February, and we are back !
So, a quick review of January…

#GAM January

Because of several issues, Thomas directly focused on his February project. It consists of a dungeon crawler for which level design data will be saved on a database server.

Bastien isn’t entirely satisfied with his own project that isn’t totally polished (LINK : read what he says about it on his blog). It however allowed him to have his first experience with Unity and to wholeheartedly adopt it. He perfected the game during February.

FOSDEM

We told you we would go, and indeed we did!

First, a quick presentation in its organizers’ words : “The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software.“

Talks were held on plenty of topics and booths presented a variety of products, softwares or project teams. Some were well known – like Gnome, Firefox, Ubuntu, LibreOffice… – but there were also others far less renowned (or finished).

Bastien and Pascale, the true warriors they are, already attended FOSDEM on Saturday. The rest of the team joined on Sunday to follow a few talks about Open Source games, of course, but also lots of other topics.

Personally, I felt both very intelligent (I understood the title of the books, I who didn’t code at all only eighteen months ago!) and very inexperienced. Since I don’t have much technical knowledge, I couldn’t follow everything. But next year, hopefully, I’ll have improved!

Alun Hevel

Even though this project became secondary, we are still working on it, especially on visuals.
Last one? Angelic forges… which gave our imagination a hard time.

Bloboy

The long and hard coding work is ongoing, thanks to our devs !

This month, they worked on jumps, in a very particular form : the main character is launched using the mouse movement – a catapult-like system – and gets thrown upon release of the mouse button.

Moreover, they made a great effort to give an elastic effect to our character’s movements since he is, after all, a blob.

To manage this, I cut the sprite’s rectangle following a grid, and I move the different points to distort the rectangle. The texture (Bloboy’s image) is thus distorted in the same way. This gives the impression that the sprite is crushed in the direction of the mouse pointer.

And tests are conclusives!

Now, the effect still has to be polished…

Hi there! As we alluded in our previous article, there will be more than “under-the-hood” changes in the upcoming Alun Hevel release. The most easily spotted of the changes will probably be the audio component. We are very proud to announce that we got help from a great composer to write some original music for the game! His name is Will Phillips, and I will let him present himself:
Continue reading »

From an external perspective, GSM Productions looks as productive as a fish-stick in a box of 12.
Apart from some ScreenshotSaturday, we’ve been dead quiet on the web, apologies for that.
But nevermind! It’s not because we do not talk about them that our progresses aren’t real.
So today, for your greatest pleasure, we decided to give some updates.
Continue reading »

It seems crazy that more than a year has passed since we released the first playable version of Alun Hevel. And while there have been unregular postings here, not much seems to have moved forward. And indeed, as we are slowly inching towards another release, we cannot really hype that much new content.

Sure, the maps we are going to include in this version will be new ones, the music has changed, and a couple of visual change will appear here and there, it will seem as if it was the work of maybe a week or two. And not something that would take a year.

The reasons for the delay are diverse, and I think this post as a good opportunity to share some of them with you.
Continue reading »

One year ago on GTalk…
Continue reading »

Apart from bringing an awful pun to your eyes, here is a quick update of what is going on in the team.
Continue reading »

In a video game like Alun Hevel, we need to store information inside files.
There are two types of files:

• the ‘dynamic’ files, in which we store the modified data, either directly or indirectly changed by the players (such as the options backup).
• the ‘static’ files, containing the data needed by the game, such as pictures, translations or maps.

We must therefore use various programs going from a basic text editor (Gedit, Notepad, Geany, etc.) to a picture editor (Paint, the Gimp, etc.) in order to generate those files.
But sometimes, there isn’t any program which can comfortably generate the desired file, and this is the case with the mapping files.
Continue reading »

Hi there! Seeing how dead this blog has been for a while, I thought I’d give you a quick overview of what we are busy with at the moment.

Mostly, we’re working on Alun Hevel, which we plan to release at the end of the year (did I just let a release date slip ? I think I did…). We would love to share with you some of the improvements we are working on, but unfortunately right now most of our task are about “behind the scenes” stuff, as we decided to move from one multimedia library to another. So nothing to be very excited about, except maybe if you don’t experience a smooth framerate with the current release : the next one will be much better in that regard !
Continue reading »

I know I said I said that I’d write a post a week…

But, you know, the hazards of life, work and Murphy…

Yet, as demonstrated by this post, I’ve not given up on my gelatinous friend.
Continue reading »

One comment that came up most often concerning the LD version of Bloboy (except the extreme difficulty of the game) is the unfortunate choice of controls.

The most obvious solution was to leave this choice to the user.
Continue reading »