Bork! Nifflas here!

So basically, during the time I've spent working on the Night Game project and even during the new unknown Q project I've been busy. While Mike created the new Night Game Wii engine, I've been in touch with Clickteam a lot about various things. I prototyped both Night Game and Q in Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion 2. The staff at Clickteam have been very helpful during these projects and offered support far beyond what I expected to receive.

I don't think I need to hide why I write this post. It's for all the help I've received I want to give show some appreciation back to Clickteam. A good idea is to write a little about how MMF is involved in the creation of these games.

Of course, it's not possible to export an MMF game directly to work on the Wii or any other console. You can export to Java, but that's about it right now. Lately, MMF's support for externally stored data has improved a lot which, of course, is important. Why? It's important for building a game that MMF's own level editor is not optimal for. Since Night Game deals with physical objects, I would need a dedicated polygon editor to draw the physical properties of each object with, and a way to link a graphical images to this.

I also needed some basic stuff like a tile editor (similar to what I used in Knytt Stories). In the old days, MMF was more like a tool where you'd usually build the game (including graphical and sound content within MMF's own interface), but for these new projects I've managed to set up fully custom level editors that retrieves it's data into external data files that we can use.

This is particularily nice for Night Game, all level data (physical properties, graphics, sound, music) is contained in external files and the physics we use are based on the Chipmunk engine. For Mike to write the new engine, he can read the same files and apply the physical properties to a Wii port of Chipmunk, display the same graphical files, then the game can run really close to how the MMF build works. This is all done in an original engine we've built for Night Game, but it's sufficient versatile to use for other games.

For me, it's very nice to be able to work in MMF to design games. I'm no C++ programmer so I don't currently have many options. The main reason is that I can get things done really quickly and test out ideas when they pop into my head; Instead of having to spend a lot of time just getting them to work. Besides, since I do graphics, sound effects, and music in Project Q, I don't think I would have time to be an advanced programmer, too.