On Puzzle Design

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Benjamin

I learned a lot about puzzle design working on Helios. When Team Chobits made the risky move from action-adventure game to puzzle-platformer, I was a little worried due to my lack of experience with puzzle creation. Most of my experience at Full Sail up to that point had involved encounter-based level design, which is a much different experience.

But in the thick of it, designing my own puzzles and critiquing those created by the team, I learned a great deal. So here are my thoughts on what you need to create a good puzzle, and a couple optional ingredients for taking them a little further.

Continue reading →

Pxlbyte

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Benjamin

I’ve started writing for a little gaming news and culture site called Pxlbyte. It’s a really cool site that collects gaming culture, something I’ve always been passionate about. Putting my name forward when they called for writers was a no-brainer. Pxlbyte publishes gaming news, reviews of Indie and iOS games, gaming-related crafts and art, and even a fashion section for articles about cosplay and game-related clothing and jewelry. There’s also a shop that sells an eclectic assortment of gaming merchandise. It’s pretty much a dream website for me, so I’m excited to be contributing.

If you want to see the stuff I’ve contributed specifically you can click here.

New Game: SNOWBLOCK

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Benjamin

SNOWBLOCK is a retro-styled game about making a tiny, one-pound snowball into a gigantic ten-pound snowball. I just released version 1.0 in the wild at SNOWBLOCKgame.weebly.com!

Following some advice, I wanted to get my hands dirty with Unity4 and teach myself C#. I found a series of great tutorials made by Jasper Flick of catlikecoding.com, and once I had completed his tutorial, I set to work creating my own game based on the lessons he had taught by significantly altering the game’s design and writing a lot of my own code.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The end result is a challenging but fun little runner game where the goal is to make your snowball super-big. It’s unsurprisingly retro-themed, with pixel art, low-poly shapes, lo-fi sounds and a chiptune soundtrack (compliments of my old friend the Free Music Archive and a chip artist who goes by Origami Repetika) I had a lot of fun working on this project in my spare time.

This is also a good example of how, in this day and age, someone with no real help and no real money can make a cool game (cooler than this, for sure) for completely free. I used Unity, Gimp, Weebly, cfxr, the Free Music Archive, and a free tutorial to concoct this game. No software licenses, no hired artists, and this could have been done with no formal education, too, though I had that going on well before.

Anyway, check out SNOWBLOCK and give it a play. I’m still collecting feedback, too, so let me know what you think.

No Better Time To Learn to Code

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Benjamin

“I think everyone should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think. I view computer science as a liberal art, something everyone should learn to do.”

-Steve Jobs

Over the past few days, I’ve seen a ton of awesome resources for learning to code pop up online, and I wanted to share them with you, one of my, like, 23 views a day. First, though, check out this video to see how essential of a skill that coding is becoming, and learn a bit about the mission of Code.Org:

I entered the Game Design course at Full Sail because I wanted to make games but didn’t Continue reading →

First Impressions: Hexels

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Benjamin

Hexels is a cool little art tool developed by the guys over at Hex-Ray Studios, makers of my beloved sleep aid and geek toy, Pixel Fireplace. I just downloaded the free version for a trial and gave it a shot. After a few minutes of playing, I kind of had a little old-school JRPG world map thing going on:

In addition to giving you tons of colors and a hex-based grid to play with, Hexels also has a cool “glow” feature, which allows you to apply a nice glow effect to the entire image, sliding it to be either blindingly radiant or nonexistent.

Nice, pretty, clean-and-easy UI, too.

The pro version, which I’ll likely buy because I’m like that (and also omigodthisisocool!), has a ton of other cool features. You can use other shapes besides hexels (including pixels or trixels) and you can create cool new kinds of glow effects and export to a variety of formats I’ve never even heard of before.

Also, their file type is the .hxl, which — come on, that’s cute.

I’ll probably post a more detailed geek-out once I’ve spent some more time with Hexels, but in the meantime, if you’re into pixel art and such like, you should definitely check out this sick little tool.

Personally, I’m excited to see what kind of cool-looking game I could make using these sorts of images!

Does This Count?

Image

So, I’m in the credits for the Minecraft movie, courtesy of Kickstarter. Can that go in my resume?

Pretty cool seeing my name in the credits of a movie, though! Almost as much fun as seeing it in the credits of a game.

The Corning Towers

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Benjamin

I made this pixel art a few months ago:

The Corning Radio Towers

I’ve always liked radio towers. They’re emblematic of humanity’s ability to communicate Continue reading →

Helios!

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Benjamin

After four long months of development, Helios is finally publicly available. Head over to HeliosGame.Net to download and play for free.

Helios is a game about running, jumping, pushing stuff, and traveling through time. The player is a cyborg searching to reclaim his humanity in a world of dreary machinery and trash, a world which was once vibrant and beautiful.

On this project, I worked with a team of five exceptional guys. I served as our team’s producer, designed and built levels, wrote the narrative, and conceptualized the chunky art style (and those lovable chiyos), in addition to a bunch of other little tasks here and there.

I had a blast the whole way through, and I’m eagerly looking forward to future projects.

Helios Postmortem

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Benjamin

Well, the end of an era has finally come. I’m graduating from Full Sail University. Helios, our Final Project game, will be available for free download from the game’s website shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy our postmortem presentation, assembled by my friend and colleague Darren Gilkes:

It was an epic journey. My most humble thanks to Team Chobits:

How to Change the UDK Game Icon

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Benjamin

Changing the game icon in UDK is a surprisingly simple but cool thing you can do to give your game a little more personality.

First of all, you’re going to need an image in either .png or .jpg format. Make it perfectly square, and make sure it’ll look good at various sizes, as Windows will make it bigger and smaller depending on whether it’s in your taskbar, start menu, or file hierarchy.

Next, take that image to ConvertIcon.com. Upload it and then export it as a .ico file.

Note: .ico files have pages which store various sizes of the install icon for various uses. Download your .ico from ConvertIcon in all of the sizes offered and you’ll be sure that your game will stand out no matter where it’s installed.

Now go into your UDK hierarchy. You’re looking for:

C:\UDK\UDK-2012-07\Binaries\InstallData

In here you’ll find a .ico file called GameIcon. Reserve it someplace else in case you want it back later, and replace it with the one you just made with ConvertIcon, making sure to rename it “GameIcon”.

When you cook your game, the UDKInstall will still have the same icon it has always had, but when the game is installed on the hard drive, it will have whatever logo you dropped in there.

Download and install Helios to check out our cool custom icon!

Benjamin Jaekle

Game Designer