Loerbeek, Nederland
carving@nielsbrouwers.com

Blog

The math behind platform games

I just ran through a couple of well-known platform-games (mostly 8 bit classics) to find out about their ratios in terms of the differents sizes involved. I measured a couple of things, most importantly: the size of the main character and the size of the screen. I only checked platformers that were well received with the general public (ranging from …

Dream Build Play 2012

After my personal debacle with my 2011 DBP entry (when I finally finished one level filled with enemies it turned out to be dead-slow on the XBOX itself – it was too late to change so I submitted what I had) I had to find the time, energy and spirit to re-do everything and this time, do it …

Productivity and stuff…

When you are working at daytime on a ‘normal’ job and developing games in the evening it is sometimes difficult to get some productivity going on when you get back home from your day-job. Last week I was struck by some virus, causing headaches that started in the afternoon and had me going to bed …

The year of the dragon

‘The year of the dragon’. Say that out loud a couple of times, it just sounds like a great (sub)title for a game or movie or something like that! I like dragons, never met one though, but I like them. Unfortunately I am a tiger according to chinese astrology and the tiger and the dragon….well…they don’t …

Rewriting code: tile-player collision code

A lot of time on the Carter Jones Adventures game is spent on rewriting pieces of code. Visually you probably wouldn’t notice any difference if I would show the game before or after a rewrite but in terms of performance, memory leaks, bugs and maintenance of the code there can be a huge difference. The …

The ways we work

The way I work is like this: I get an idea, start drawing, make screenshots and when it looks nice and I am starting to wonder how it would look and feel when it is moving/animating, only then I start programming. Also, I tend to switch to coding when I am unable to draw something …

Happy Birthday dog!

I drew this dog for my nephew who turned 7 recently. I don’t know why exactly I drew him a dog but there is a story involving him and dogs: Once upon a time, in a temple in Hua Hin, he and his brothers were mocking a couple of dogs from up a ledge, the dogs were …

Wappy dog

So, I noticed this trailer for wappy dog from Nintendo. It’s like a Sony Aibo connected with your Nintendo DS. Cool idea, mixing reality with the virtual world. Skylanders is another game doing this. I am not sure if these games are really worth playing, but it is just another way of interfacing with your …

New level in progress

Hopefully you didn’t notice that I upgraded this website to a newer version of blogengine, it did happen however and actually it was pretty easy. The only thing that didn’t work out of the box was the twitter feed, but I fixed that. I have started on the third level graphics for Carter Jones, I …