New format and social networking

Hello, I hope your doing well.
I’ve been thinking lately about how to organise things a bit here so I’m going to try a new structure for blog posts starting with this one. I’ll split up the posts so that they are more focused and have a tag in the title like Dev Log for general stuff I want to say, Update for new stuff about my current project and a few others as I think of them. This should help keep my posts more concise and easier to document.

So, during the last few months I’ve tried being less of a basement dwelling developer and tried to be a bit more social where I can. I met a lot of new people on Twitter and generally find everyone to be really nice peeps 😀
It’s always great to see a community helping each other out with anything and everything related to video games. I also discovered a few studios located not far from me as well so, I might try and find a meet up!

What’s new?

You can Double JUMP has been coming along well over the last month or so, which is always great. I’ve created some new levels, enemies and gotten through my feature list a bit but I’ve been having trouble trying to get v-sync to exhibit zero input lag. I will have to do some tests on other hardware because I know v-sync for almost every game on my rig has input lag associated with it. I tried using XNA’s fixed time step setting and this removed the lag but the game motion stutters with it on and is quite annoying. I will have to come back to this issue at some point with a full interpolation system I think, which should hopefully smooth out the dropped frames and finally allow the game to run without screen tearing, input lag or stuttering.

Last but not least, the main reason I’ve been pretty quiet is because I’ve been busy making a new game and I’m really happy to announce it in more detail very soon. It’s fairly close to being in beta and will be available for free over at gamejolt.com sometime later this week. It’s a game that’s similar to how SuperCube was originally going to be and also it’s based within the Double JUMP world. It’s a free running game called Just Double JUMP where Lord Leo has discovered a prophecy spelling out his demise in the near future unless he pre-emptively strikes Gigi (name TBD). Leo has created a solar beam of mass destruction to target the little blue guy from which you must collect Speed Coins to boost your running speed so you can out pace the beam while avoiding obstacles. The final version will feature leader boards, different game modes and hundreds of micro levels for a controlled yet random experience.

I will make an Update post where I’ll explain it in more detail and show some screenshots 😀

Thanks for reading,
Marios.