Omni-Mad – News

2010 will be our year.

I cannot tell you why … yet, but here are some hints:
- A new/old developer has (re)appeared and is more than happy to work with us again.
- Gameplay of “CrazyAir” is 95% finished. Just a little bit of polishing and we might let some testers onto the first-playable version.
- Negotiations for “Project: Drunken” have started and do look really good.
- It looks like we will have real offices soon, which will really help us with our WiiWare developer license/registration.

So full steam ahead. The future is now.

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2010 will be our year and you will enjoy what we produce
So stay tuned.

Last week we suspended our development to relax a litte bit and start into the new year with full steam.

Well, that was the plan,
but after two days we got bored and things started to happen.

Kojote gave us the chance to do the Gianas Return port for Mac OSX.
Starting from 0.997 we will provide the Mac builds.
It’s not cleanly packaged into an .app yet, but Kojote is travelling during January and we will fix it when he is back.
Enjoy the game!

And let us know if you need your game ported!

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As some of you might already know:
From December 2007 till March 2008 I worked at Keen Games in Frankfurt as the Lead Programmer
for Anno/Dawn of Discovery Wii.

Last wednesday Anno Wii received the award for
“Beste deutsche Konsolenspiel 2009″ (Best german Console Game 2009).
Since this was my first lead role in the game industry im pretty proud on what we achieved.

And I’m more than super motivated to get another one

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Just another quick status update, before you forget we/I exist

Didn’t have a lot of time during november, but created some.
The only thing that seems to be limitless is time.
There are always ways to find more.

Here is a randomly sorted list of stuff that I managed to squeeze in:

• Window resizing for OSX and Linux with fixed aspect ratio. It feels so much better to play in a bigger window.
• Added score and cash handling. Game logic is almost complete with this.
• Implemented pools for game objects. Constantly newing and deleting was just fragmenting the memory.
• Added various helpers for easier creation of dialogs.
• Added animation converter and loader. Dialog animations are much easier to tweak this way. No editor yet.
• Added Level 4. Also added some extra features needed for this level.
• Added graphs to our subversion statistics. This is a huge motivational help.

Overall the game (and the framework) got a huge push forward.
It will still be hard to make the alpha deadline in december, but we are trying.

I also got a quick update from our artist, but didn’t actually see the new graphics yet.

Our windows developer is still missing…

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The bad news:
Over the last 4 weeks I only had about 4hours in total to work on Omni-Mad stuff
About 2 hours at the End of October and about 2 hours this weekend.

The good news:
In the first 2 hours I managed to:
a) Get the Mac Version working again (the dreaded Carbon to Cocoa translation).
(And yes, I will give you the promised sample code, but first I have to fix some minor things … and that is pretty low on my list right now.)
b) Created a bunch of tests for the platform/window/context code. This should make it a lot easier to port to a new platform in the future.
c) Cleaned up the platform code … using the said tests.

In the other 2 hours I managed to work on “Crazy Air” [Codename] again.
This included the following:
a) Level converter, kevel loader, in-game level selection and 3 sample levels are done.
b) Game over and level completed handling are done. (About 99%.)
c) The build utilities have been extracted from “Crazy Air” and can now be shared with the other projects.
d) The asset-build has been automated.
e) The font system is fixed. Before the alpha was broken and only one font could be used.
f) “Speed” controls have been added to the game. (Including pause…)

That might not seem like a lot, but the game (prototype) is about 90% finished now.
Soon there will be some gameplay tests, before I go and fix all the small glitches.
There is simply no need to make the graphics perfect if I don’t know if the game will be entertaining.
(It is for me, but I want some extra players…)

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