I spent most of last night tweaking the graphics.
For starters, I've jigged about the whole Background tileset.
If you've bothered to poke around inside the old game, you'll have noticed that bg.png contains a great big pile of unused "Inside a Wall" stuff. It was originally going to serve a purpose, and fill out the black, but eventually I decided that having plain black nothingness would be good enough, and the black stayed as black.
So, they're now removed from the tile...

The other day I considered redoing the whole wall structure. I considered making nice wonderful multidirectional walls, and levels with all kinds of diagonals, straight, and maybe even curves.
It seemed like a good idea.
Then I started to work on it, and... well.. it wasn't exactly super fast!
In fact, things were painfully slow.
As the game struggled to draw a single wall, with nice detail like the old one, I realised that drawing an entire arena in that way would only lead to ...

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...

All games must start somewhere, and Alien Deathmatch 2 starts right here!
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot001.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot001_thumb.png"></a>
This isn't the most entertaining shot I've ever posted, but it does show that work has now actually begun on the sequel.

..I got an X360, and I've really been playing the heck out of it, lately.
It's fun! I'm worried it'll RROD at any minute, but while it's still going, it's still fun.
And last week I bought Geometry Wars 2, for 800 points, as well as Geometry Wars 1 for 400 points.
Lovely stuff.

If you're slightly above the age of people who are still meant to be pissing about playing silly games, like I am, you probably remember Gearworks, from the Amiga/C64 era.
I don't know why, but the game suddenly popped into my head, this week.
So I made a quicky clone.
It's not perfect, there's loads missing, and there's no editor in sight, but as a testbed for my still growing 2D-in-3D engine, it does the job.
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/gearworks.p...

Having headed back to Blitz3D (from BlitzMax, with it's annoying incompatibilities) I decided to make something quick and easy to test it out.
Snake!
With a 1 minute timer on it.
Get all the points you can, as fast as you can.

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.

A while ago, I made <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/?p=14">this</a>. Horizontal Shooter.
Fly about, shoot the bad guys, guard the good guys.
A nice enough game, lovely lines all over, but somehow lacking in something extra.
This week.. I added something extra!

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.

Puzzobomb rears it's head once again, this time in a Junior capacity.
Puzzobomb Jr DS is basically just Puzznic! But, hey, there's nothing wrong with that!
Just because the titular "Bomb" is completely missing, doesn't mean the game's not fun.
And with over 2000 levels to work your way through, you'll be playing away for quite a while..

I don't normally post individual Workshop entries. They're not usually good enough to make it to single-post-worthy status!
This week's workshop is a Jericho-based "Explosive" challenge, and so I made a small puzzle game with Bombs.
It's quite an interesting puzzle game.
Take the basic rules of the classic Puzznix game, add bombs, and score it all on a Golf-style scorechart.
The game looks quite nice, nicking the "chunky" block style from Blockman, and there's so...

Those expecting another Saturday filled with happy retro memories have a long wait.
I took the week off!
Mostly because coding 18 games within 3 weeks takes quite a lot out of you, but also 'cos my DS finally gave up trying to hold onto the tiny shred of hinge it had remaining. (ie, it did that whole "R-trigger side snap" thing that DSLite's tend to do!)
During this week, though, I've been thinking about Galaga.
On the one hand, it'd be nice to make a tiny retro version of the Amiga...

<a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/dsdev/colbox_800.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/dsdev/colbox_400.png"/></a>
Platdude's Retro Collection was first released in November 2007. Each new release will contain a handful of new games.
How many will there be in the end? Who can say!
The latest release, <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/dsdev/col018.zip">Download Here</a>, contains 18 games from the list below.
Note : If you'd like to play, but don...

Having started and given up on a fair few projects over the past couple of weeks, I've decided to go back to basics. It's time to bring return to the 8-bit Tiny collection, and get things started once and for all.
So today I got working on a base program that can use a series of includes to incorporate a bunch of games. I've designed a neat collection of generic looking graphics, and started listing games that may or may not be included. I'll try to make all the games as Repeat-Play-...

I decided to start a Dev diary here, for all my DS Developing. I figured people would eventually stumble across it, and start reading away at all the fun coding. Either that, or they'll completely ignore these bits, and just download the Experimental stuff like they usually do.
Either way, this is going to be a part dev-diary, part progress report, and part release schedule for all things DS.
I currently have 4 DS Projects on the go. They are Stringy Things, JNKPlat, An Alien Breed type clone,...

When I started doing Wed.Workshop, a few people complained that a week was too short a time, so in September 2005 I did the first and only Monthly Workshop. The Super September Challenge asked people to recreate a classic 8-bit game in a 16-bit style, and add some silly extras that people kept adding to games around that time.
My entry was to be Super Dig Dug.
It started off well enough, but then the sound started going all screwy, and I couldn't be bothered fixing it. So it was left to rot...

Platdude. A 16 pixel, 3 color character. Deftly defying the world of 3D models and amazing realism, in favour of good old fashioned gameplay.
Over the years, Platdude has been in plenty of games.. Here's an approximate history of Platdude, along with Downloads where appropriate. (Or skip to the bottom for the latest stuff!)