A decade is over, and what have I done?
373 games, created a new blogging script for here, rewritten the Socoder forum, started a few new sites and more!
Oh, and a brain tumour!

It's been a wild and crazy decade, and over the next few days I'll be looking back at the best (and worst) games from the decade.

2010 - BlitzMax
2011 - Touch Control
2012 - The Bad Year
2013 - Monkey-X
2014 - OUYA!!
2015 - The Gap Year
2016 - Forget-V
2017 - Cuddle Me
2018 - Ringing the Changes
2019 - Overload

2012 - The Bad Year

2012 doesn't have a Top 10.
Because there weren't even 10 games made that year..

The year started wonderfully.
A set of "AGameAWeek Proper", as well as a scheduled monthly iPhone game, too.
I was in full swing, and nothing could stop me!


Except something did stop me.
A giant sodding Brain Tumour...

-=-=-

I'd started with odd neck-cramps way back in 2008.
By 2010 I'd made a silly Star Trek Remix.
2011 I struggled on in dribs and drabs, trying to stick with a schedule, but fairly often having to take days off due to extreme pains.
Doctors told me, over and over, that it's "Bad Posture".. but it wasn't that.

When they finally discovered the tumour in 2012, I ended up in hospital for around about 5 months.
March to July were almost exclusively spent stuck in a hospital bed, and once I got back to some kind of normality at home, it took another few months of recovery before I was ready to even attempt to code anything new.

Here's a list of the games I DID manage to make..

Eight Games

(in order of release)

Unijuggler


I'd been struggling to come up with an iPhone game that might make decent use of tilt-control, and this was the end result.
Bright and colourful to entice players, and entirely tilt-based on the iPhone, the game turned out rather well, if a little difficult.
I do still enjoy watching the poor little Unijuggler flail around, but tilt-controls now seem to be a thing of the past.
Aw well.
The keyboard-based PC edition still works well enough.


Shift Clues


A "slide the tiles" game which requires both memory and .. shuffling!
I think I was aiming to make something along the lines of Cardagain, but this game wasn't anywhere near as much fun!
Failure is always part of AGameAWeek, though, and it's good to learn from horrific mistakes such as this.


Key, Bo and Ard, Too


A return to the world of Kee Bo and Ard, or Key, or whatever it was I called it.
This time, you control all three characters at once, and it ends up feeling a little like the more recent Quadoban titles.
The game is made slightly easier by the fact that the characters stay on their home-squares one you've got them there, unlike in Quadoban where you can move the blocks off them, too.
This is probably an idea that could be expanded upon, but it would just end up as Quadoban again!


Snaked Up


A nice enough concept, but one with a really evil scoring mechanism.
Avoid the blocks and collect the blobs like in any other Snake game.
If you hit a block, the snake doesn't die, and instead you lose ALL of your points!
You lose the game if you hit yourself, so rack up as many points as you can.


One Turtle Dove


"Dove" as in, the past tense of "Dive"
This is one of those "random chance" games, where you try your luck throwing the turtle off the top of the tower, and seeing how many points you can rack up on the way down.
Obviously a precursor to the later game "Chuck-a-Ball", which is similar in concept, but a LOT more refined.
This is SO slow in comparison. Insanely slow. It takes forever to reach the bottom, and there's not a whole lot of action along the way.
Think of this as a trial throw!
Chuck-a-Ball is much better.

Oh, and also, this is a vaguely themed Valentines Day game!


Pancake's Syrup


If One Turtle Dove is Proto-Chuck-A-Ball, then Pancake's Syrup is Proto-Clampett as I attempted to make a somewhat randomised platform game.
My randomisation skills weren't quite honed in at this point, though, and if you peek inside the files you'll find a lev.png with the entire level pre-drawn.
*tsk*
In the time since, I've gotten much better at making large random levels like that, and the Clampett games show those off rather well.

Additionally, this is a vaguely themed Pancake Day game!
I should do more things like this!!


Mario Throws Things


Still somewhat bitter about last year's "NeonPlat Adventures" release getting little to no attention, I tried re-releasing the game as a lazy sprite-rip version, to see what might happen.
Nothing happened.
So, I'm kinda happy that people weren't just put off my my rubbish graphics, and instead... Just don't give a rats arse about the game.

This game is me being bitter!!
Doesn't happen very often in my games, so enjoy it.


Mental Psychic Pulling Forces


And lastly, a game about migraines. A bit..
Oh boy, were the headaches getting out of hand, by this point.

I struggled through pain, finished off this game, uploaded it to the site, then about 5 or 6 hours later was in an ambulance on my way to my medicinal prison for the next short while...

Gameplay wise, this is quite fun, with you flinging plates around with your mouse.
But isn't nearly as controllable with a touchpad as it is with a mouse!
Be sure to play with a mouse.

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