Toon styled water

So in this game I have been working on, the artist made a painted concept sketch/mockup of how the level graphics could be, like this:

Click image to enlarge.

And my first reaction was something like, oh noes, now they want some kind of water/fluid simulation stuff and this should run mobile. But then I thought about it some more and some different approaches and eventually came up with this.

A way to do toon-like water/ripples/edge foam for dynamically generated levels.
(Note. This might have been done in better ways before, haven´t really looked in to it.)

What I’m talking about here is the edges/outline of the objects, just to be clear.

The idea is that you draw like a “depthslice” of the surface of your water to a texture/rendertarget white on black, like you were looking straight up or down with no perspective. Then you run a blur-pass on that texture/rendertarget, this is used for the “ripples”. Then, without clearing, you draw once more on top without the blur, this is to get the hard outline.

So now you have a texture that looks something like this:

Then you feed this texture/rendertarget to a shader.
In the shader we take the pixel value and multiply it by a larger number and run that value through a sin-function along with time. This makes the gradient part “peak” and animate outwards with time.
If we then “cut off” these peaks when they are above a certain threshold and then set that value to 1, we get the ripples.

Also to get some more “life” in it, we feed the shader with another texture, like a noise pattern of some sort. We can then move it and use the pixel-value to remove the ripples on some places to get it to look less static. And also to offset/wave everything a bit and also to make bigger ripples.

The end result in the game was like this:

Click image to enlarge.

In my usecase the levels were static, as in no objects moved around, so the setup could be done once in the beginning of each level. I also only had square and round objects. So what I did was to draw sprites, according to how the level looked, to a offscreen orthographic camera. Then render that once with the blur and once more with no blur on top.
If you were to have moving objects that should be included, you would have to render this all the time. And possibly do some kind of “depthslice” of the real geometry along the surface of the water. I have not looked in to that.

Check out this test on youtube to see it running:

Here is a link to that proof-of-concept unity-project on github.
This was fast-hacked just to test the idea, so it’s very rough and not production-ready code.

And if you want to play the game, it is here: App Store and Google play. It is a logic puzzle game.

Edit: 2019-01-24
I revisited this one and looked into doing a “dynamic” version with moving objects. You can check out a test here:

Ok, just one new game…

Had some sparetime this weekend, so I made a remake of one of Oskar van Deventer’s awesome puzzles. It´s called Threesome. You control three players who have to work together to exit a maze. Have a try.

A couple of simple games

Have made a couple of simple games. First up was a dice game, Dice Poker(called Yatzy in swedish). Hadn´t done anything with dices before so that was fun. A game like that should be Multiplayer though..
Second one was BlackOut, a classic simple puzzle game. Have had it on my HD for quite some time, but never gotten around to finish it until now. There´s always plenty of unfinished stuff, can´t be arsed to to graphics for them…

Fun Cup

Andre’ Michelle have made a new game engine for a rotating isometric cargame. Looks damn impressive! Try it out here! Nice work as always.. ;)

New game – RefleX

Have made another remake. This time of great little puzzle game called Reflexion. Hadn´t done anything in quite a while, so it was fun! Try it out.

Abandonware

Found a really cool site with a bunch of old games I used to play :) Has a lot of the old Sierra adventures. Played through Space Quest II(Ega version) this weekend, great fun! I can also recommend “Pushover”, under Puzzle… Go visit: Abandonia.com.

Small director test

Did a small tile engine test in director a while back. Just to get an idea of much faster than flash it would be.. Tile engine test.

New game – Blockdude

Have made a new game called Blockdude, another remake a great TI-83 game. Have also been playing with FlashMX a little and made this: Pacman with perspective, not really a game but more of a test…

A couple of games

Have made a couple of new puzzle games. First up was D-star, from the TI-83 calculator. Then it was Double Maze, remake of a great shockwave game. And finally a remake of a Java game called Eliminator. It was fun to script a little now again, although I was a bit rusty ;)

Flashkit “members´ choice Game Awards 2003!”

The members over at the Flashkit Games forum are having “competition”, where any member can nominate a “game” in a number of different categories. Candidates can be nominated until January 1st, members can then vote for a week. Please go check it out! Looks like great stuff…

Tile tutorials by tonypa

Tonypa, veteran member of the Flashkit games forum, has made a whole bunch of tutorials about tilegames in flash. They are somewhat based on my shit, but they are more up to date codewise(flashMX and newer). They seem to be very well written, so I recommend everyone to go read them! Great work Tony :)

Head over heels – remake(not flash)

A little off topic, but this remake must be one of the coolest I´ve seen. Head over heels was and still is a very great game. Check out those screenshots, looks damn good. Can´t wait for the realese…

Webbased game article

I read this article, written by Director-wizard Charles Forman(setpixel.com), a while ago. It´s really good reading and very true! Read…

Z-mapping

Really cool thread over at Flashkit about an old technique called z-mapping(Nintendo called it mode7, I think?). Useful for making games like Mariokart…
There´s some pretty cool examples from different people, be sure to check them out.

GoToAndPlay

GoToAndPlay is a new “Flash-gaming-community”. A great initative, I think. The site looks very fresh, nice and clean.
It´s a little low on content at the moment but it just launched, so that´s understandable. They also launched a Bomberman clone, which looks very nice.
So check it out. (Thanks Marco)

Lost Vikings demo

Blizzard Entertainment have realesed a mighty cool flash demo to push the launch of the classic game Lost Vikings for the Gba. It´s probably old news, but still very cool :)

Whizzball

Whizzball, a pretty cool isometric puzzle game by Andries Odendaal(Corrected: Sumona). The objective is to get a marble to the goal with the help of different tile-pieces. You can also design your own levels. It’s great to see stuff like this beeing made in flash :).

Finalists FF 2003

These are the finalists in the game category for FlashForward 2003:
Jingleballs
Flyguy
Law & Order
Battle of Sudan
Haven´t played any of them, since their loading time sucks ass when you´re on 56k… But I´m sure they´re great.

New blog about games

Games Bond is a new blog that focuses on flash and shockwave games. Which I think is great, have really missed that among all the blogs that exists nowadays.

Scroll in 4 directions.

I recieve a lot of mails from people who can´t seem to figure out how to make a tilemap scroll in all four directions. So here´s an old test-file that might help.