This year was the first time that there was a Global Game Jam in Augsburg. Wildfuchs Interactive, a very young game studio located near the city centre, was hosting. There were just 5 members of the studio and me attending, so it was very different from bigger events. We could just make one game and…
In the last blog post, we learned how to make the best plays irrespective of what the opponent chooses to do. To make this work, it was necessary to look at a payoff-matrix listing all the possible moves that could happen. But what if you are unsure of what moves are even available to your…
New year, new Indie Games Festival and 460 new game trailers to watch. There were a little bit less submissions compared to last year, but I found the quality of the games were higher on average. Also some chinese games, which I never noticed before. Would love to see some good indie games coming from…
If you watch some YouTubers or Twitch streamers play competitive Pokemon, you will often hear phrases like this, after they made a choice that resulted in a bad outcome for them: Wow, my opponent is such a ****head, why did he klick Earthquake in front of my Zapdos. He’s such a bad player! And now…
The last post was about playing optimal Pokemon games by calculating the value function V(x) using Bellmann equations. Unfortunately, this was impractical, so we need another way to calculate the likelihood of winning games. One solution to this problem is called Value Function Approximation. The idea behind it is to not calculate the value function…
One year ago, I was drawn into the world of competitive Pokemon. It’s an incredibly deep game that requires quite an effort to master. First, you have to memorise a vast amount of information: Which type of attack is most effective against which type of Pokemon? What are the base stats of the different Pokemon,…
Today is a holiday in Germany and I spend most of the day watching the trailers of all of the IGF (=Independent Game Festival) trailers. This year there were 512 game submissions with trailers to the competition, so this took quite a long time and now I’m sick and tiered of ever watching footage of…
I’m very glad that I managed to participate at this year’s Global Game Jam in Ansbach. The company Tradabyte did a great job hosting the game jam and I got to try out the HTC Vive, which was a very memorable experience. But first of all I worked with an awesome team and we made a fun…
I recently finished Fjords. It’s an interesting game that makes you feel like a real hacker. You will summon doors, deactivate waterfalls and glitch your way through a mountain. I spend a lot of time mining pizza and making a map. Recommended!
Instead of dressing up and going to some Halloween party, I used the weekend for typical nerd things: I met up with two fellow game developers (@oh_krapp @dfelber) and together we created the fastest multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Our initial gamejam topic was forest, but the game is probably more aptly described by the word “bloodbath”.…
