In two weeks, July 16-19, there will be a indie game developer gathering called No More Sweden in Malmö. This is the second year of the event, and this time around it’s more than twice the size with 34 people signed up! The main purpose of the event is to meet interesting people and have a fun time, but there will also be some game development competitions.
I will post more about this after the event, with pictures and maybe video clips, but until then you can find more information at the NMS site: http://www.nomoresweden.com
A couple of months ago I was writing an article series about real-time strategy game design. I never finished it (and I should!), but I wanted to make a small comment about one thing I wrote in one of the articles, let me quote myself:
In the current alpha build of Starcraft 2 the only remaining hero unit is the Zerg Queen. [...] Hopefully they will rename her, and allow the player to use strategies that involve building several.
Now all I want from the Starcraft 2 design team is to move the health bars to the feet of the units instead of flying around above their heads. Pleeeeaaase?!
I thought it might be a good time to repeat what the latest versions of Harvest are. Currently, the correct version is 1.14 or 1.16. The 1.16 version is only used on Steam, and fixes a couple of Steam-related issues. This version has the same features as the 1.14 version that everybody else is using. If you got the game from Reflexive, this version should already be 1.14, otherwise follow this link:
If you are a Steam user and want to migrate your non-Steam copy there, you can do so by activating the product on Steam with your Harvest license key. This option is only available if you bought the game here before March 2009.
InterstellarKinkajou in the forums posted this funny video.
I love World of Goo and I hope Kyle will have time to meet up when he comes to Malmö next month. If you haven’t done so already, check out their website here: http://2dboy.com
I’ve recently started using Twitter because I wanted to check out what the fuzz was about. I am still not completely convinced, but with the help of DestroyTwitter it has at least become a lot easier to keep track of tweets.
In case you want to fetch my updates, follow jeb_. I’m currently tweeting all kinds of things, so please give me some feedback on how to make it more interesting.
During my trip to San Francisco and Game Developer’s Conference, I recorded a bunch of clips and put them on YouTube as a video blog. You can see them all here:
We’ve updated the Windows version of House Globe with a small synchronization fix. It turned out that floating point numbers got all messed up on some computers, but that won’t happen any longer. I recommend you use this version if you plan to play online and record replays.
We’ve also changed the price if you buy the game on our site too, because Steam is not available for Mac OS X yet, and we don’t want you to feel left out. Also, a new year calls for a new high-score table, so the stats have been cleared (we made a backup first, of course). During 2008, 46 340 games have been reported, and who knows how many games that have been played in total? I can’t wait to see what 2009 brings!
As you know, we’ve been using Lua to make prototypes and add mod support to Harvest. However, I’ve always thought that the C++ binding we’ve used hasn’t really worked the way I’d like it to. Basically we’ve used simple C functions to create our own Lua library for callbacks, and some Lunar objects in Harvest. Lunar allows you to do stuff such as this:
local stuff = lib.getStuff()
stuff:foobar() — call C++ member method
However, it doesn’t allow you to do this:
local stuff = lib.getStuff()
stuff.onEvent = function(self) print(”Recieved event!”) end
The problem is that with Lunar all objects of the “stuff” class share the same meta table. It’s possible to modify the meta table in Lua by calling getmetatable(), but then you will be modifying the meta table of all instances of “stuff…”
In this part I will describe in more detail what abstract, or “hidden,” balancing is and how it can be used in your game. This is the last part I’ll post for a while, since I’m going on vacation for a few weeks, but I’ll be back next year!
No More Sweden 2009
As you know, we’ve been using Lua to make prototypes and add mod support to Harvest. However, I’ve always thought that the C++ binding we’ve used hasn’t really worked the way I’d like it to. Basically we’ve used simple C functions to create our own Lua library for callbacks, and some 
In this part I will describe in more detail what abstract, or “hidden,” balancing is and how it can be used in your game. This is the last part I’ll post for a while, since I’m going on vacation for a few weeks, but I’ll be back next year! 
