Doing your homework on the back of the bus..
A crazy week of illness, busyness, and a party, have meant that this week's game had to be done..
..
um.. today!

This week's Wednesday Workshop <a href="https://socoder.net/index.php?topic=1414">#186</a> was to create a nice Asteroids game.
As I started creating it, I was planning a nice Horizontal Shooter-esque game, with powerups and all kinds of crazyness.
But I ran out of steam midway.
A shame..

This week, I've been working on an Asteroids game.
On Thursday, it was a bog standard Asteroids game, that seriously needed updating.
On Friday, I changed the controls to mouse. The game plays like a cross between Asteroids and Horizontal Shooter.
On Sunday, I tweaked the controls further, and added particles.

I've had it in my desk's cupboard for years.
I bought the game not long after my original Playstation broke, thinking I'd pick up a PSX cheap somewhere..
I never did.
And, I never bought a PS2, or a PSP, or PS3, or anything else that could play it.

I've had a couple of emails about the donate button already, so thought I should clarify why it's there.
I write a game a week.. Sometimes they're good, sometimes their rubbish, and sometimes they're really fun, playable, and can keep you playing for a good few hours.
I can do this, because I have a lot of free time. And by "a lot of free time", I mean A LOT of free time.
The webhost is pretty much minimal cost (GoDaddy), the programming languages range from 0 cost (DS/XN...

A short and sweet game, this week.
Would've been more (extra graphical niceness) but I ran out of time! Aw well..
Here's the basic form.
<img src="https://socoder.net/workshop/dlds/184_go_left.gif">

I'm not sure if you figured it out from the picture I posted the other day, but it seems that the project I'm currently working on in XNA will turn out to be Centipong.
To be honest, I wasn't actually planning to do Centipong!
I was actually just shoving in a basic sprite, and getting it bobbing around on the screen, in order to duplicate my basic "Blitz 2D-in-3D" command set within the XNA environment.
So far that's working out rather well, and I've near enough created...

( border="0"><tr><td>Blimey!
What a year, eh!
I decided to round off the year with a nice big, old fashioned list, with everything in it.
Except this doesn't have everything in it, because I've forgotten to add the DS games.. I'll do that later!! (Took me about 3 hours to do this, so I'm not going to tweak it, now!!)

A more accurate title would be "Just like Windows Vista, here's a list of things I told you I'd be putting in, but haven't yet bothered to, so will be missing when I release the game.."
Except I'm one person, and have spent four weeks doing this.. Not 100 people working for 4 years...
...
*sigh* Vista sucks..

I'm not ignoring it!!!
I woke up late, today, and time seemed to slip away fairly rapidly.. I spent about an hour browsing online shops, buying a cheap copy of Sonic Unleashed for only £20 (Gamestation) and an el'cheapo Digital Photoframe (£30 Aria.co.uk), and then surprisingly it was time to settle down, eat, and then go to work.
Where my time went, I don't know!!
Still, I did post the demo yesterday, so that's ok.
Meanwhile I think I've figured out ...

I didn't get time to fix this up properly last night, or this morning, either.. Blame Alien Deathmatch!
So, this week's game is exactly as it was yesterday, when posted over at Socoder.
Wednesday Workshop #180 asked us to create a Darts game, so here's a quickly made one.
A target is written on the scoreboard, and with your three darts, you have to try to get as close to that target as you can.

I'm quite happy with the level compression, now. Things are nice and trim, and everything's fitting into a small enough area.
So, today I'm thinking about how the server should work.. Note, I've not added the server yet, but I'm definitely getting prepared! What I've decided to do is implement an Author name and Level name directly into the checksum.
This way, when the server checks your game for new levels, it can automatically dig out the new stuff, and it'll know...

Today's work has been mostly of the external variety.
First off, compressing a level..
I'm taking 160x160 pixels, each one being around about 16 different colors (give or take, depending on what walls/floors/etc I bother to add.) and trying to bundle them up into a teensy tiny bit of data.
To me, compression's a fun time, where you get to play with lots of fiddly numbers, and chaotic maths, just to get large things down to size.

<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot009b.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot009b_thumb.png"></a>
An editor!
Today, I finally got around to making the editor. Starting nice and easily, I'll be adding bits and pieces as I go, so that .. hopefully.. when you get hold of it, it's not as empty as it currently is!

Since we're already up to Saturday, and there's still an amazing amount of work to be done, I think I'm going to bump the deadline for Alien Deathmatch 2.. (OMG!! Missed Deadline!! WTF?!!?)
So, with that in mind, and since we missed AGameAWeek last week, I'm quickly heading back to Wednesday Workshop for a nice quicky idea.. This week's challenge is to create a game that works just as well played with a pen and some paper, as it does ingame..
For my entry, I'm not 100% sure, but I think I'll pr...

Haven't done a thing, today!
Actually, that's not entirely true. I spent most of this morning playing about with the Enemy Spawning layout code, and tweaking it to be a little fairer.. One of my annoyances when playing Geometry Wars is when you're running in one direction, and a bad guy spawns RIGHT in front of you, giving you a fraction of a second in which to go "Oh, FFS!" and then die horribly!
Maybe I'm just rubbish at it (so says my gamerscore), but that always pisses me off.
So, I'...

No need for a screenshot tonight, as there's not really anything worth looking at!
Everything I did today was invisible background coding stuff! So nothing fancy to look at, but still some nice new things.
I started off by squeezing the whole pixel by pixel arena out into a great big map array. I'm hoping (!) that it'll make things that bit more precise once I start adding in some walls (probably tomorrow)
Basically, rather than having the player walk past/into/occasionally t...

In what can only be described as a complete disappointment, I've given up with BlitzMax.
Technically, the engine's great, the language runs fast, and things are good.
But.. It doesn't run on some systems..
And some of the features I'd really like to use run really stupidly slow on certain other systems.

This week's Wednesday Workshop <a href="https://socoder.net/?Workshop=Challenge&Week=173">#173</a> was a redoing of an old one. Wednesday Workshop 1 asked us to make games using only 5 objects onscreen.
Rather than doing that, I opted to take my original 5 object game, and remake it, turning it into a slightly more interesting game.
It's still not anything amazing, but at least it's something!
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ballup.png"><img src...

I spent most of this week rebuilding a few of my older games with the new Highscore stuff, so there's a couple of nice new-ish games to play.

First off, we've the 3rd version of Horizontal Shooter.. <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=49">Get it here</a>. It's pretty much the same as ever, but with Mr Scouter from the original, thrown back in for good luck.
The new highscore method should help ward off nasty hackers from the scoreboard system.. Or at least for a...

This week, I haven't entered the Wednesday Workshop. Instead I had a try at the Monthly one (#013), which asked us to create a game with lots of guns, and bullets and shootyness.
Since I'd already done a decent enough shooter the other day (H~S) I decided to try my hand at something a little different.
<a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/sheriffmunky.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/sheriffmunky_thumb.png"></a>

Due to all manner of obscure things happening this week (A HD Crash being one of them..) this week's effort isn't anywhere near as good as last week's!!
Still, a game's a game, even without a titlescreen, music, sound, an ending, scores, or anything else like that..
..
*cough*

A sequel/repeat this week, as the <a href="https://socoder.net/?Workshop=Challenge&Week=167">Wednesday Workshop #167</a> asked us to create a game with 2 main characters.
At first I considered doing a Bill and Ted game, but couldn't think of a decent gameplay element other than "Move the blocks".. That'd be a most excellent waste of the characters.
So I resurrected Bibbleman and Bobbleman, and just used them instead.
Still the same game, mind.. So if you're wo...

This week's Wednesday Workshop <a href="https://socoder.net/index.php?topic=1206">#166</a> asked for us to create a game that uses lots of Balance.
I couldn't come up with anything!
So, instead, here's JNKPlat DS 08.
<img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/dsdev/platds8_menu.png" align="right">
It's a complete restart of the engine, coded wholly from start, but using the old sprites so as to keep the good old fashioned style of the last one! (Although, had...

I'm not entirely sure who came up with this idea, but it's been roaming around the internet for the past few years.
This week's Wednesday Workshop #165 was to create a game using only one button.
So, Heck, why not!
??

This week's game will not include Super Online Highscore functions. The way it works makes it impossible to stop people from cheating.
Ho hum..
 
In the meantime, here's a couple of bonus games.

I'm not the type of person who usually does a lot of things! For starters, you'll probably notice that 99% of my games are locked to the refresh rate of your screen. If your screen's higher than 60hz, my games will run all that much faster.
The reason for that is that all my systems are set at 60, and.. to be honest, I tend to forget that other people's aren't!
Whenever a game relies 100% on framerates and specific timings, I'll more than likely bother to sort that out, but usually I'm onto th...