Archive for the ‘The life of VGS’ Category

Bold Pixel Engine v2 Annoucement

Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know of some stuff going on regarding Bold Pixel Engine.

Collaboration with Arne G. Strout

It really felt great to hear about a developer wanting to build on BPE to make it go further. That’s what I felt when I read Arne G. Strout blog post about BPE. Under the spirit of open-source, Arne offered a great deal of thought and ideas regarding our little framework.

In the meantime, v2 was already under way so we exchanged some ideas and I’m pleased to announce that Arne will be collaborating in v2 development.

Box2D integration…

Wrapping Box2D in a minimalist Bold Pixel Engine kind of package is no easy treat, but it’s done. It doesn’t offer the full potential of Box2D yet and it’s not integrated with blit, but it will and it’s working great.

Toolkit changes

Manager has been removed from the toolkit package and it is now the manager of all the engine. Again this is related to a minimalist approach. Box2D wrapping needed information about framerate and we could get it from the main movieclip that is passed to the manager. This also offers other possibilities like controlling mouse focus, quality, yada yada yada.

I’m cooking a Button manager. I know most developers don’t really like SimpleButtons, but I actually do! What I was lacking was a central point to control those… it’s being taken care of.

Scene and Music will now have transitions. This is possible mostly due to Greensock tweening library, which Vortix Games now officially supports by becoming a member of the Club Greensock.

And that’s it!

There won’t be many news in the next weeks, since we have a lot of work (remember that we kinda disappear when we are just starting up a contract project) and the rest of the bunch, like the Japan game, Bold Pixel Engine and so on.

Sorting out some random thoughts

I’m cleaning up my brain today. It has been cluttered with code and projects and today after almost six months I’ve managed to stop and think. At first my objective was to code but while I was pulling some design decisions I noticed I was also organizing my own brain.

Projects

We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.

Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.

We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?

Bold Pixel Engine

A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.

With this a lot of questions appear also…

Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?

I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…

I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.

Sorting it out

Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.

By the way… thanks for reading

Our Second (Official) Birthday

And I mean official because the whole thing started a long time ago. Pull a chair, relax and enjoy this little story.

There was this artist dude, who we will call Marco for no particular reason. He had his share of game development work done, mostly for startups and community contests. He had a gig set to go work on a game development company that was doing some nice stuff over the web.

Then there was this coder dude, who we will call Diogo for no particular reason. He was a student, a game development enthusiast. Somewhere between the geek and genius but with the aspect of a normal human being.

And finally there was this consultant dude, who we will call Vlad for no particular reason, who had a lot of experience managing contracts and projects, that loved game development, that had a crush for game design but that the best he could do was a text game in high-school and all the other gamedev projects failed miserably.

Well this Vlad fellow was tired of being a ’suit’ so he started to read and do some game design stuff. One day he was frustrated of not being able to kick start a game because his coding ability was far lost for more than 10 years where Pascal was the king of the hill. A friend of his whose name is James said the the magic sentence that triggered hell: “If you ever coded, just pick code again and hire an artist.” And so Vlad did and he was lucky enough to meet Marco.

They worked on a game that was so bad it would never be understandable, Vlad’s fault by the way… but a friendship was born and that’s where it all started. Later on they were making plans about a lot of stuff but all around a game development studio. They then picked a project and started working on it.

In the meantime they decided to try to support several projects. Oh the failure… it was rather easy to find talented people, the problem was that talent and hard work rarely meet so projects failed one after the other. Until one day Vlad opened his mailbox and there it was… an email from Diogo, one of the many that Vlad and Marco met, saying that he was able to work hard and so he did.

Some months later, February 13th 2008, they all met and registered what is known has Vortix Games Studio. Their first game was almost finished and some weeks later they were able to show it to the world.

The rest is written somewhere along the lines of this blog. But the bottom line of this story is that Diogo, Marco and Vlad did it and February 13th will always be remembered as the day that they made it official to the world.

Vortix Games Studio is alive and kicking!

Grand Theft Content

I faced a weird situation some days ago. Some content from this blog was being used on another blog. No credit was given, no link was to our blog was made available. Anyone that read those lines would easily assume that the owner of the blog wrote it. To make things worst he edited parts of the texts that would point to us.

But… he forgot one link and that one link created a pingback and that pingback led me to his blog where I left a very nice comment on the blog post I wrote and he edited. Some minutes later he took both our posts from the blog.

I got some mixed feelings about it. On one hand I felt good… after all, our content was good enough for someone to take it and pretend it was his. On the other hand I felt awful because that was plain theft.

We work mostly on the flash game market, meaning, we want our games to spread, so we want our games to actually be stolen from site to site. The very nature of our success is measured that way by our partners, clients and competitors analyse this.

So? Where do we stand? What’s the difference?

The difference is credit. I just love that all our games travel the world, but I would hate to know that we wouldn’t be credited for creating it.

We are usually careful about content we use that is not ours. But now we will double check everything. I wouldn’t like to have someone thinking we would be stealing there content for our own good, especialy now that I know how it feels when that happens to our own content.

The image above is a fine example. A nice WP plugin for free pictures does all the work for us, so even better!

Vlad out!

Contracts, games and Pedro

Hi everyone, Vlad here.

A lot of people has approached me on MSN lately wondering what we were up to since there was no news from us for some time. Our blog hasn’t been updated with the exception of Marco’s previous post, we haven’t used Twitter lately or done our daily visit to FGL.

Some have wondered if everything is ok and so on. Well, it is! I’m currently working on a big contract that we will let you know once it’s public. This contract is the major time consuming ‘thing’ that has made hide in our dev cave and one very nice addition to it is that it is using our Bold Pixel Engine framework, which means that we will release version 1 as soon as we deliver the project.

Marco is juggling several things. For starters, this contract also involves art… well actually it involves the whole product, so art is part of it. He has delivered all known assets and he is currently working with a programmer that is doing some really cool things for us. The name of this fellow is Pedro, so give him a round of applause because he really deserves it! Trust me, he does and you’ll know about it soon. Marco also worked on Palisade Guardian 2, which I’ve failed to announce… so… I owe Mark Loika that one!

So apart from the forced disappearance d in our dark dev cave, everything is well, right? Not really… M:A:D, the game that we’ve been talking about is completely stopped for the reasons mentioned above, which is kind of sad since it was going out really well and we are already aware that maybe some other projects will get a higher priority before we can resume its development. Can’t win it all can we?

So I guess this is just a heads-up for everyone and we’ll be back soon.

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