Hello! I am drunk robotic artist Yamatron!
We added a gallery page this week! !
You can see early concepts, the magazine “Astronote” in the galaxy of Inc., comics and more and more.
We hope you can use it while enjoying strange space travel with beer in one-hand! (all right! even coke and pizza!)
I will continue to update. please check! :D
Morning! Samurai Programmer Sawa (and cub) here!
Is everyone finding the dev blog useful!? Chat with us in the comments whenever you like~!
Ok, so have you ever seen the credits of a PixelJunk game? Anyone that hasn’t, get straight over to the PSN Store, buy all the PixelJunk games and clear them! Did you notice a name that appears every time in our credits? Yep that’s right, it’s our CEO Dylan Cuthbert… ..wait no, i’m talking about Game Monkey!!
It might feel weird, but over 70% of PixelJunk games are made in script. PixelJunk Inc. is of course no exception. The name of that scripting language is Game Monkey, our dearly beloved, stylin’ monkey friend.
And with that, here’s this week’s “imagination shot”!
As you can see, there’s lots of ‘sleeps’. If you want to put a brief delay between this thing and that thing a ‘sleep’ can help you out. Although, if you’re not careful the code can get overrun with them.
It’s still better than the alternative though, of implementing ‘sleeps’ in C++, then having any small tweak trigger an entire C++ build each time… that’s a big waste of time we’ve avoided.
GameMonkey lets you easily make threads (typically called fibers or coroutines) making it super convenient!
If only it could get more exposure…
Waah♪ O-ooh a-aah♪
Oh!.. My cub and monkey are calling.. I’ll leave it here for today.
Hello! I was working on a menu around with Sawa this week. Looks like still much to be done.
Today’s topic is the story of robot GIFs attached to the end of the blog post every time. I make a robot that was imagined from the contents of the article by noon every Friday. Motto is, as much as possible, laugh!
How to make simple:
1. illustrator make frames the image of the original
2. photoshop make animation& export to GIF.
That’s it. I tried to also capture part of illustrator work this time, see if you like. Theme is “Rocket bot!” GOGOGO!
See you next week!
Samurai Programmer Sawa has been slicing away at our ‘Building Menu’, so it’s slow going on gameplay this week. I did want to show you guys something that made it in though. Conveyor belts! :D
There was already a few buildings that provided easy vertical motion, but none that were really doing anything horizontal to let you chain-automate production.. There’s a bit going on in this screenshot so I’ll break it down. The skill tester building on the left pulls up whatever falls into its claw. The tube is a higher tier infrastructure building that we showed before, transporting things from A to B. That’s a funnel on top of the tube’s entry, which automatically funnels things into whatever building it’s attached to (art is still placeholder). You can attach funnels to a soup factory, deconstructor, furnace, or whatever else you feel like.
We also confirmed this week that PixelJunk Inc will be coming to PAX Prime! :) More details to follow.
Hello, I am programmer kalin. I wrote the original prototype of PJ Inc long ago, and when I can find the time, do various gameplay design and prototyping in the current version.
Today we’ll talk about ecology!
Recently I added a simple ecological system and spent some time tweaking it. Ecology-related game objects are divided into Flora and Fauna – plants and animals.
Flora will continue to spread as long as there are sufficient nutrients around; be it soil or water or maybe even poison gas! Left long enough, it can get quite overgrown.
Fauna will breed and multiply when they are well fed and happy. Usually they reach an equilibrium with their surroundings, but sometimes they can over-populate and eat all their food sources. Sadly this doesn’t end well for them… needs a little bit of tuning still!
So I wondered what would happen if I tagged the fauna themselves as a food source… started up the game, the fauna searched for the nearest food source… and found it – themself! All the fauna in the world promptly consumed themselves and disappeared in a puff of particle effects. Oops!
So overall the current system feels natural. Untouched areas grow thick with plant life, and creatures tend to gather around food sources – so be careful leaving your farming areas unattended!
Title says it all really. :) Here’s a screenshot.
Here’s a pic of us hard at work for 3 hours after it went in.
Of course online Steam co-op is the eventual goal, but this small step is important (and crazy fun). :) Enjoy some hatbots in split-screen. PC games need hats right? :P
This week I’ve been plotting away, steeped in the design of our research & upgrade systems. I’ve come to an important conclusion: “Transforming buildings are awesome”. :)
I thought we’d share a design idea we’re probably NOT going to use for a change and point out some of the reasons why not. Here’s one of the ideas for research & upgrades we had:
You can unlock new building blueprints and levels with the money you make from exporting soup. Then choose which buildings you want to level up (also costing money). Seemed simple enough. Each building type (EG: my Generators) has a clear linear progression of power. Each instance of a building carries an internal ‘level’ and with an exchange of currency and labour you can ‘level them up’ by shooting them with a laser.
So here’s the 2 main issues unique to Inc with this popular tower-defense style system:
So that one probably isn’t the holy grail for research design we were looking for. We’re still testing a few different ideas yet for how research will ultimately play out. The end goal though is still to not have you bogged down in DOING research & upgrades but let you get on with ENJOYING them! :D
Drink beer everyday,everynight ～♪
Good beer after work! One more please!
hello! I am drunk robotic artist Yamamura!
I am happy to announce PixelJunk Inc. I tell to you something about new art style. Well, from the self-introduction, like last week Sawa, I am also Japanese! ! But I am single! Sawa envy… …there is only drink beer!
Beer-can mountain just grows like that, but, of course, I make the many art! This time, it is the story of the world’s distortion.
Although you’ve seen many other world, Inc. has been bent a little from the early days. We will get the entire screen distorted, give the atmosphere of a mysterious planet! I tried to create a sample that has a few different angle distortion, we tried among the actual game prototype.
40 degrees feels round planet, but I was feeling a little drunk. We think 3 degrees is good for play!
Tiles pop out, looks like paper texture of the screen? I will talk of something like that next time also.
ok! I finished work and I drink some beer with robot!
Hello!
I am samurai programmer Sawa!
Now that the fresh new PixelJunk Inc. name has been announced, I think it’s time for some new fresh blog posts to go along with it!
I’d like to start posting some delicious programmery details on PixelJunk Inc. for you all to see.
So I suppose there are lots of people who wonder; what is game development like? What sort of people work on games? I’ll give a little bit of an introduction.
I’m a native of Kyoto! The Japan inside Japan! I haven’t visited overseas!
Ok, everyone feeling relaxed?
This week I’ve been working on optimization of some rendering systems.. lets look at this splendid screenshot of Inc.!
Wah! Lots of things here. What is all this?!
This is the PixelJunk profiler. What kind of things are going on here?
Imagination!
smash
Uh-oh. It looks like some ninjas have snuck in here. I’ll have to leave it at that for today.
