Mushroom 11 on Polygon
Following Indie Press Day, a great write up from Polygon on Indie-Funded titles Mushroom 11 and The Swapper!
Mushroom 11 is Best Of Indie Press Day
IGN Executive Editor and Indie Press Day judge Justin Davis:
“Mushroom 11 is unlike anything else I’ve ever played, but it still manages to be intuitive and instantly understandable”. More here: http://indiepressday.com/highlights/
Mushroom 11 was demoed last night by no other than Indie-Fund’s Jonathan Blow at the Indie Press Day in San-Francisco. Check out the video here: http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/05/23/mushroom-11-jonathan-blow-demo
25 Indie Games To Keep An Eye On
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/25-indie-games-to-keep-an-eye-on/2/
Rock, Paper, Shotgun on the Experimental Gameplay Workshop
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/02/the-2013-gdc-experimental-gameplay-workshop/
“one of the best showings of the afternoon” — Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Went better than expected.
Mushroom 11 at GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Sessions
Mushroom 11 selected to the Experimental Gameplay Sessions! Check out the exciting lineup of experimental games: http://bit.ly/WkIuXB
Oh, and: 
See you at GDC!
Mushroom 11 - More Level Art
Another lively scenery from upcoming Mushroom 11
Our Global Game Jam 2013 Title: Inde’
This weekend, Julia and I made a procedurally generated vascular system mini-game.
Play it here: http://untame.com/inde
Organic UV Based Animation
“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” (Larry Wall, author of the Perl programming language)
Check, check and check, I guess?
This is very true for design, not just coding. Impatience and laziness do spur my better solutions. In this case I wanted to have an organic, almost underwater feel, to some of the mutative elements in Mushroom 11. But most importantly I wanted to avoid creating extra animation frames which may take valuable artist time, and expensive room in my ever growing sprite sheet.
The solution I found was to apply pseudo-random repetitive movement to the UV positions pointed to by the vertices that make the sprite mesh. First, the sprite needs to be split to more polys than the standard 2, depending on the precision of the desired effect. In the case of pink-tentacle-guy, I chose 5x5 squares. The grass patch works well with just 4x2.
Now, per each frame I’m offsetting the UV spot under each vertice by applying a rotation around the original UV position, making sure that new UV doesn’t step out of the designated sprite area. To complete the effect, X and Y axes factors can be applied per vertex to set a more realistic movement as needed (e.g. mostly horizontal for the grass patch), or it can be completely disabled in predefined areas (e.g. the pink guy’s body).
Performance-wise, this has practically zero effect on even slow mobile cpus. UV movements are much faster than mesh (vertex) modification - and UV offsetting happens in animated sprites anyway. To save some extra clocks, the rotation around original UV spot uses a pre-calculated sine/cosine lookup table. And obviously, updates happen only if mesh renderer is visible.
Take a peek:
Mushroom 11 is backed by Indie Fund
My game Mushroom 11 is now backed by Indie Fund, the supergroup of indie game makers. Couldn’t be prouder.
Check out the announcement: http://indie-fund.com/2012/11/mushroom11/
Mushroom 11 submitted to IGF 2013
Among the hundreds of indie games submitted to next year’s IGF, so is Mushroom 11.
Check out the submission page: http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2013.php?id=1005
