Defining Awesome

An awesome and very comprehensive article about me  on Indie Statik:

http://indiestatik.com/2013/03/20/king-arthurs-gold/

There’s an interview up on IndieGames.com and Gamasutra.com with me with the glorious title:
“Soldat’s Marcinkowski On Why Alpha Funding Will Save The Games Industry” :D.

Quick recap of what has been going on in my life:

• Soldat 1.6 has been released! Big up, for Shoozza!
• King Arthur’s Gold is part of Desura’s alphafunding
• Look what I found
• I’m gonna have a lecture about KAG and the process of indie games development on game developers conference in Lodz, Poland (8-11 September) (Zjazd Twórców Gier 2011; jak ktoś chce mnie spotkac to zapraszam w ta sobote:)

I just got signed up for the IndieWeekend over at QubeTubers.com for a live interview. If you want to listen it’ll be in 15 mins: Saturday 6th August 2011 at 4:00am EST. That should be 10:00am GMT. Meet you there.

About 2 months ago I came to an important realization. Actually I don’t feel I thought of it, it sort of found me. These are game design principles. Universal and guaranteed to just work. The holy grail of game design.

This isn’t anything new and I feel no ownership over the ideas. I did though, come to my own understanding of these principles and it changed how I perceive game making.

It started because of my random interest in random stuff… read more »

Some people have found out about my secret hobby. I will announce everything very soon. I will explain what has been going on during the past month and what the hell is up with Link-Dead. There are countless reasons why I have been sitting quiet and I will explain everything in the tiniest detail. I am very surprised myself at what happened.
Stay tuned.

The alpha version of Link-Dead is an iterative process were I might change something completely just to see how fun it is. This new build changes entirely two critical gameplay elements. First of all I unified the damage model. This means all weapons behave nearly the same when doing damage. A picture describing this can be found below. I hope this change will bring some tactical variety to the game because it is now VERY easy to die, so you’ll have to be very careful about what you are doing, how you expose yourself, what gun you are fighting against etc.

Second thing is I removed weight classes and replaced it with a gradual system. This means that every piece of inventory you add affects your weight. Weight then gradually affects your movement speed, climbing speed, ability to climb walls, roll and fatigue. I hope this change eliminates artificial inventory shuffling that was done in order to stay in a given class.

This is not all. There is a couple important bug fixes and other improvements.
I added an Armor Repair Kit for Einheriar. It means you can now weld your damaged armor!

There are also some visual & audo improvements. Step sounds are completely remade and sound a lot nicer. They were done by a proffesional (LD’s musician Maciej Stankiewicz). But most importantly there are new BLOOD decals:

You can download this game for any donation for my game development right now.

IMPORTANT: When you first run this version be sure to change your Sneak Toggle button to Z or any other key you want. If you don’t do this it is probably the same button as melee (Shift).

IMPORTANT 2: If the game fails to auto-update, please go to the LD folder and rename LD.bak to LD.exe.

The SNES port isn’t a joke. Well almost. You can turn the SNES mode on if you change the resolution to something low like: 320×200. To do this open Scripts/autoconfig.gm and edit v_width & v_height.
Meet you on the servers.

Here is the complete changelog.
Changes 1991-1999:


[general]
- added Armor Repair Kit for Einheriar
- changed soldier/bullet collision; hands don't block chest and head
- removed weight classes; weight affects speed and movements gradually
- separated sneak form aiming; sneak is now toggle with (default Z) key
- soldier can walk and patch
- melee and punch now execute fully when tapped fire
- corpse stays longer if is being hit
- recoil doesn't move mouse[effects]
- new reworked foot step sounds
- jump sounds based on material

Last but not least. A week ago I asked Prince to write a song about the new Link-Dead build. Being a fan of my games he happily made a new song called “build 1999″. Enjoy:

Hard times have come. As you know the PC market is on the verge of death as more and more gamers switch to consoles. In a desperate attempt to gain some share of this market I have been secretly porting Link-Dead. I can finally reveal the Link-Dead: Super Nintendo port.

Watch the video I recorded. It is running 100% on the original Nintendo machine at 30 FPS. This is the second game in history to make use of the SNES mouse. The video isn’t high quality but that is what you can expect from a TV signal. I first had recorded this via rf on vcr, and then recorded on dvd, and then prerecorded on dvd by converting rca to vga and then back to rca for up/down sampling the signal. Just imagine how much the signal has been damaged due to the rca cable and the constand adc & dac conversion. This is what has been left off from original source. Enjoy.

Most important bugs are fixed I hope.
I’m going to TEDxWarsaw tomorrow (not to speak this time). More news about Link-Dead’s future will come shortly after that. I’ve got a few announcements mostly concerning the game’s design.


- fixed a couple ragdoll issues
- fixed respawn & nade timers display
- fixed double left game msg on server
- renamed "ProcessPID" to "PID"
- fixed music mixer crash
- fixed jump climb bug
- gun hit angle is narrowed to more perpendicular
- block angle is reversed
- fixed climbing with [UP] pressed when just touching stairs
- fixed sprite depth sorting


I’m not gonna make you wait anymore.
This version is a work in progress (well, all alpha versions are…). I spent a lot of time working on new ragdoll physics code and grabbing your opponent in this version. Unfortunately I overestimated my abilities and it was a tough battle. I had to disable the grabbing because it was too buggy (so head cutting is disabled for now too). I will add it later because there is still a lot of new features and modifications that you can play right now. So the new ragdoll code is there, they still have some Parkinson case, nevertheless should be much more stable now.

It seems like I predicted an upcoming trend creating the Nuclear Plant map. I tweaked it some more by adding more sniping spots in unused areas. Take a look:

The screenshot below shows a backflip. read more »