Some of you may remember me from my last game (Pong-Karuga) or perhaps my Unreal Tournament 3 maps. Well, today I come to you with a brand new game! It's been about 6 months since my last game and I'm proud to say that there are less bugs in this one than the last one. The game, called Up and Atom, is another class project and our first group game project. We had 2 months to make a game as a group of 4, and I think we're all pretty proud of what came out of it.

First, a little information about how it started out. At the beginning, we were given the topic of "Physics." Now, our first idea wasn't quite what our game became. Originally it was going to be an action platformer with Physics elements. Things like: a gun that would shoot black holes, or switches that could change the direction of gravity, but we quickly realized that what we had in mind was pretty much just a standard platformer. We didn't want to just make another platformer (I should say platformer one more time), we wanted to try something different. We tried coming up with a few more failed ideas until someone suggested to us that we look into Molecular physics, and that's when it all started coming together.

Up and Atom is a molecular puzzle game. At it's core, the game is about bonding the atoms together to form molecules. Molecules have to be made in an alternating fashion, meaning the color of the first atom must match every odd numbered atom, the even numbered atoms in between can be whatever color you want though (including the color of the starting atom). To help mix things up, there are also so "special" atoms peppered throughout the board. These specials include radioactive atoms that will blow up the finished chain, or the solid atom (yeah it doesn't make much sense... but whatever :P ) which can't be used in a combo and must be destroyed by the other special atoms.

The game also has 3 play modes: Survival, Puzzle and Versus. Survival mode has you racing against the clock to make as many chains as possible. For each chain you complete you'll gain back time as well as some points. Make a chain of 7 or more, and you'll get yourself a score multiplier. Your objective is just to last as long as possible. Puzzle mode has you completing a series of puzzles (no way) with a certain completion criteria such as "Clear 21 atoms in a single chain". And versus is, well, versus. You can play against the CPU or with a friend (you'll have to have a 360 controller to play second player).

There is also a profile system that will keep track of your gameplay stats and achievements! This was one of my favorite parts about making this game since I love achievements so much. Some of the achievements are pretty simple (completing the tutorial) and others are so hard that none of us have actually unlocked it fairly (lasting for 5 minutes in survival mode), and other are just time consuming (Get 25 million points across all survival playthroughs).

Overall, we had a lot of fun seeing the game come together throughout the 2 months we spent on it, and we hope all of you will enjoy it to! Yes there are still some bugs (if you find any, let me know and we'll try and fix them), but the game isn't unplayable by any means.

Also, in the next few days I'll be writing up a sort of postmortem to talk about the things that I felt went right, and the things that went wrong. Hopefully this can give some more insight into the development process and the improvements to looks forward to in future Odd Man Out games.


A little taste of the gameplay.

Download Up and Atom

Oh, and before I forget... If you want to help us in making our next game you can check out our Kickstarter page and donate to our cause.

1. My name isn't Stewart. None of my names (First/Middle/Last) are Stewart. My real name is Daniel Rodriguez and my buddies call me Dan.

2. I'm only 19 years old, and by the time I'm done with college (if I don't fail a class) I won't even be 21 and I'll hopefully have a job in the game industry as a programmer.

3. I'm not good at holding on to money and it usually all goes to games, especially when it's an impulse buy like with games that I didn't have a chance to pick up when they first came out such as Burnout Paradise or Condemned 2.

4. I've never had a job. I've done small jobs for my mom's work and made some money that way, but so far in my life the only income I've had is mostly birthday/christmas money.

5. I'm a bit of a gamerscore whore, but I won't buy games just for gamerscore. I'll only try and get as much gamerscore as I possibly can in the games that I own.

6. My oldest memories of gaming are of the Back to the Future and Ghostbusters 2 games on the NES.

7. Final Fantasy 7 is my favorite game of all time (it was the second RPG I ever played but Saga Frontier doesn't count for me since I never got past the opening sequence for any of the characters) but I've never beaten it. I got to the final battle and could never beat it.

8. I own a Wii, but I don't think I've played any more than about 20 hours on the thing since I got it Christmas of 07.

9. Same goes for my PS3. Although I've spent more time on that than my Wii. I own Warhawk, MGS4, Uncharted and LBP but I've only beaten Uncharted. I've played maybe 2 or 3 hours of Warhawk and I'm only on the beginning of the second act (Brazil or something like that?) in MGS4.

10. The SNES is my favorite game console of all time. I have the most memories playing it. I also have it when people say "snes" like it's a word. Also, Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts is a bitch.


Well there it is, 10 things you probably didn't know about me.

Well, I've been planning on making one of these "My Setup" posts for a long while now, problem was neither me nor my brother (slash roommate) had a digital camera... Until now! Hooray for Christmas! So, here it is!



This is my desk. As you can see I've got a pretty big desktop setup goin' on (2x 24" Monitors each running at 1920x1200). You can see the Dreamcast along with the 360 sporting a Dark Sector faceplate (including HD-DVD player) and PS3 right above the monitors, and the HD cable box and external Hard Drive above that.



On the left I've got my workstation laptop (Compaq 8710w) where I do all my coding and school work. Above that you can see my 360/Wii/PS2/PS3 collections on above the laptop, with the PC games on the shelf above that.





Along with my PC I also play my 360/PS3/Dreamcast on the right monitor (so I can still do PC stuff on the left) and occasionally I'll watch TV on the left monitor while playing a console game on the right. But now let's move onto the exciting stuff...

My Retro collection!

I've got a sweet little setup right here. I've had this TV for years and it's still going strong. All the old games look great on it!



Now the systems!
Top row: NES, PS1, PS2
Bottom row: Atari 7800, N64
Outside: SNES, Gamecube





And the games starting with SNES/NES:
I know you can't see it, but at the back of the drawer there I've got Link to the Past on SNES and the original Zelda for the NES (I really love that gold cartridge)


Then the N64:


The PS1 (Which I got for christmas along with the Gamecube. Also, I love the big boxes):
What's the deal with Ebay auctions and a lot of shitty sports games... I don't need 4 football games with my Playstation.


The good old Dreamcast:


And of course the Atari:





Well I hope you all like it! I'm pretty proud of it myself. I feel all warm and fuzzy when I'm sitting near all that stuff... although that may just be the buzzing of the consoles and the heat they give off. I may want to look into that.

That's right! Our projects were due today so, here's version 1.0 of Pong-Karuga. I'll spare all the boring talk about the bug fixes and features I've added and just let you all get at it.

A word of warning, the game only runs at 1280x800 and in windowed mode (resizing is disabled) so if you've got a smaller resolution it may not fit correctly.


Yay pause menus!

So now for the instructions:
- If you're running on Vista it may not run very well and you'll see some weird extra space below and to the right of the game (but still inside the window). Having XP on our laptops, and no Compiler on my desktop, I'm not quite sure how exactly to debug/fix the problem so... play it on XP.
- Just unzip the contents of the package to wherever you'd like
- To run it, just double click the "Pong-Karuga.exe" file
- In the main menu, use the arrow keys to navigate and Enter to select your option
- The 360 controller works as well. DPad and Thumbstick both work and "A" selects the option
- In the game "P" pauses the game (when the pause menu is open use arrow keys and Enter like the main menu)
- You can check out the rest of the controls in the "Controls" section of the main menu.

NOTE: If you get an error message telling you that you're missing "XInput1_3.dll" you can download it right here and drop it into your Windows/System32/ folder. That should fix it up for you.

So, without further adieu, here's the download: Pong-Karuga v1.0

I hope you all enjoy! If you find any bugs or have any suggestions let me know and I'll try my best to keep the game updated.

Well I'm back and with quite a big update (after working around 30-something hours on it). I'll try not to be as wordy this time around (plus I've got more pictures!). So, here it goes.

Over the weekend I put together the rest of the gameplay for Pong-Karuga and started working on the sprites and particle effects to make it look good while you play. So I'll start off talking about the new gameplay elements implemented and in between you'll see some images of all the current images (some temporary some final. See if you can guess which ones are which).


One of the splash screens (It chooses at random on startup)

So once I got my "physics" system working I started on polarity. This was the simplest of all the gameplay elements in that one variable is switched from true to false and back again. So, that means I got the polarity system up pretty early on. Hitting the ball as the same color will net you 1 energy, but hitting it with the wrong color means you lose a life. At first, the ball never changed colors and was always stuck at white. This made the game pretty easy, but I had to come up with a way to change its color. So I did what every programmer does... I made it random! Now, everytime you hit the ball back, it has a 50-50 chance of changing colors. This makes the "charged shot" battles pretty hectic.

This ended up working pretty well and made the game much more interesting than I expected it to. It's especially fun watching people play it for the first time and watch them struggle to grab the concept, but once they finally get it they completely change the way the play the game and it's great to see.

Now that the charged shot AND polarity were both implemented I had to tie them together somehow. After some toying around I came to the current iteration of the system. When you launch a charged shot it moves more than 3 times the starting speed, but in a random Y direction. This makes it a little harder for the person with the charged shot to just try and take advantage of the other player.


The other splash screen. Yeah, they're awesome.. I know.

If the other player hits the charged shot as the right color, the ball gets volleyed like it normally would, but now the original player has to react to the quickly moving ball. It still randomly changes colors too, making it even more hectic. I've even had a long enough volley that one of us got enough energy to catch the ball again. It sounds simple, but it's really hard once the ball gets moving (and it still speeds up every 3 hits).

So once that was done I added the enemies flying in from the top of the screen. Their job is to break up the flow of the game by just being there. When the ball hits them, they suck it in and change its color to whatever they are and then spit it out in a random direction. They're mean little sons of bitches, especially when they start passing it around through the middle of the board. Once they launch the ball out though, they explode (Still no explosion particle effect yet :( ). I guess they're kinda like bees if you think about it. Once they do their damage they die a very painful death...


Some enemies (no white enemy sprite yet) and the black ball shown with particle trail

Anyway, they come in waves of 5 starting from the very beginning of the game. A new wave will only come once all 5 previous enemies have been wiped out. Oh, and you can blow them up with your charged shot too, which is pretty sweet. AND they'll catch the ball and they fly in from the top of the screen. They're always ready to just screw everything up.

Then I had the idea to get a wired 360 controller to work in game... luckily that didn't take much effort (much to my surprise)! Start pauses/unpauses the game, left thumbstick moves the left player, "A" changes polarity, and "X" launches a charged shot.

Once all of the gameplay had been finished I moved on to the Sprites/sound effects/particle effects. Rather than blabbing on any longer I'll just show you the rest of the screenshots of the game.


Crappy charged shot lightning!


The little pause before starting a match... Everything looks so peaceful


Here's the white ball's particle trail... and stuff.

Oh... and if anybody wants to help me make some sweet sprites for the game I would love the help (I'm a programmer not an artist dammit!). If you want to help, know that I'm on a tight schedule. As in, I would need them sometime tomorrow since the game is due Wednesday morning.

Anyway, I hope you've all enjoyed this little preview. I'll be back with the download for the game on Wednesday!

So, for the past couple of days I've been slacking on getting Pong-Karuga done. Being sick (sore throat, headache, runny nose, coughing) didn't really help my case either. So now that I'm back on the job I've got a bit more to share.

Unfortunately there are still no sprites or any cool effects put into the game yet, but I'd rather make the game work and have the all of the systems down before I try and get all fancy with the other stuff.

A few days ago one of my Classmates and I worked together on getting a really basic physics engine into the game. It's not using gravity or anything like that, but the velocity of the ball is based around time rather than how fast your processor is. Here's a little explanation to help understand what I'm talking about...

My Pong has 3 main functions (which end up calling a bunch of other smaller functions), GetInput, Simulate, and Render. The GetInput function checks to see if a key is held down. The simulate function handles the moving of the Ball and the calculations for the AI. And the Render function paints the whole thing to the screen. The way movement was originally handled was based on two things, an increment and a sleep.

The Sleep function basically tells the program to stop doing anything for the specified amount of time. The problem with this is that the Sleep function isn't always accurate. Depending on your processor and Sleep of 1 millisecond can take 10 milliseconds to wake back up. This means that the slower your computer it, the slower the ball will move because it won't make it to that Simulate function as often as a faster computer would. This also means that when you resize the window to something bigger (or maximize it), it will take longer to render the components and thus delay the time it takes to get back to that Simulate function and change the ball's position.


Here you can see the y-Velocity of the ball is 825, quite a bit higher than the 500 to start with. Too bad I suck and lost a life in the process of taking this screenshot...

So what we ended up doing is basing our movement off of a time step. Basically we call a function to get a time (the number of milliseconds since your computer started) and when the next call to simulate comes around it grabs the new time and compares it to the old one. That time difference becomes the "time step" which we use to tell us how many pixels to move. So this means that no matter how fast or slow your computer is, the ball will always move at (what I've got it set to) 500 pixels per second. This also means that with a real velocity, you can use the paddles to "spin" the ball by moving as you hit it.

Once that was done and implemented I started to work on the actual Pong-Karuga mechanics. I figured I'd start with something a little easier: the Charge shot system. Currently, whenever your opponent misses the ball and it hits the wall behind him, you gain some charge. Once you've hit the wall 5 times You've gained a "charge shot". Once you've filled your meter, the next time you hit the ball it will stick to your paddle. Pressing Space bar allows you to launch the ball again. This makes the ball grow to 2.5 times its original size and move 3.5 times faster across the board, firing at a random angle from the paddle. If the ball hits your opponent's wall he will lose a life, but if he manages to hit it, you volley the super shot back and forth until it hits someone's wall.


Charged shot ball! Hooray!

Eventually once polarity has been introduced if the opponent hits it with the wrong polarity he's lose a life too. But I haven't implemented that yet. I'm still trying to think of a way to have the AI choose polarity without it being unfair due to his being able to immediately know which polarity it is.

Anyway, I'm off to work on this some more. I'll be back in another couple of days with an update, hopefully one that starts with a "D" and ends with an "ownloadable Alpha".