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What's this?

This is my experimental game projects site. I will try to release a themed game here at the end of each month

Quick n Dirty File Download

January 18, 2010

My Dream Game: The RTS

Even if there are a million great games there's one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It's not the game I've played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming seriously for once; sure I had played online with cs but I was never serious. I did nothing to improve myself, I didn't really care - as long as I didn't have 1-10 or a silly just-beginning-stat.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...

Posted by Jonas Hietala 20:14:17 in Dream Games, General | Comments(0)

December 21, 2009

Now we have a Forum

In a burst of random energy I made a forum for madeoftree. Well okay I just made an awesome style for the awesome phpBB - the forum itself was up and running in say 10min and the rest of the latest days has been all about customizing. Now it's finally kinda complete so here it is!

Making it was the easy bit - now we need to generate some content! Where is the almighty sundb00m when we're in a desperate need for spam?!

Posted by Jonas Hietala 15:51:36 in Meta, Webpage, General | Comments(6)

November 2, 2009

An invisible Remake

What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother's hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I've been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you've visited my site before today you'll know what I'm talking about.

NOT

There's practically zero visible difference. You might notice the 'Quick n Dirty File Download' or the little line of text towards the bottom of the page, or even the ability for multiple tags! That's kinda freaky stuff eh? And only +1 week to do that! :D

The big thing was actually a complete rewrite of the whole site. From really bad and random spaghetti code I managed to produce some half-nice code. I wrote the site with Kohana which was a blast to use! If you're making a page of some sort I can heartily recommend to give it a try.

Soon it's time for some game making again, I just need a good idea... hm.

Posted by Jonas Hietala 22:51:36 in Meta, Webpage, General | Comments(2)

September 28, 2009

Why make games

Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon... Damn - when you count them like this you'll see how many great games there are out there. And I can honestly say each and every one of them has inspired me and made me wanna create something similar. No - something even better!

I also like to program, that's almost a must if you should make a working game from scratch, so I figured why not use it to make something productive and hopefully something fun?

Posted by Jonas Hietala 10:08:02 in General | Comments(2)

August 25, 2009

Going into Being Busy mode

I'm in the civil service atm and, sadly, we're going to be extremely busy the coming... two months or something? So I can't promise a game the next two months. Kinda beats the point of this site doesn't it? I'm really sorry and that's all I can say really...

Hopefully I'll get a week somewhere with enough spare time to create something. It's a damn sure I'll have to make a game about submarine warfare!!

Posted by Jonas Hietala 20:13:09 in General | Comments(2)

July 21, 2009

The first (worst) post

Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here's where I'll outline what the blog will be about and maybe, if I'm dedicated, it won't die before Christmas you think.

And sure, you're right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never got the traffic I'm fantasizing about but I can try to summarize the site in one sentence: I'm going to make a themed game every month. There, I've said it. Tired and scared of wasting my time with a monster-project I've decided to use the experimental project model. Basically I'm going to make a game in 7 days, kinda like God made the world. And I'm alone making these games, all the gfx, the sound and the code.

If this got you interested check back regularly for some cool (I hope) games and read my about section.

Posted by Jonas Hietala 13:34:38 in General | Comments(3)