Flan's Blog

Following on from "O Captain! My Captain!" that I made for Ludum Dare 46, I've been hard at work pulling the project apart, refactoring the code and experimenting with new concepts. On the art side, I've been getting into AssetForge, a kit bash tool with a few hundred assets in it, which is a definite improvement over Blocks. I'm still trying it out and am always on the lookout for other one-step-above-programmer-art tools. In terms of code, there's a big problem with O Captain jam edition, and vehicle games in general, in that most game engines are built for fixed size levels of about +/-2000m in each dimension. This is due to the limited precision of floating-point numbers, where the difference between 0.001 and 0.002 (which could be relevant when making a model of a control panel) gets completely swamped when added to your ship's position at +4000 units. This causes textures to jitter and at extreme lengths can start making player movement jittery ...

Last weekend was Ludum Dare weekend and so I was busy making a game once again. Ludum Dare is one of the world's biggest game jams that now runs twice a year and which I have been taking part in for the past 8 years or so.  We had a great theme this year of "Keep It Alive". I'd had an idea in the back of my mind for a while about making a space pirate game and decided to have a go at it, with the ship being your sentient AI friend you have to keep alive. Judging by the other entries, I don't think I was alone in taking an idea and adapting it to the theme; there is such a wide variety of entries this time around! So the game that I made, with my partner Lucy doing the voice-acting and some of the VR modelling, is called "O Captain! My Captain!" and features you and RobinOS flying around a (very small) asteroid belt completing missions. Please give it a go and let me know if you like it! If you entered a game into the jam too, let me k...

Hello again everyone! I've been toying with all sorts of things this week to try and pin down my tool chain and lay some groundwork for future projects. I've used Google Blocks VR for modelling in loads of gamejams and to a very minor extent in Minimancer. I love it, it lets people without the know-how to use Max, Maya or Blender to start creating models very quickly. The trade off is the cap on complexity and simplistic style, but I actually quite enjoy those limitations. It reminds me of working on Minecraft icons and working details into that 16x16 sprite. The exported .obj models from Blocks are really easy to use but, while jamming on BeetHoven, I started to experiment with custom materials and shaders. While fun, the massive pitfall I happened into while doing this was that I had no way to automatically apply those materials, and so I ended up dragging and dropping a material onto every bit of every model. Oof. So last Thursday I put together a custom model importer, uv...

Last week was all about COVID shutdowns, getting set up in my home office and a helpful splash of writer's developer's block. So coming into this week, I really wanted to hit the ground running and make something.  The plan was to make a game in 12 hours, no matter how bad it looked or how terrible the gameplay was. I've done my fair share of gamejams, and crunched hard in a lot of them, but I've never made anything with quite such an aggressive time limit before. Nonetheless, I had some hex map code running by lunchtime and managed to get a very basic resource collecting game going with a handful of animations and effects for a bit of added flair. I've just been referring to it as "Game" so far, so I present to you; Game Episode 1: Beebles Begin The gameplay is as simple as placing minions in chains to get resources from the wild to the shop, or Business Bee. To help you move resources over long distances, you are given a bunch ...

Working one job Monday / Thursday and another Tuesday / Wednesday / Friday is quite an experience. It felt like every single day was the start of the week and hitting Friday was a bit of a surprise. Monday this week has been full of Coffee Chaos, including finalising a print for UK Games Expo coming up in May. That means shiny production quality cards and a lot less paper cutting for me. Look out for photos in the next couple of weeks! As for the rest of my newfound time, I'm going to be toying around with some more digital projects, with a mix of new ideas and old projects that haven't had much love for some time. So it seems fitting to start things off by blowing the dust off my old Steam game and giving it a post-mortem.  Minimancer has a lot of flaws, but I'm really excited for building on it and taking it somewhere different, so I'll be booting it up for the first time in several years and having a play through on stream. This will be on Thursday evening, ...

Whoa, I'm actually here. My role at Payload is now part-time and I'm in the Tentacle Zone (Payload's awesome co-working space in London) two days a week. Let's hit the ground running with an announcement! I've mentioned a card game previously, with the codename "Tea for Two", but I can now officially announce the main thing that I will be working on over the next few months; Coffee Chaos! Coffee Chaos has you and your friends   new-found enemies battle it out to collect ingredients and equipment to serve customers a wide variety of beverages. All the while, your friends arch-nemeses can play actions to steal your kit and trick your customers. For 3-8 players and focusing on 30 minute rapid-fire gameplay, it will be coming to Kickstarter at the end of May. Expect more frequent blog posts from now on, in a mix of Coffee Chaos news, Flan's Mod updates and jams (I'm currently doing the Tentacle Zone's Autistica Jam ) And if you want ...

My name is James, but you most likely know me as Flan, creator of Flan's Mod and programmer on TerraTech. I've been modding, jamming and coding professionally for a long time now, with Flan's Mod entering its 10th year at the end of this month. I even took a year out to make Minimancer, which you can find on Steam, and to try my hand at the world of boardgames. I'm doing something new and exciting this year! As of March, I will be splitting my time between TerraTech and some incredibly exciting digital and board game projects. More information will be coming soon on each project, with this blog and my new Discord server being the place to find out about new announcements. But for now, a quick summary is in order. Codename "Tea for Two" - A party card game, coming to Kickstarter in May Beet-Hoven Post-Jam - The follow up to Beet-Hoven, my most recent digital jam game Unity Tool Jams - Terrain generators, dialogue systems and other bits to form a shared...