Piroot Devlog 1 – The History Of Piroot

Posted on 11.12.18 by Frank

I’ve worked on many games, but I want to talk a little about how this specific project evolved because I’ve actually been working on it for over a decade! 

Almost 10 years ago I first posted about it on the Box2D fourms. I was talking about building my own game engine to make an adventure game spanning a circular planet. At that point I had a very rough prototype of the game with the circular gravity mechanics in place. It was a totally different game then, but the overall shape of the map has not changed much. Check out this screenshot showing the full planet…

Map of 2D Game Prototype From 2009

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Piroot Announcement

Posted on 11.06.18 by Frank

Today I am announcing the game that I have been working on, please enjoy this short video that introduces the gameplay…

Unfortunately my version of WordPress chokes on the actual name so here I’ll just have to just call it Piroot. In this game you will experience an epic story that will literally span an entire planet. You will begin with only the ability to roll and end flying around the planet with relative ease. The technology that I have developed allows for an extremely attractive looking and smooth running open world game with no load times. The game includes a fully integrated level editor for people who want to make their own adventures and uses my own open source game engine.

Keep reading for more info and demo download.

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How Thick is a 3 Sided Coin in UE4?

Posted on 02.11.18 by Frank

On the popular YouTube math channel StandUpMaths, they recently asked: How thick would a coin need to be so it landed on it’s side 1/3 of the time, making it a fair three sided coin?

It turns out, this is difficult to predict mathematically and they weren’t able to come up with a decisive answer. So I wanted to try simulating the experiment, to do thousands of flips and track the results. Keep reading for the full explanation and a reasonable stab at the answer.

3 Sided Coins in UE4

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Pixel Fractal Shadertoy

Posted on 07.02.17 by Frank

I’ve been working on some recursive shaders with Shadertoy…

See more on my Shadertoy profile page.

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Super Aspen – Remake Jam

Posted on 06.24.17 by Frank

Super Aspen is a remake of my first game, a TI-82 skiing game that I made in high school. I remade it for #RemakeJam using HTML5/Javascript. This is my first game playable in browser, I really like being able to share without requiring a separate download. I wrote everything from scratch including a small game engine framework, art and music. Continue reading for more info and postmortem.

Play Super Aspen it in browser on itch.io. 

View post on imgur.com

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“Marble Maniac” – GBJam 5

Posted on 10.11.16 by Frank

“Marble Manic” is a procedural generated Marble Madness style game made to look like a game for the original Nintendo Game Boy. I made it for GBJam 5 at twitch.io in about a week in Unreal Engine 4. I experimented with many new things on this game jam, most noticeably working with super low-fi graphics in UE4. The result turned out pretty well though it could have used some fine tuning. It placed 205 out of 402 entries. Post mortem and download after the jump.

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DOOM

Posted on 05.14.16 by Frank

It’s been great collaborating with id on DOOM’s multiplayer! It’s out now for Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

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Game Jam Q&A Panel @ MAGFest 2016

Posted on 04.23.16 by Frank

I hosted another game jam panel at this year’s MAGFest and the video is now available! This is our second year doing a game jam panel at MAGFest so we focused more on audience Q&A and how to run game jams.

The best part was that after the panel we ran a 1 hour game “idea” jam. Around 70 people showed up and we split them up into 12 teams. We picked a random theme, “Oh no, I’m late!”, and the teams spent an hour developing an original game concept. Afterwards each team had about 5 minutes to present their idea. For most participants this was their first game jam so it was a really fun experience.

We had some amazing panelists, here is some info about them, from left to right…

Keep reading after the jump for more pictures from the event and postmortem and our plan for next year.

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“Berry Thorny” – Ludum Dare 34

Posted on 12.14.15 by Frank

Ludum Dare 34 had two themes “Growing,” and “Two button controls”. I tried to hit both making a 2 button controlled infinite runner with a vine growing in front of you. This was my first time using Unreal for a game jam, and tried doing many other things differently this time.  It placed 174 overall out of 1232 entries and 88 in the graphics category. Post mortem and download after the jump.

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“The Monster I Am” – Ludum Dare 33

Posted on 08.24.15 by Frank

Another Ludum Dare has come and gone, and I’ve managed to cobble together something that resembles a game. This time the theme was “You are the monster”.  It placed 209 overall out of 1199 entries and 66 in the fun category, making it my worst scoring Ludum Dare so far. Postmortem and download after the jump.

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