crazy IMO.

Press left mouse button to focus. Press space to switch effects. The cursor is the centre of the effect. Have fun! CLICK!

I used the 'gravity point' effect in-game earlier and it totally rocks. Imagine tons of wreckage , fire, smoke, sparks etc being sucked into a hole.. epicness. The possibilities are endless, the game will be very fun to look at and play.

Drop me a comment (WYK) and see you in a week!

Finally. Finally I have a lot of free time to work on my game.

I must admit I'm a lil' piece of shit because my game was supposed to be done a long time ago. Wasting almost 3 months on doing nothing in that direction makes me feel bad. Winter, xmas, modern warfare 2, exam session, skiing in Austria and finally a new semester. So let's get to work.

My upcoming game, temporarily named shade is a shooter set in space exploration age. It's a "rail shooter" , as you don't control the ship - only it's guns. You can say that you're defending it. The player takes control of the ship's guns - switching between stations on the fly, facing off varied enemy forces. The player can upgrade or build new guns, each with it's pros and cons.

The gameplay point is pure enjoyment of shooting enemies and being rewarded with great visuals and particle effects. The game will be a 30 min experience with 5-6 levels with many enemies. It has a simple story connecting the sections with in-game 'cinematics'.

Additional game modes are being considered.

It will be a fun ride, perfect for people who are sick of zombie games and tower defences, wanting to play and enjoy something not investing too much time into it.

The 'engine' running the game is around 60% done. It needs some fine-tuning here and there, but overall it runs nicely. The gameplay is at prototype stage which i'm using to balance weapons, ballistics, effects, and enemy movement. Once all that is ok i can start creating final content. I'm already having a lot of fun with it. (too much time wasted on shooting spaceships ;) )

As I mentioned earlier I'm putting a big effort into particle effects. They need a few improvements but for what I'm doing it's the best particle code out there. There are many libraries but they just can't do what I want so well. I may be a shit coder and the classes are in mess but it all works and looks great. I'm using a very early version for Shade but i'll be improving it all the time.

It's too early to talk about further plans but I'll be developing and cleaning up my particles heavily. I have a lot of great game ideas and as it grows it will be a perfect product. Once it's finished I would like to see it as a cheap package for all game developers. But that's far away. Now I focus on Shade.

TO-DO list:

particles :

- variable, realistic wind effects (changing every frame)
- 'black hole' effect (pulling all particles into a set point)
- particle trails
- area based spawing
- create randomised explosions, unique for each ship
- cleaning up the code and making room for LOD settings so it can look great and run well on all computers

ballistics:

- improved collision detection (integrate iterations, bullets fly through thin objects at some times)
- optimised collisions (checking for bounding box, then pixel-perfect)
- fix a bug when strong wind is stopping bullets that go against it
- clean up ricochet logic

enemies:

- fix a bug when enemy guns at their centre instead of their actual coordinates (fucking flash trigonometry - it works with hero ship :[)
- improve flying behaviour and shooting mechanics
- write unique dying patterns
- make all the enemies
gameplay , engine , game logic:

- final content(backgrounds and effects)
- health mechanics
- cinematic
- stereo sound system (considering)
- lightning effects (lens flares on explosions, have to find out if it works out)
- menus
-medal system
- scoring
-levels

..and more

Drop me a word what you think about it and look forward to the first playable level for selected users so I can fine tune the game. It's still open to all suggestions. See you in a week or so with another update!
Small screenies (all WiP) CLICK

I'm really sad to say that my game is still far from being released. I wanted it to be out in early December but i had no time I i couldnt stand the pressure i've been putting on myself. Then on xmas i got mw2 pc and damn..how can anyone not play it;) ? i know u understand.
I had a lot of school work due to the exam session (something like finals) and i had no time to work on it. Also my lovely 2.5 yr old Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTS 320 died last week so my PC was unavailable. I'm getting a gts 250 1gb today so I'm back into action this Thursday! Hopefully , when all my exams are passed I'll have a lot of free time until February 15th!
Anyways this delay is a good thing cuz with more time I can make this game exactly as cool as it is in my sick head. It would have been rushed and we don't want that guys, don't we?
I'm sorry to all of the ppl who've been asking me about this game, showing their interest and support but the good news is that it will be better.

From other good news I'm defiantly back into flash animation and I have a great scenario in my head. I think that i owe it to you guys to deliver the best animation i can. I want the #1 spot of all time back! Been there only for 3-4 days with int3 but I've never been more happier. Next summer will be awesome.
cheers

Hey,

Last time I wrote that my game will be finished around this time. I'm sorry to disappoint everyone fallowing me - due to heavy school obligations I had a little time to work on it.

BUT I am pushing it forward and I like what I have already. By the week end I should have a demo for sponsors ready. Right now I've been optimising the enemy code and their movement behaviour and it looks really good. I think that it will show cuz I don't recall too many action games having this.

I also did some very useful optimizations for ballistics and particle system. Moreover, I added a very cool feature to one of the weapons - the heavy precision cannon - penetration and ricochets. Once I got 3 enemy fighters with one shot and they weren't aligned - very cool thing. And the fun part was that it just required 2 lines of code.

You've seen my explosions in action and I've put much effort into them. The reactions of enemies getting owned by you guys will be very rewarding. I can't wait for you to play it!

.
/* */