I can't believe I've still not finished this yet! Seems that, no matter how much work I do on this game, it's still not quite done. This week, I finally decided on the complete "Not Chance" and "Not Community Chest" card selection. 12 of each, ready and waiting in the engine. Next, I added all those lovely patents. They're all in there, each one displaying on a nice little card, along with the creator's name. I haven't yet gotten around to actually printing the bulk of ...

Aww. Didn't work. This week's Wednesday Workshop (#209) asked us to create a game with some kind of Gravity. If you've been following AGameAWeek for a while, you'll remember Puzzobomb. A nice puzzle game with Gravity. I also did MunkyBlocks as a kind of follow up. Well, this week I decided to try it again, but with rotational gravity, rather than plain gravity. As such, the block will fall in the direction they're placed. They ha...

Last Wednesday I started a new project, it's since gotten out of hand and I need some ideas to help bring it all to a close. Let's start from the top. Over at the MyLGCookie forums, someone asked if there was a nice touchscreen Monopoly. As usual, Jay jumps in and says "Yeah, that'll be nice and easy" ... It's not! See, rather than getting my ass sued off, I decided to make it "But a bit different", and the idea I came up with was to use Patents. Instead of houses and hotels, you ...

I've about 20-odd projects on the go, this week, so you'll have to excuse the lack of blog entries, and even a decent AGameAWeek game. Most of this week was spent trying to roll a dice! (die, whatever) I figured that, with 4 frames per roll, I'd need around about 200+ frames of animation. I tried to work out all the animations, and it drove me crazy! Then I rested, and eventually worked out a way to do it, without bothering to animate it, which was a lot simpler to do. .. Then the game i...

OMG! It's a Trial Edition!! WTF!? Demo! ARGH!!! Actually, I've not finished yet. But rather than skip out a week of AGameAWeek, I've decided to release a quick Trial edition. In this version, you must guide Platdude through 11 classic JNKPlatDS08 levels. They're all in there, and they all work approximately as they did before There are, of course, odd timing issues, as I've not quite got everything exact. It's not TOO obvious ...

Just a quicky, this week, as I know the spam is spam! But there were still a couple of oddities that stuck out. My Amazing Weight Loss Story writes... Thanks for writing, I truly liked reading your most recent post. I think you should post more often, you obviously have talent for blogging! Aww, shucks, thanks! We'll call this one "ComplimentBot" The trick is, if you weasel your way into accidentally getting approved, you can then reuse that username over and over, and no...

I'm a calm person. I will happily settle with what I've got, and be glad that I have it. I don't own a copy of Flash, I can't afford it, and I'm not going to steal it. So I carry on making games in Blitz, and whatever else I can get my hands on. So, with my £100 Phone, from LG, (The KP500 'Cookie') I started to write games using the freely available MidletPascal. It's a wonderful piece of software, and it does many great things.

Like Electronic Arts, my game titles are becoming ever more complex, with themes and years being added on, in an ever expanding way. No matter, it's still only 12 characters long, so that's ok Yesterday I made a decision that might break up AGameAWeek for a few weeks. I don't seem to have nearly enough time, recently, so I'll pad things out a bit, and work on a lengthy project. (Although, if it helps, I worked on a bunch of MidletPascal Java t...

Occasionally, I like to jot down my current doings. It helps keep track of projects, and ideas, and sometimes getting a bit of feedback helps. So feel free to do that! 1. Java/MidletPascal Since I got my latest phone (an LGCookie) I decided to get back into Java coding... Except, without that horrible Java bit. So, whilst learning MidletPascal, I've released a few games, and also started to write a series of MidletPascal tutorials, too. So, there's that! I'm continuing to build up a fun...

1st attempted Java App. It's a nice quicky program. Pick a time, click start, when time's up it plays a tune. .. Yeah, it's not much, but surprisingly the LGCookie (KP500) doesn't have one. So here's one.. Quicky Timer <-- about 70Kb

I'm taking a day off from H~S~R today, thinking ahead for next weeks game, which may/may not be a word game.. not sure.. Anyhoo, there are bugs, and Swarmer found a couple, so head inside to have a good read about 'em.

Yeay! It's Horizontal Shooter Redux!! In this first release, there's a few pointers. Read inside for those. Otherwise, nice and quick, here's a picture. And you can Download H~S~R here!! yeay!

It's been 30 weeks since I last tackled Horizontal Shooter. The last time, I used BlitzMax. It was wonderful, and gave me all manner of nice swirly effects for those lovely background lines. Mmm.. Until it came to running it on other systems, whereby a huge amount of incompatibilities arose, and the game kinda fell on it's arse and died. Oh dear. 30 weeks on, let's give it another go!

AGameAWeek, except when not! It's Easter weekend, the weather outside is gorgeous, and I'm really not in a Sit + Code type of mood. Doesn't happen very often, but there it is! So, if there's no Game this week, that'll be why! Meanwhile, you might like to check out the new "I bothered to tag all the releases" view. Releases You can now flick through pages of Just Releases. How handy!

Giving yourself more work! Bugger. Last week I bought myself a new phone. A lovely little phone! LG "Cookie" KP500 Touchscreen, and stuff. It's nice. But it's time for me to complain, as I usually do. See, the thing is, Java games. Proper ones.. That you'd pay cash for online.. They try FAR too hard to make themselves look good. They desperately attempt to fling hundreds of "nice" "polished" "wonderful" sprites around the screen at once, like they've worked oh so hard on the game to make ...

OK, as I said earlier, I've been playing with the Skeleton stuff today. Whilst I was in there, I wondered how fun it might be if I added some kind of overriding features into my default engine. You might (or not) have noticed, but since Wednesday Workshop Week #1, I've been placing all my game's data into the System folder, then into it's own Weekly numbered folder within. If you get ALL my games (from the past couple of years), you can bundle them all together into the same folder. The root contains al...

OMG! The complaints are everywhere! I guess the general verdict is that my games are too hard. To be honest, I never thought of them as being "hard". I just kinda skip over the dull early parts, *ARRGGHH!! TUTORIALS!!!!* and get the player right into the game, instead. But folk are complaining. So a new plan of action must be decided. Today, I opened up my Skeleton frame doohickey, and decided to add a Game-And-Watch approach. The engine now has a simple "GameStyle" variable, right up top. Th...

As game time progresses, so do the many bugs that appear! With sprites drawing WAY out of bounds, and memory being messed up all over, there's chaos in the game. But a few tweaks here and there, and everything's coming together nicely! Another slight issue, though, cropped up suddenly. PALib warned me I didn't have enough memory for all the artwork! Uhoh!!! To be fair, it was 2* 512x512 pixel starfields, so it was kinda big. But even so, it wasn't directly loaded into the Video ...

A long forgotten game gets a remake today. Platfire was originally made, way way back in Wednesday Workshop #2!! To be fair, #1's probably the better game, style wise. (As in, it wasn't rushed within a few hours, since yesterday!!) But Platfire 2 is in the "It's super hard, and you won't get much of a score" style that I seem to be leaching onto, these days. Piles and piles of enemies will appear, and you just keep taking shots at 'em until you're dead. As I type this,...

Game 3 needed a few tweaks, here and there, this morning. Mostly due to the controls being a little twitchy. Plus, something's missing. And annoyingly, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the missing something is indeed Ingame Music! uhoh!! It's bad enough having to create a jingle for each and every game, but to now start building up a bunch of little ingame tunes, let alone a big enough collection that folk won't grow tired of. .. That's a lot of music to do! yikes! ...

With more tweaking than my head could stand, I finally got Game #2 wrapped up yesterday, so I'm finally starting on Game #3, today. As stated previously, Game #3 will be reusing quite a lot of the core engine that Game #2 used, so it should be short and sweet putting it all together, like some kind of coded jigsaw puzzle. Once that's done, Game #4's ready to get going (ie, I have a vague idea in my head!) and will also be coded in Blitz for this week's AGameAWeek, so watch out for that.....

I just paid 400 points for Worms on X360. What the hey, right?! It's Worms... What could possibly go wrong!?! .. Well, aside from the things I ranted about, on the original DS version, a long while ago.. Well, would you believe it, there's something wrong with the Xbox Live version, too!

I'm yet to start coding anything gamewise, yet, but I've made my first start on the first game. Gerinych over at GBATemp suggested a Sokoban clone. Usually, I avoid Sokobans. They're kinda dull, generic and boring after 5 seconds, but there's something in Sokoban that's really useful right now. Sokoban has a LOT of levels, and since one of the Socoder members (JL235) is making his own Sokoban clone, he knew where I'd find a whole big bunch of levels for it. So, in rapid succ...

This time around, every game will have it's own quickly made titlescreen. Not wanting to spend too much time doing each one, I figured I'd get away with doing NES style titles. They're simple, but effective. I'm deciding all this, now, because it's so much easier than having to frantically throw it all together, later on, with 10 or so games all needing to be worked out! So, the style right now is, Title of game at the top, highscores below, and "Press Start" below that. Nothing...

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.. <img src="https://agameaweek.com/completeB/2009/Disasteroids_20090203A.png"> BUT. It's still a nice swooshy game, with fancy particles, and nice explosions. It's mouse controlled, l...