Last week was Anticlon’s first anniversary. We thought we would have an update ready for that date, but we still have a few changes to make.

In the meantine, here is an image showing the new style of the squares. Hope you like them.

-seigiac

Today, we are releasing the initial version of the complete toolchain that helped us to build our first game, Anticlon.

We always wanted to release it as an open source project, ever since I started coding it, but I wanted to clean it a bit before releasing it. The truth is, that I never cleaned the code, and I think that i never will… So, maybe it’s time to release it as it is.

But please, don’t judge me too bad for this code, I know sometimes I code very badly, but I’m a good guy in person…

Also, next month will be the aniversary of Anticlon, and we’re planning a big update, with new game elements.

We’re also working on a new game, and everything is looking gorgeous so far, this time there’s a very cute character that I know you’ll love.

I still haven’t written proper readme files for all the projects of the toolchain, but feel free to grab them and do whatever you like, there will be a very liberal license in place sometime soon.

You can find the projects at my git repo or here are the links for each one of them:

• layadd To add layers to a layers file. Used by the compiler toolchain (nailgun) when building a game.
• mbd To convert an XML or layer file into a Machete Binary Dictionary, which is basically a key-value file with support for arrays.
• ng Nailgun is basically a V8 Javascript interpreter (like node.js but not as complex), but this one is made with the idea in mind of creating complex multiplatform build systems using declarative javascript files. At the moment it only supports Android, but some day it will generate also the XCode project and other stuff…hopefully.
• stiletto This is a graphical editor tool that lets us create and package the graphics. It’s very simple, but it has lots of features. The bad news are that I believe that all the features are useless to other people… I’ll try to update it for our new game, for the moment, no code for stiletto is being pushed for the moment because i’m working on a new, more powerful tool… So this is basically deprecated… Feel free to make it your own.
• machete Last but not least, here it is, our platform. My C++ masterpiece, haha, just kidding… Ok, you can look and grab whatever you need, but beware, there are several hacks around that I placed just to make it to the deadline. This engine is still being actively developed, and I will be pushing massive updates shortly after Anticlon’s anniversary.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at: contact [at] matongames [dot] com

- Muy Maton

Big news! As part of the big update we are planning for Anticlon, we are porting it using emscripten to Javascript/HTML5 and just last night we got our first results:

In the above screenshot it is running on Firefox 19 and here it is running on also on Firefox but now on a Nexus 4:

No changes on the game’s code were needed so far. The changes that we had to do were to “machete”, our game platform that currently supports iOS and Android.

- seigiac

Sometimes, ideas sound better on paper than what they actually are and the same thing happens in video game developement so before starting the actual development of Anticlon, we built a prototype just to make sure the mechanics we had on paper felt good.

At the time when we first made this prototype, the game was a lot simpler than what it ended up being, if you are curious, you can give it a try.

This prototype was made in Java and it was actually reallly useful all throughout the development of Anticlon.

The puzzles were made “by hand”, meaning that I had to solve them manually to know it they were actually solvable. Of course, we later developed an automatic solver, but that’s for another post.

- seigiac

When we first started to talk about making a game, the time came when we had to have a name for ourselves. At that time, most of us where very into Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam and Hilario, our super coder, used the folowing nick name:

“Muy Matón” is in Spanish of course, and it means something like “Very Bad-ass”. It could also literally mean some nonsense like “Very Killer”. Both meanings are in reference of being a “bad-ass” within the game and killing a lot of zombies.

We thought it would be funny to call ourselves “Matón Games” and we also thought it sounded really good. So that’s the story.

-seigiac

After releasing Anticlon last year, we haven’t really let anyone know what we are up to, so we decided to start this blog to post updates on what are doing and what we plan to do next.

We are not done yet with Anticlon, to celebrate its first anniversary, we will make a big update with lots of new puzzles, a new type of square and other features. Also, we are working on porting Anticlon to Windows, Linux and OSX.

There are plans for a new game after the big update, but it is still too soon to talk about it.

We will be keeping this blog updated with news, stories and sneak peeks of  our work.

-seigiac

We are currently working on a big update for Anticlon’s first anniversary. This update will include lots of new puzzles and other features.

There are hundreds of puzzles that didn’t make it to the final release, most of them didn’t make it because they were either too easy or too similar to another one. But a few of those puzzles aren’t in the final release because they were made for other purposes, for example:

Every puzzle shown in the video were made exclusively for it. I thought that if the trailer showed a bunch of existing levels, we would be giving out the solution.

-seigiac