This Town (ABEFTTOU) : Ludum Dare Entry

This Town (ABEFTTOU) made for Ludum Dare 23 in 48 hours.  Runs on XNA, so the download leads to an installer.  If anyone knows how to compile standalone XNA executables please tell me kthnx.

Timelapse:

Postmortem

The Good:

1. GitHub is so beautiful! I cloned my half-finished OOP engine and worked on the engine alongside the game.  The cool thing is, the engine code remains separate from the game.  If I wanted to add, say, animated sprites to the game, I'd set it up in the engine, merge them, and have GitHub resolve the conflicts.  Ended up with not only a finished game but a patched up engine as well.
2. Small, concise idea that could actually be finished.
3. Having drafted the idea for the game before starting.

The Bad:

1.  Use something you're familiar with, dangit!  Should've used Game Maker or Flash, both way easier and faster to dev in than C#/XNA.
2. Figure out how to compile the game before submitting.  No one who didn't previously have XNA already could play the game at first because it wasn't packaged with the framework.  Stupid me.  And an addendum, people with weak graphics cards still couldn't play because I compiled it in HiDef mode unnecessarily and accidentally.  Stupid me.
3. Leave an hour or so for balancing and bugfixes.  Pretty much crippled the game.

Overanalyzing Hanging With Friends

Another strategy guide for Zynga's "etcetera With Friends" series.  The first one was for Words With Friends here.

For those of you mountain-dwellers, Hanging With Friends is the next corporate installment by Zynga in an attempt to squeeze as much money as they can out of their word-based net framework.  It's hangman.  Over the Interwebs.

The idea is you're given a tray of 12 letters to make a word between 4-8 letters long for your opponent to guess.  If he gets it wrong, he loses a balloon (i.e. one strike) and whoever gets five strikes first loses.  Then your opponent makes a word and vice versa.  Very simple.

This is just going to be a small guide of some tips I've picked up.  I'm no master but there's a lot of things that no one seems to notice.

Also, if you're a total asshat, scroll down.  I have a tip especially for you.

Greetings From Liverpool!

For the GMC Halloween Jam, made in 72 hours.

RDC, Lasers

Forgot to post this.  Last Saturday we had an RDC where we made games in 4 hours.  The theme was Lasers.  The winning game (as per judging by me and a few others) was LASOR DOT MAN by orange08, was a pretty neat thing I guess.

As per tradition, I made a troll entry called GettingShotByALaser which is basically a screensaver with Atom Zombie Smasher's Blue Without You playing in the background.  If you want to use it as your actual screensaver then throw it into C:/Windows and select it in that Control Panel shiz.

Bye.

Starload : Finished

http://www.rypens.be/starload/

Not a fan of the game or the port but it's done and hopefully we can get a sponsor et cetera.

Next thing I'll be working on for them will probably be Kingdom 1420.  Played the game.  Not too fond of the gameplay or the story (to be frank, there isn't one) but it is doable and shouldn't be a problem, and it'd be nice to work on something like this, really.

*hums* ..But in the town it was well known when they got home at night, their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives *hard strum* *snare roll* ...

Cantilever Bridge : Finished

So GMC Jam #3 came around and the idea was to make a game in 72 hours with the theme "Live." Ended up making Cantilever Bridge, which is a generic-ish story-driven game based on two cities and a bridge to connect the two, around the politics and stuff of that.

Tense political action-packed diplomacy efforts right here.

Pannenkoekenhuis Flash : Halfway Point

Since I know you're all dying to know what I've been doing this summer (spoiler alert: eating, sleeping, and pretty much nothing) I'm going to throw a curve ball and announce this SUPER HAPPY AWESOME HALFWAY POINT of a Flash port of a game that's been overdue for a few months now.

Today with the help of a Jan Flanders from the Flash IRC (##flash at irc.freenode.net) we got bitmap masking to work.  Which means all the core features aside from powerups are now in.



Hooo-raah.

Coma : Finished

Made Coma for the 2nd YYGGMCIRCRDC, which placed FIRST OUT OF SIX HELL YEAH.  Well actually it's not that great because a lot of people came in during the middle of the competition and therefore didn't have a chance to do a full-blown game.  It was a tie between my game and creativebunch's until the tiebreaker judge leaned it to my side.  The game actually sucks a fair amount; my favorite in the compo was by far Goebbels' entry.  He makes a bunch of art games, they're all pretty cool.  That one's his best, easily.

Arrow Keys, Z to do stuff, X to do stuff later.

Coma : Download Link

The Hat Man : Finished

For the first GMC+YYG RDC, set up by zeddidragon, Alti, ShadowLink, Pqp232, and I.  Haven't seen such a successful RDC in so long.

Download "The Hat Man":
Mirror 1: YoYo Games
Mirror 2: UpUrLoad
GMC Link: GMC

Controls are arrow keys.  No, you're not playing it wrong.  Yes, that's supposed to happen.  And no, there is no "better ending."  Hence the actual ending.

Made in four hours.  Landed runner-up alongside zeddidragon and Skarik, behind IQbrew who won with this massive freaking 3D thing holy crap.

Overanalyzing Words With Friends

I just woke up having slept approximately 50% of my weekend (am i dying i'm always tired now is this a sign of dying) and I haven't done anything productive so hopefully this will make up for it.

For those who are total shut-ins and don't know, Words With Friends is an app for iOS that allows one to play scrabble over the internets.

I'll be walking through a game of it to point out some tactics I tend to do.  No guarantees that they work but they seem reasonable enough.

Diagnosis : Finished

Ludum Dare Page

My back aches from 48 hours sitting on a laptop eating granola bars and salad and bagels.

The game is about you, a mental patient, going through your mind with a psychiatrist that "helps you out" with your illness by giving you "medication" along the way.

Adding music and shit later.

And polish and shit later.

I wish so many people didn't drop out of the GMC Jam, there's like five of us left.

Man I'm tired.

Busy Month

Sleep levels are at an all time low.

Finished Mono for the YoYo Games Rapid Development Competition, where you make a game in 4 hours. Theme was "Black and White." Landed 5th place.

Also finished a game called Neo-Retro for another Rapid Development Competition, with the theme being "Retro." It sucked. Sucked so much that I don't even have a YYG link to it. It still placed in 2nd, somehow.

Pannenkoekenhuis tied for 5th place with a grand total of one vote in the GMC Jam.

Entered Pannenkoekenhuis and Retroplat into the Team Dark Tomorrow Contest, Retroplat placing 4th. Was originally going to polish up Camp, but it was way too buggy and I quit.

Also made a half-game called Quasifluid for the Game Jolt Inventions Competition but I got bored halfway and stopped.

Currently prototyping a procedurally-generated SHMUP where bullet patterns are randomly generated. Looking sort of stupid, in a glitchy, hey-I'm-a-program-and-I'm-going-to-hijack-one-of-your-system-functions sort of way.

Phew.

I think I'm going to lay off indie game design for a while.

Pannenkoekenhuis

Finished a game for the GMC Jam: Pancakes. The title means "Pancake House" in Dutch.

Download

Made in 72 hours. Scrapped two projects until I managed to get to this (was originally a SHMUP, then a 3D city destroyer, then this). First time trying to make dubstep music and I'm pretty proud of that.

Here's a timelapse, though it's not very good:


Meanwhile, going to fix up the Games page of this blog sometime later. When I feel like it.

Let's play a game. "How long will it take thatsnail to finish updating the games page?" Place your bets.

Ludum Dare / Merry Christmas, JK LOL

Made a game for Ludum Dare 19. The theme was discovery. Link

It's Christmas and I feel like I'm wasting my break doing things I don't care about to avoid doing other things that I also don't care about. Winter break is great and all but shitty because I haven't done anything with it nor plan to, and generally have no motivation to do anything besides eat oatmeal clusters and read blogs.

And I promise promise promise I'll get around to redesigning this shit template. After some more oatmeal.

Side Projects

First off, porting Wrapple to iPhone, a collab between me and Nick Carney. So look for it some time soon/later/next year/maybe sooner/probably later. Price is up in the air for now. Hopefully won't be too much.

More interesting: some WIPs.
Schrödinger's cat:

ΔPace:

Brainfuck:

Vent:


Hopefully I'll get the attention span to finish one of these.

Camp : Finished

Finallyfinallyfinallyfinally.
YoYo Games Link
GMC Link
Direct Download (UpUrLoad)
Thanks to everyone for the support!

Blueberry Garden

In my continuous procrastination attempt to not work on Camp I managed to play through the demo version of Blueberry Garden. The first time I played it it lagged, and thought, "bleh this sucks". Well it doesn't lag now, and I take that back x 100.

I highly suggest it for anyone trying to kill off some time.

Wow programming must suck.

Working on Camp, made a bunch of progress. Need to finish the game in four days in order to reach my deadline (to leave time for bug-testing and balancing).

I really hate this game though.

So annoying to work on, right now it's just sort of fixing up stuff. I think this is how corporate programmers feel. Sort of like setting up dominoes but with a deadline. Hate doing it but sort of have to. Wait that didn't make much sense.

Once I get this game done I'll try to get some more indie stuff up here. Meanwhile if you're bored (who isn't, life's not great), you should play some of Cactus's games. Been playing some of these and they rock, a lot. Only if you like that sort of stuff though, because if not you'd just be really bored.

Maybe I'll post a demo of Camp in the coming weeks. Ha.

Trying to pull my shit together.

Here's all I have so far. It's due in 20 days or so. C&C: Zero Hour isn't helping. Neither is the crapload of summer reading I haven't started. Ohchrist.

The Foreigner

Actually made a game, look at that. Was supposed to be a 3-hour competition between me and my friend but he finished in two and I finished in seven and a half...
Art game so don't expect much.

Arrow keys to move, Z to jump.

Download