Last week has been a sleepless yet exciting one for us. We took a small break in Degrees of Separation to participate, as always, in the Norwegian nationals in gameplay (“NM i Gameplay”).

just like before, it’s a ten day long game jam hosted by the Norwegian film institute (NFI) that awards 100.000 NOK to the winner to be invested in a game.

And…

guess what…

We won! again!

The topic this year was “Cloning”, and we decided to create Multiple Clone Disorder, a 2D platformer where the player has the ability to clone the world and merge it in order to alter the state of the environment to solve puzzles. It’s possible to clone the world multiple times, and use this power for many  interests: Perhaps you want to use a clone to explore the world around without risking yourself, or maybe you need to go through that small platform with an enemy walking around, needing many tries before succeeding. The fun comes when you merge two worlds: the player will be placed in the middle point of both clones. This can be used to get into a room that is surrounded by walls.

There are many more tricks and challenges that this mechanic brings to us, so why not show you a playthrough of the prototype that won the contest?

Thank you very much to everyone that voted for our game at the event, thank you NFI for hosting this fantastic competition, as always, and thank you Norwegian game development community for being every year even more awesome!

Well, it’s been a while since our last post here.. Let’s just say we’ve been busy making Amphora and leave it at that, ok? Ok!

Anyways, we showed our game at SpillEXPO (site in Norwegian) this weekend and it was great seeing the reactions of people enjoying our game. We also gave out almost 1200 posters to visitors during the weekend and hopefully they will be hanging in homes around the country. =)

And here’s two teaser videos for Amphora we made for the weekend:

Amphora Teaser 1 – Fireworks

Amphora Teaser 2 – Tortoise and Hare

So, we had to get some things of our chest in a fast and simple way. Here goes:

We have a new homepage, in English! And with it we updated Kesper’s Keep, the game we made for (and won us) the Norwegian nationals in gameplay 2011! New puzzles and better performance among other things. Check it out if you’re up for some puzzling and see if you can find the bonus levels.

A new year brings yet another global game jam and of course we’ll be bringing it all the way to Hamar again (27.-29. January). This time we also teamed up with Krillbite Studio and Serapta Studio who we share offices with, so it will be bigger than ever before! What else can you ask for than spending a weekend making games with good people and (some) free food? Check out the official page (gamejam.no) for more info and to signup.

We’re currently very busy working on a prototype for this years Norwegian nationals in gameplay which went above expectations last year and we are going to be interviewed by NRK tomorrow about that.

And other things. We will come back too that when we have more time.

A (late) happy new year to everyone!

A while ago I wanted to find out if you could define your own global functions in ActionScript 3.0. After a little searching I found an answer: use static members. Sure, its a global, but it didn’t quite answer my question, what if I wanted a global function like one of the built-in ones like ‘trace’ or ‘setInterval’? At the time it seemed like no one had even thought about it.

Well if AS3 had support for user defined global functions(and why shouldn’t it? the AS3 API contains several)  it should be fairly easy to guess the syntax. So i wrote something like this:

package
{
  public function foo( ):void
  {
    trace( "bar" );
  }
}

and put it into a file called “foo.as”. And waddaya know, it worked! Also found out it worked for variables and constants, like so:

package
{
  public var someVar:int = 7;
}

package
{
  public const someConst:String = "baz";
}

Just make sure the file name matches the variable and that its in the correct source path.

I later discovered that Java does not support global standalone functions and variables. Since AS3 is influenced by Java maybe some people assume it would be the same.