Delta Engine Blog

Here are some quick impressions from our game jam last week with the presentation of the games we did recently. 8 teams, almost 30 people participated and we have a lot of simple to complex games. Each week we will release one of those games with our weekly Delta Engine releases, some need some further cleanup.

 

It all started with the planing of the 8 team, see the previous post for details.

Then we had some Pizza to get started at the first day of the game jam after all the teams have formed and the first ideas started to be materialized. The next day we had some BBQ and some teams decided to work a bit more at the weekend.

 

The final presentation was this week, each team presented their status. Sadly some of the games are not completely playable yet, but there are some really nice prototypes of very different game types: Jump'n'Run, Kids Game, Strategy Game, Multiplayer Game, Fps, Puzzle game, Card Game, RPG, etc.

 

For example this is a card based game with rounds that a mixed team from MobileBits and Delta Engine guys did.

 

Another simple game is the "Find the Word" game, where our book keeper made all the graphics :)

 

A more graphically advanced, but unfinished game, is the "Don't Fuck me off" game. In this game you run around and get annoyed by almost everything and need to calm down by smoking or solving your quest: Find the milk. Kind of familiar theme (remember Postal ^^). Technically this game was using quite a lot of tricks and layered rendering with huge textures (4k) plus tons of animations to reach many 100 mb of content.

 

And finally this is Ghost Wars by Kirsten and me, a strategy game you can play alone or in network mode against your friends. It is similar to the recently released iOS Mushroom Wars game (which is actually a much older game from the PS3, but the game idea is much older). Quite fun to play and really simple class structure. Probably even simpler than our last Game Jam contribution "Game of Death".

Until next time for the Game Jam in August :) Then the topic will be "Mobile".

Here are some quick impressions from our first Delta Engine Game Jam (Friday, 2013-02-08). The topic was "Death". Our next Game Jam will be bigger and better and starts 3rd May 2013 till 5th May 2013 (you can either just work on your game on Friday or spend all weekend).

All the games shown here were build with the Delta Engine Milestone 2 and will be part of the Samples so you can download and try them out in the next releases, but there was also a team building a Java game. I don't have a screenshot, but you can check out Andre's game here.

We started by buying some food, there is even some healthy stuff in there, but not much. We also ordered Pizza and bought more Beer later.

 

Our amazing Game Programmer Phil (living in China) was working on his own on a game called "Blob". He was working on vector rendering and did a cool intro for his game, but then ran out of time to actually build some levels. Next time we should pair him up with some artists.

 

Another team with 2 programmers from the office and an artist from Italy build the really bloody game "Tanfius Must Die".

 

The biggest team at the office build a pretty complex RPG like game called "Til Death" with adventure like cut scene scripts. They have completed 4 levels and have everything from long funny intros, 4 unique maps and path finding. The mission is to protecting a guy or girl from zombies until he or her can finally die a natural death so the main character can harvest the soul properly. Credits include: Joey, Michele, Janina, Kerstin, Melanie, Flavio and Gero (and some others helped as well I guess). The game is amazing and everyone was surprised that they managed to put so much content and functionality into the game with this early version of the Delta Engine. However it does not work on most PCs (not even mine, so I have no screenshots from inside the game) and needs some reduction (500MB?) and finetuning before it can be released ^^

 

Because of a Dentist appointment Kirsten and me started a few hours later and build a little "Game Of Life" game with the twist to actually prevent life from spreading. It is called "Game Of Death" and the goal is to kill little rabbits before they multiply too quickly and take over the world. You can hit them with a mallet or burn them down, but they will get stronger over time so you need to resort to biological and even atomic warfare as the game goes on. The more rabbits you kill the higher your score will be. The whole 14-15h I worked on this game was streamed, so you can watch the way I approached Test Driven Development in a stressful environment. There is obviously some hacking going on, but you can always see unit tests helping me along the way and it really helped finding bugs quickly and even fixing several issues I found with the Delta Engine while adding features for our game (particle effects, font rendering, playing compressed sound files, etc.)

 

Last but not least here are some impressions from our presentation on Friday:

Everyone agrees this was a great event, we all learned a lot and had tons of fun. We even improved the Delta Engine, fixed issues and now have a bunch of useful sample games for others to check out.

Till next time, remember the date 3rd May 2013 for the Second Delta Engine Game Jam :)

I am currently streaming live from the Game Jam. The game I am creating is called "Game Of Death", which is a variation of the Game Of Life except you have to kill live, which spreads throughout the game. You will lose if you cannot stop life spreading.

http://www.twitch.tv/deltaengine

Today we got the final confirmation and some signs from our NBank funding, which is supporting our ambitious Delta Engine project. This allows us to hire some more people and we are really excited and happy that the EU and Niedersachsen, Germany is behind us. We are on a good track for 2013 and have really a great team for both our starter projects (we call it the game team) and our engine. Here are some pics, celebrations start Monday :) We are still hiring!

I just quickly assembled some cheap parts (LEDs for $7, some old network cable, 2 traffic lights and some light switches I got for free) together for our CruiseControl Server build results. Currently it still has to be switched on and off manually, but once our DigiSpark Boards (Arduino) arrive we plan to automate that too.

In case you are interested in our build results, we publish them every time a build happens on our build server. Internally we obviously use CCTray to get notified while working if anything broke, but it is also nice walking through the office seeing a green light and knowing everything is okay.

Step 1 for my quick 15 minute LED-Assembly was getting some power out of my PC into the network cable (I used some CAT6 cable for less resistance since the cables are pretty big and isolated well, but anything should work). The black cable is ground, yellow is 12V (which is what my LED panels want), red is 5V (unused).


Next up was grabbing two old lamps for the light switches and connecting the cables.


Finally I taped the LED panel strip to the back of the traffic lights (btw: these are old East Germany traffic lights, normal traffic lights don't look that way in Germany). Probably separating the LEDs out a bit more would look cooler, but from a far all you care about is green or red.


And this is how it looks like when switching on the red light (if a build brakes).


The LEDs are pretty bright and visible even at daylight (not as well, but you know if green or red is on).

Here are some pictures from the Making Games Talents event in Hamburg from last Saturday (November 3rd, 2012). This is me talking about the Delta Engine company and which people we are searching for:


This is where all the talks happened:


One of our VCs was also presenting itself (iVentureCapital, presented by Sandra Fisher). Didn't know that we were so special :D


Girls visiting our programmer booth? wtf? No one is going to believe this back home. They even wanted a job and had some nice art to show.


One major point of almost all companies was that they don't want to hire assholes or jerks. Gunnar Lott of flaregames was funny as hell in his usual form and was also making fun of browser companies all day.


Here you can see the HR head of Good Games (and behind him the HR head of Innogames, but only her behind is visible ^^). Then Marius Follert from Farbflut (known for Pennergame) and finally Gunnar Lott, myself and another startup in Hamburg Threaks (not on this pic).


Our audience got a little thin in the evening.


And last but not least this is Heiko Klinge from Making Games/GameStar/etc., the man behind this event:

Just backed the cool Oculus Rift Headmount display. I almost forgot about it, but thanks to the successful completion of Project Giana I quickly looked at Kickstarter.com and noticed I had about 90 seconds left for the Oculus :)

 

An employee had a problem with mocking graphical stuff and content loading on Friday. More on this in the next post. While working on Moq and Autofac to try some of these things out, I was watching a few startup videos and this one from Jason Nazar (docstoc.com) was the most interesting IMO. Some aggressive ideas, but it reminds me of me (working too much ^^):

Nuke made a pretty cool hype video for the last OSL Final that is today (Ongamenet Starleague):


Fantasy is playing against JangBi. For more details check out Moletraps post on TeamLiquid. And last but not least here is the stream link for the english cast of the last OSL Final ever (casting right now). Sad, but most people have moved on a long time ago, only the Koreans kept playing Broodwar like crazy. I still enjoy a quick game of Starcraft from time to time, IMO still the best game ever made :)

We are in the final steps of founding the new Delta Engine company and more announcements are coming soon.

Here are some early pics on getting started.

Disassembly	Elevator Fun
Almost ready to work again	Concentrate
The future is bright