NEW PROJECT ALERT! Colors has always been a passion-project of mine, and with the last release dating back to 2012, it’s about time to get an update out there!
This time it’s for Nintendo Switch and since the Switch doesn’t have a stylus, we had to make our own! There’s also an innovative new game-mode that I’m really excited about.
Continue reading Announcing Colors Live!This June, it will be 10 years since I first released Colors! as a prototype for the Nintendo DS. Since then, it has lived on a multitude of platforms like iPhone, Android and PSVita, but no version has been so successful as Colors! 3D for Nintendo 3DS, which still is one of the best sold titles on the Nintendo eShop and one of the top reviewed titles for the platform.
With last week’s launch of Nintendo Switch, we’ve gotten questions about the future of Colors!. Continue reading The future of Colors! and Yoku’s Island Express
It always feels good when you spend a few hours getting that idea in your head down on “paper”. This is a concept of card-base adventure game with semi-realtime combat that I mocked up a few weeks ago.
Trading-card games as a mechanics for video-games seem to getting more popular every year. I’ve spent a bunch of time in the excellent Hearthstone recently and they nail so many things in that game. Blizzard being awesome as always.
It’s time for the release of another project: Hyena
Hyena is something I call an AudioGame player. It is probably more correctly called AudioGameBook which is a combination of the words AudioBook and GameBook, which Hyena is based on. AudioBooks have had a dramatic rise in popularity the last couple of years, probably due to the rise of mp3-players, but they do provide a unique function: Being able to “read” a book while your body is busy with other things. Continue reading Hyena – Audiogame Player
As you may know I’m currently on sabbatical from the games-industry and my company Starbreeze. After having the best job I can imagine for 8 years, I felt I needed a change of scenery and decided to take the money I had managed to put away and burn it on things that makes me feel wiser. You can see some of those things on this site, with small projects of different kinds; some art-projects, some game-projects and some other things that may or may not be good ideas.
The biggest of these projects is one that I haven’t really started on. It’s the project that I’ve been hoping to do for quite some time, and it’s the project that made me create this site in the first place. It’s the Collecting Smiles project.
I’ve talked a bit about games and art in the past, but something that is much harder to pinpoint is programming art. I was introduced to programming art a long time ago with the demo-scene, where people are creating beautiful applications that often try to do things with a computer that computers weren’t meant for. Another example is one of my great inspirations Karl Sims. Continue reading Programming art
Having a great idea for a game is valuable. That goes without saying, but exactly how valuable is such an idea? I’ve become rather cynical on the subject after working a while in the games-industry. If 50 people work on one game for over two years, how many good ideas are thought up? And how many of those are needed for the next game? Even if you don’t have a team of 50 people or don’t plan to work on one project for that long, there is a good chance that you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas that could become great games; Ideas that never will be realized.
Cosmonaut is such an idea. Continue reading Cosmonaut
The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more “traditional” art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally I see interactivity as the key word, and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity of conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.
Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach.
For some time I’ve been messing around with some homebrew stuff for handheld platforms. I’m incredibly impressed with how far it has progressed with things like devkitPro which is a user-friendly collection of some of the reversed-engineered SDKs that are available for different platform and easily rival the official versions.
Especially the handheld platforms really intrigue me since there is a lot of potential there for new types of games and applications. Colors! is a program I’ve developed that I released a couple of weeks back that are along those lines. It’s more or less a digital sketchpad on the fly, which I’m currently having a lot of fun with.
I’m going to talk a bit more about handheld homebrew in general, but if you want to check out Colors! you can go here.