Pixeltruss blog

Ripple Dot Zero – Deleted Music

Simon — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:49:37 +0000

Ripple Dot Zero have been ongoing for about three years now, and the music has been iterated back and forth all that time. There is so much recorded music that won’t make it into the final game, so I thought that it would be a good idea to release some of it. Music has always been an intergral part of the Ripple Dot Zero project, since the video game music of the early 90s is part of the soundtrack of our lives. I remember plugging in a RCA cable to the Mega Drive making mix tapes, a bit embarassed that I never got what Oasis was all about.

Well, here’s the link:

http://soundcloud.com/simon-st-lenhag/sets/ripple-dot-zero-unused

cheers,

Simon

Sneaky peeky

Tommislav — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 18:41:12 +0000

There’s a paparazzo in Simon’s apartment!
As Simon is playing through one of the levels in Ripple Dot Zero I’m taking the opportunity to document it with my mobile camera. Well… it’s been a long day of development today =)

Lets call it a sneaky preview or something, and remember that both the game and the level is under development. Nor does the chaotic desktop and foul looking dude in front of the monitor represent Pixeltruss Inc. or any of it’s affiliates.

/Tommislav

Status report 24/7 2011

Tommislav — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 09:53:26 +0000

Time for a status report as I haven’t written anything for a while now.
As I wrote in the last post I took a week off, focusing entirely on Ripple.

During that time I managed to tweak the performance, so that the game runs with a pretty sweet framerate even on my old netbook.
I made the levelselect-screen (inspired by Super Mario World, but with a much more sinister atmosphere), and most of the menu screens.
Oh yeah, and the game has an ending now. And its a really epic ending as well =D

So whats left?
Actually not much.

I am currently working on a tool that optimizes and compresses all the level data. The raw textual level data (images and sounds not included) is about 500 mb per level, but there is a lot of data that isn’t used and should be removed.
When this is done I need to write a new routine for loading those new compressed levels. I’ll need to add a preloader to the game, I need to finalize the last menu screen where you’ll be able to re-map the controls (functionality already in place, only needs gui) and I need to implement some mochi-stuff.

Except for this, we need to do some balancing in the levels, and probably go over the behavior for some of the enemies.

So, when will we release the game?
Don’t know. I’ve been working on the game for about an hour every day the last two weeks, and I think I will be able to spend a lot of time during the summer. Would be sweet if we had a release candidate by this autumn, but no promises.
The best way to keep up is to keep an eye at this blog (even though we’re pretty bad at updating it, sorry ’bout that).

/Tommislav

Quick update – Ripple status

Tommislav — Thu, 05 May 2011 19:19:49 +0000

According to our plan (~6 months ago) we were supposed to be finished with Ripple Dot Zero some time ago (i.e. March). We have had some crazy times in our IRL-lives so we are a bit behind schedule.

The current status of the game is that it is nearly complete. We have all nine levels and you can actually play the game from start to end. Whats left is a lot of polish, ending, intro, final touches on the menu system… and wrapping it up.

I have taken next week off from my day job to dedicate all my time on finishing this game. I’ll try to post something here during that week.

/Tommislav

ScreenShot Saturday

Tommislav — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 13:36:05 +0000

Here is a screenshot from Ripple Dot Zero, which we have posted to #ScreenShotSaturday on Twitter.

Click to enlarge:

Metro Siberia Beatbox

Tommislav — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:28:09 +0000

I just found this video on Youtube. Someone is beatboxing to the soundtrack of Metro Siberia (the first game released by Simon and myself, the original score was composed by Simon).

Awesome! =D
(P.S. You can play Metro Siberia here)

Saturday coding fever!

Tommislav — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 10:56:38 +0000

Today the full team gathered at Simon’s place for a full day of Ripple Dot Zero development.
I’m really excited, we have some really cool stuff in todays pipeline.
For your pleasure – here is a picture of the Pixeltruss team!

/Tommislav

Bice Courves

Tommislav — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:26:42 +0000

Title Card from Ripple Dot Zero

Nice title card in place, but we might want to change the name of the level ;-D

Developer Diary – second and third quarter 2010

Tommislav — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 11:10:07 +0000

Just a few words about the progress of Ripple Dot Zero, the project is still very much alive! We will probably start working more actively with this blog as we get closer to completion. Right now we are spending a lot of time on the game, and it is starting to look really nice.

Backlog and expected delivery

(each column is one month, green=complete, red=not started, yellow=in progress).

Starting a few months back, we actually are trying to work toward some kind of deadline. At least we have defined all outstanding tasks and put them into month-long “sprints”. It is very hard to stick to this time plan since we are all working on this project on our free time, but at least we now have a good overview of how we are getting closer to completion.
If we manage to stick to this plan, it looks like the game will be ready to ship by march 2011!

LOLCAKE

Tommislav — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:51:28 +0000

I turned 30 last Friday, and was surprised by my colleagues with a cake which had frosting with LOLCODE-greeting on it!
I am childishly fond of this programming language ever since I found out about it a few weeks ago (late as usual)! In case you haven’t heard about it before – make sure to check it out www.lolcode.com.

Thanks a lot all of you at isotop. You really made my day =D
KTHXBYE