23rd April 2012
Over the weekend I took part in my first Ludum Dare – the 48 hour game jam. In the game I created you control a giant robot (by moving it’s legs) as it stomps around town delivering flowers.
You can play the game here: Robots Are Red, Violets Are Blue
This was in fact my first ever game jam, so I was excited to take part even though I didn’t have a clear weekend ahead of me. What follows is a brief post-mortem.
Tools Used
After reading a couple of articles, the advice was clear – ‘go with what you know’. For this reason I used my usual development tools:
- FlashDevelop for ActionScript 3 coding and compiling
- Flash Professional to create and package up my graphical assets
The Good
Though I wasn’t able to start development on the game until Saturday evening, I had been contemplating the theme throughout the day. When I sat down to begin coding I had a pretty solid idea of what the game was, which was great.
I actually like how the control player movement system worked out, easy enough to move but clumsy enough cause some damage to the town.
The Bad
The town below needed more work both graphically and for gameplay. The gaps between buildings are generally too small and buildings are too big to step over – the whole thing needed balancing.
I bunged in some quick sound effects made with sfxr in the closing stages, but they aren’t great.
The Ugly
I didn’t spend much time on creating graphics, so everything looks a bit rushed. Even the robot remained the same as it was in my initial prototype so it barely looks like a robot at all.
What Didn’t Get Done
I realised quite late that changing to a single button control mechanic would much simpler for the player. There’s really no point in using 2 keys as they can’t be used at the same time.
I’d originally planned to have cars moving around the roads to add an extra element of difficulty, but this feature had to be dropped.
I had wanted a ‘working week’ system (like the classic game Paperboy), where the player starts on Monday and completes a day’s work, then the next day is slightly harder.
Summing Up
Although I do think a few more hours would have come in handy, I also think having some time over the weekend to go and do something else (e.g. walking the dog, shopping, DIY etc) was useful in order to reflect on ideas and let them evolve, away from the screen.
Overall I’m pretty happy something half-way playable came out of the weekend and it was a great thing to experience. I’ll definitely try to participate in the future, and once the judging process is over I’m keen to return to development on ‘Robots Are Red…’.
29th January 2012
For this month’s Experimental Gameplay Project challenge games had to be designed for control via 5 buttons – specifically 5 floor mounted pressure pads in front of a large projector screen. I came up with a simple game prototype which I’m calling ‘Wyrm’.
I designed it primarily with one player in mind, but I think it could be fun with more (each person manning a pad). The aim is to take down a fire-breathing dragon-like creature as quickly as possible by switching between the archers on the ship. The closer the archer is to the ‘dragon’, the more damage they’ll cause. There’s also a power up that occasionally gets dropped, temporarily increasing one archers effectiveness. The average game time is pretty short so that potentially lots of players could have a go.
You can download the game below and use the number keys (1 to 5) to play.
Download
14th May 2011
I thought that rather than leave my blog untouched while I’m trying to finish projects, I should post some information about my current work-in-progress, which I’m calling The Top Hat Club. It’s a monochrome pseudo-victorian puzzle-platformer (or platform-puzzler?), and it’s based on the remains of a project I abandoned last year. I’m hoping to have it finished within the next couple of months.
14th March 2011
Okay, so it’s not a new game exactly, in fact it’s been over 18 months since we originally rushed it out for the Mochimedia Word Game contest. But today I’ve finally ‘finished’ Alphabots to a standard I’m just about happy with.
Alphabots is the Papervison3D powered word game I worked on with artist David Fullick back in 2009, but pressures of personal life and the day job meant it was never really finished to the quality we had originally wanted.
But now, after a final push of bug fixes, adding features, sounds, and tweaking functionality here and there, we’ve finally decided to release it properly, pushing it to all the Flash game portals.
Play Alphabots now on Kongregate.
22nd December 2010
Niculus is my 16k ‘remake’ of Nebulus for the 8bitrocket 16k Atari remake contest. Nebulus (aka Tower Toppler/Castelian) by John M Phillips on the Atari ST is probably the first game I can remember playing. I gave my game a bit of a festive twist (’tis the season after all). It was a bit of a rush and there is only one level, but it’s quite good fun while it lasts and captures some of the essence of the original game.
10th December 2010
My latest project is the sequel to one of my simplest and most successful games, Crumbs! – imaginatively titled Crumbs! 2.
Overall I’m pretty happy with it and it does add a little to the original idea, with new play modes and slicker presentation, but it wasn’t really the game I wanted to make right now.
I’ve never really been a fan of creating sequels, and I’d much rather be playing around with new game concepts. But the original Crumbs! was extremely popular (in terms of the sheer number of plays) and I couldn’t resist trying to cash in on that. While that may not be the noblest of motivations, it’s sitting okay with me.
You can play Crumbs! 2 here.
19th March 2010
This is the first post in my brand new blog.
After developing games in Flash for several years, I finally decided to create a place to post my ideas, prototypes, code examples, doodles (everyone likes to doodle) and just about anything else related to my current projects as well as anything to do with topic of game design and development in general.
