Posts

• Introducing Meticulous Monster

  April 15, 2018

  I just wanted to post a quick update to introduce Meticulous Monster – this is a company I created for the purpose of releasing Bludgeon once it’s ready, along with any future games I decide to make. I actually created it early last year, but I’m announcing it now because I finally got a website up for it!

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• Learning to Write Music

  December 30, 2017

  I’ve been interested in the idea of composing music for quite a while, and being able to write music was the last thing I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do in order to make a video game on my own. Over the summer, I finally decided to give it a try and see how it worked out. I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.

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• Bludgeon Update: Building a Dungeon

  November 21, 2017

  I’ve recently been working on updating the background art for Bludgeon. For quite a while, I’ve been using a very boring, plain, brick wall as the background during combat (you can see what it used to look like in this video). This was fine for initial versions of the game, but I really wanted to make something nicer. I decided to start out by making a dungeon, though I’m planning to eventually make several different levels to fight in.

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• Scaling Pixel Art Without Destroying It

  April 30, 2017

  When I started using pixel art in game development, I assumed that it would easily work at any screen resolution, since modern screen resolutions are much higher than the native resolution of a pixel art game. However, I quickly came to realize that this is not the case – it’s actually quite tricky to get pixel art to look correct when scaling it up by an arbitrary amount. It works fine when it’s scaled by an integer multiple (2x, 3x, etc.), but there are issues when scaling by a non-integer multiple. This causes problems because the texture pixels (in other words, the pixels in the artwork, also known as texels) get scaled to fractional pixels on the screen. Because screens can’t display fractional pixels, the rendering has to either round to the nearest whole pixel, or it has to blend different texels into the same screen pixel. Choosing one of the two standard texture scaling modes will end up either making some of the pixels in the pixel art bigger than others or making them all blurry. Neither of these options look great, as seen in the example below.

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• Introducing Bludgeon

  August 31, 2016

  Earlier this year, the Iowa City Game Dev group that I’m a part of hosted a month-long game jam, with the theme being “sports which could never exist”. I participated in the game jam and made a game called Bludgeon. It’s a local multiplayer game featuring two knights riding birds while wielding flails. The goal is to knock the other player into the spikes on the edge of the screen. Survival is made more difficult by the fact that you can’t control the direction your player is moving while using your weapon. Here’s a video (of me vs. the AI player) from the game jam version of the game:

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