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My local multiplayer bug – The Rhizome

Yes, at some point in time one has to admit that they have a thing for something when they keep doing said thing over and over. In my case, it is my ability to eventually end up making local multiplayer games. I genuinely love them to bits <3 and can’t seem to stop making them! So when time came for me to submit a proposal for a project at Srishti, I did just that 🙂 a local multiplayer.

Rhizome was one of the installations as part of the Entanglement: A Dance between Art & Science – at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa 2016. The Entanglement was curated by the Center for Experimental Media and Arts – CEMA which is part of Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology and in collaboration with Science Gallery International.

Rhizome was a local multiplayer game with some specific goals in mind – an easy to play game, the game had to be publicly installed and as a personal challenge, with a seamless interface for the player. Continue reading “My local multiplayer bug – The Rhizome”

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SpellDown! DevLog – #3 – weekly roundup

This week wasn’t as eventful as the last. If you are following my daily (well almost daily) updates on TIGSource Forums then you might already have a good idea of what this post is about 🙂

A good chunk of time was spent in creating some art assets (which are more like placeholders) – the assets will give the artist a better idea of what fits in where and also act as a sample spec. I always think that small things do pay off, each room has a surprise in store for the player and i wanted it to be presented in some grand-yet-not-too-grand-that-it-gets-tiring-after-seeing-it-the-100th-time kinda way. The door opens to reveal the stage and the panels ease in from both sides, and then the letters fly out and with a poof, the enemy is revealed. You exit the room in a similar fashion and the door closes on you. Also, that effect can also be applied to any scene, without any fuss.

SpellDown! – Dramatic Door – May 23, 2017


The second major task I took on last week was to get the dungeon generation working. The idea was to procedural create a navigable dungeon with multiple points of interest. Shown below is the earliest test.

SpellDown! – Dungeon Generation – May 25, 2017


The next two days went into tweaking and changing things and moving on to actually taking this data and making it into a usable navigable map as part of the game. The idea here is that from the town, the player takes on each quest and each quest is a set of rooms in a large dungeon. After each room, the player can navigate to the next room, if there are multiple rooms connected to the current one, the player can choose to go to any room. Different rooms offer different challenges, treasures and more. The player must find the exit to leave the dungeon.

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Apart from these two major things, the rest of the time went in minor bug fixes and housekeeping. My work has taken a detour since it was the weekend and because I was working on an entry for the Shenanijam 🙂 I’m hoping that this tiny distraction will help me come back to SpellDown! with more energy and focus. That’s about it for now, more updates next week 🙂

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An ode to word games

As some of my friends already know (and against most of their wishes), I’m trying to finish off a lot (this clearly is an understatement) of the work I’ve started and not finished over the past years. I thought I’d get into the habit of a writing a devlog on my blog rather than on TIGSource or on a separate site in the hopes that it will keep me going 🙂 So here goes!

One such long unfinished project that I’ve decided to dig up from the past is a tiny game called SpellDown. It is at its core a word came 🙂 You have letters, you make words with them and if you get it right, you get points, simple enough 🙂 you also have magic and monsters and moooore! 😀

Of course, that is not how it began. Our beginnings are a bit more academic than magical. Continue reading “An ode to word games”