Saturday, May 22, 2010

Gem Square - Procedural Gems

I just released my new free game Gem Square for Android on the Android Market. It is a very simple 'match 3' game with square gems. One of my goals when deciding to develop this game was to start a simple project where I could use my open source texture edtior NeoTextureEdit.
I hoped that using the editor on a real (but small) project helps me to identify parts that can be improved. The result after finishing gem square: it worked :-)

So here is a screenshot of the final NeoTextureEdit project with the gems from the game as procedural images:
It might look a bit confusing, but for such a small project it worked really well. The most important feature that was missing when I started the project was a way to automatically (i.e. via a shell script) export images from the texture project. This is now part of NeoTextureEdit and works really well by adding filename prefixes to individual nodes to mark them for export. More features that came to my mind during the project and that are now on my todo list are automatic graph layout and merging of redundant nodes.
At the end of the project I have to say that using procedural representations for game graphics when possible is really a time saver. The images are resolution independent and you can make small changes to all images with a single click and they get exported automatically. This hugely improves the workflow and shortens iteration time.

2 comments:

  1. Hello Mystic!
    I've just downloaded the Gem Square update for scoring and I don't see any evidence of lower level scoring boards - I'm just "number 1" in the world every game. Has score ninjas stopped saving scores?

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  2. Hi, thanks for your feedback. There are some problems with the score board. I am already working on a fix and soon there will be an improved score board. Sorry for the problems.

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