Hi everyone, long time no see. Vlad here!

We never had one person to take care of our sound effects and music. Sometimes we hired, sometimes we got some sound packs and both me and Marco have made some music for some of our stuff. But the truth is that we were never 100% satisfied with the results.

When Marco was producing Hajime, we had the opportunity to work with Francisco Furtado. The result was amazing. Hajime is a much better game with all that vibrant music and amazing sound design. We spoke about future games and projects and Francisco agreed to cooperate with us.

After Hajime came The Adventures of Dear Explorer and with it a fantastic work and environment was created from the dungeons and sound and music carved in each wall, skeleton, boss… it’s almost unfair that we don’t let the rest of the world know about Francisco’s work. It is truly a work of love and high quality.

So I invite you all to visit his page at Bandcamp: http://franciscofurtado.bandcamp.com/ where you can check the OST for both games and much more.

Cheers and thanks Francisco, hope we can do more and more of these.

Talk to you all soon,
Vlad out!

If you want to contact us regarding this game (or any other matter), use the contact form: http://blog.vortixgames.com/contact-us

Nape wrapper is almost wrapped… pun intended, but first, apologies for the missed day 3. While Marco was working on the Hajime trailer I was surfing the waves of wrapping a physics engine. Before moving forward, a big thank you to deltaluca for helping out!

Although not necessarily final, the current wrapper consists of:

Core

This class basically controls the behavior of Nape’s space. Due to its nature, Nape wants simple things to be done quite often, for instance, if you want to change gravity, you need to wake all objects. Core does these small things for you.

Entities

Physics entities basically wrap Nape’s bodies. The abstract entity (if you don’t recall how we are using abstract classes in Bold Pixel, check this out) will offer most if not all of the functionality. Although this means that the class is not really abstract, it also means that classes that inherit from this can and should be used as presets. Currently we have a simple box, simple circle, core walls and a explosion.

As time goes by more and more presets will be built, that’s the whole beauty of it!

Debug View

This class allows for fine lines to appear on screen so we can degub objects positions and so on. Quite useful for blit, not that useful for display objects since it uses Nape’s assignGraphic method. The debug view observes if there is a display object assigned before drawing the debug sprites. This means that if a object is already skinned, it won’t have a debug sprite.

A simple test

The SWF below uses the wrapper exclusively. The walls are a non-skinned PhysicsCoreWalls object. The light wood boxes are also non-skinned so we can see the debug sprite, but the bitmap is handled manualy. The objective of this is to show how blit objects will look if debug sprite is present. The dark wood boxes and the rock circles are a normal body with a assigned graphic, so, no debug sprite is created.

Plans for tomorrow: have a bang with Nape… almost literally! Until then, click the SWF underneath to watch a simple simulation.

Click the SWF above to see the test…

Today I’ve been busy along with Pedro, putting together the final sound effects on the game so I could capture footage to create what will be the promotional video for Hajime, our next release. It’s been a huge trip. Not the smoothest but I have to say its been nothing but satisfying. Even Vlad, who has been working on other projects till very recently, was moved by the  VGS logo and splash screen. Something we haven’t seen in a long time, not with all the outsourcing development. It’s nice to be able to put our name one something again, but specially nice that its something we are so proud of.

So, with no further due, here it is, the Hajime video. I hope you enjoy it.

Take care,

Marco

So life is treating us so-so. A couple of contracts are approaching the end and after speaking with Marco we concluded that we won’t be doing contract work for a good while. We have too many good stuff right now to work on that has caught way too much dust.

Looking back over the past few months, a lot of what we did was neglected because of contracts. They were alright in a way, some for the money, some for the knowledge, some for something else. But unlike our own games, there’s always a part that is missing, regardless of how good the project is. We feel that has to stop and that what moves us forward is our ability to pursue what we want: pride and happyness.

I also feel that both can go hand in hand with stability and stability is what we found in the past months. We need to step up and do our thing. We need to improve what we did for us.

Project wise, that means that we have to put Hajime on FGL, we have to decided what we want for M:A:D and we have to have time for our most promising game. Code wise this means that I have to reflect if we want to keep Bold Pixel public considering that the current version suits our needs more than it suits the initial user friendliness. I strive to keep things simple, to impose convention over configuration as a standard. Right now I’m not that sure that this will fit developers needs to the point that BPE is helpful.

We’ll see about that in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for reading and the therapy session.

Vlad out!

So without further due, here is the logo for it and some combat screenshots.

Keep in mind though, the backgrounds need some work still! No time for everything!

So, here they are, in full glory, the first peak into the combats in Hajime.

Take care!

Marco

I know it makes us be very dedicated, very interested and makes us give all we have to what we do.
I’ve asked Vlad some times already “when can we start showing the game?”. He always passes the ball back to me by replying “its not done yet, but you should be able to judge what you can and can’t show”. He doesn’t say it that way specifically, he’s not as eloquent as me, but I read between the lines.

But I fear I have shot my self on the foot so-to-speak.

By posting very basic and relation-less images on the blog, I’m showing 10% of what I want to show, and you are getting 10% of what you need to make a proper appreciation of whatever it is I post. So, I’m afraid I come across as the irritating kid at school that had a gameboy and wouldn’t let anyone play, or kept the ball to him self whenever he didn’t like how the game was going (wait, I think I did that…) but anyway, the guy that everyone thinks is arrogant. Thus the title of the post. “Will I stop it?” Well you can’t really answer. If I asked “Should I stop it?” then you would have a say.

But the answer to the original question is NO. I will not stop it.

In fact, I will risk a bit more. I’ll show a bit more stuff, that you can fully appreciate and give comments like some of you have in previous posts. I can’t believe a set of screenshots can risk a project. If anything it can help it grow. And obviously it won’t give you access to the amout of artwork and code that we developed for it.

If this is a thing for the “big” games why can’t it be for the flash games as well? Teasing, promoting, saying it will be done in… whenever, saying its state of the art… mouse clicking, I don’t know, but I’m sure you get a feeling for what I’m saying.

ANYWAY, I’m showing it off what me and Pedro (the new coder) have been busy with in the past couple of months.

and some of the cast:

You can probably guess this game is based on that delicious turnbased strategy game – Advance Wars.

All the characters are 3D, as well as some buildings in the map, and they all animate and have their little death and pain and shooting animations and we’ve insisted in putting a bit of comedy and fun in it, which we hope you will enjoy once it comes out.

As for Pedro, how has been leading the coding on this game, all I can say is that I have beaten and have been beat by the game’s AI, so… it all evens out and it feels rather good. The game is still in development and we are dealing with the small things now. The minimap is an example as you can see we are still struggling with it.

Hope this one has been more insightfull and we’d love to hear your comments!

Marco

Even though he’s sitting at his desk with a mild case of flu, he’s still determined to get this game released as soon as possible.

I hope he gets better soon, and I’m sure you do too. That said, I’ll add that these images go along with some other that have been scattered around our blog in the past weeks. So, bring out the Sherlock Holmes in you and try to make out what it is!

Talk soon,

Marco

Here’s just a little teaser.

We appologize that we can’t show more, but soon enough we’ll have more info!
sit tight!

Marco