Posts with ‘MattThorson’ Tag

TowerFall

By: Derek Yu

On: June 25th, 2013

Towerfall, by Matt Thorson

Coinciding with the retail release of the OUYA today is the release of Matt Thorson’s TowerFall, a 4-player versus platformer that is being hailed as the console’s “killer app” on websites like Penny Arcade Report. In the game, each player controls an archer and the goal is to slay your opponents with arrows. Power-ups such as bomb arrows, shields, and wings add variety to the matches, which take place in one of 70 single-screen arenas. The focus is on local multiplayer, but TowerFall does include single-player challenges where you have to destroy dummy targets in a certain amount of time.

Currently, TowerFall is an OUYA exclusive, although Matt has expressed interest in a PC port somewhere down the road. The game’s graphics are by Studio Miniboss (Deep Dungeons of Doom) and the soundtrack is by Alec Holowka (Aquaria).

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Ogmo Editor

By: Derek Yu

On: April 12th, 2010

Ogmo Editor

Matt Thorson (Jumper, RunMan: Race Around the World) has released a general-purpose 2D tile editor called Ogmo Editor. It’s an Adobe® AIRâ„¢ application that works in Windows, OSX, and Unix, and exports tilemaps as an XML file or as a PNG. There’s a tutorial available to help you get started. Ogmo Editor is donationware.

Last year, Matt also released Grandma, a free platform engine for Game Maker that’s based on his Jumper 3 code. I’ll definitely be checking that one out at some point. Thanks, man!

FlashPunk

By: Derek Yu

On: January 10th, 2010

ChevyRay has created a new 2d Flash game library called FlashPunk (v0.73).

FlashPunk Logo

FlashPunk is a free ActionScript library designed for developing 2D Flash games. Its goal is to provide you with a fast, clean framework for prototyping and developing games; this means most of the dirty work – reliable framerate, sprite rendering/animation, player input, and collision detection (to name a few) – has been covered with a set of base classes and functions for your ease of use. This gives you more time and energy to concentrate on the design and testing of your game.
It’s important to note that FlashPunk is targeted towards the development of games with 2D raster/bitmap graphics, as opposed to vector graphics. It can manage thousands of animated bitmap sprites on-screen at a time without slowing, a lot faster than Flash normally could, because it operates under the assumption that your game primarily uses bitmapped graphics.

The library is released as an alternative to Adam Saltsman’s Flixel framework, which is also geared towards 2d, sprite-based Flash games. You can read a list of differences between the two libraries here, in ChevyRay’s announcement thread.

The video above depicts a game that ChevyRay is creating using his engine, called Fight! Mechanical Shooting Device. The graphics are by Pietepiet. Jumper creator and RunMan: Race Around the World co-creator Matt Thorson has also announced that Jumper 4 will be developed in FlashPunk.