This week's Wednesday Workshop (#200! wowie) asked us to create a game using no more than 2000 characters. I managed to recreate the classic 8-bit title "Splat!", whereby you control a spider through a maze, picking up fruit. In order to squeeze all that into 2000 characters, I opted for simpler mouse movement, and few other bits and pieces. Then I figured, what the heck, and decided to make it a wee bit bigger for AGameAWeek. Guide the worm through the maze, grab the circles, avoid the squares, a...

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!

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 ...

I had intended to update this a fair bit. Add music, add extra pickups, things like that. But in the end, I instead decided to leave it as it is. This is (with added Highscore table) pretty much as it is at the end of the two hour session. A nice simple game, with a basic gameplay method. Guide the "worm" through the maze, grab all the blue + blobs, and avoid the barrels. They're very very volatile, so.. best to keep clear of 'em all.. (Although, you do get points for blowing them up....

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'm still building up the basic reusable map functions! Had some crazy memory issues, yesterday, but everything seems ok, this morning, so it's time to move from silly map things, to actually building the game up. Starting with a strange grouping of maptiles, I'm going to have to add crates, and a player, and get the movement up and running. It should be pretty easy to do, though, as all the arts ready and waiting. good-good! So with all that being done today (hopefully) I should be able ...

Yeah, I figured I'd forgotten a few things, and as Sokoban gets built up, slowly but surely, all the forgotten things are poking their heads out, waiting to be sorted. Click inside for coder-heavy stuff.. or just grab Sokoban from earlier today and play that for a while!!

Yesterday was spent getting Sokoban to work in BlitzBasic for Windows. It ended up reasonably well, but there's a few things that should be tweaked, including one persons complaint that bundling all 600+ levels into a single pack kinda kills the fun of it.. A dull trek through a long list of simple levels before you even touch on the slightly more difficult levels, does not a fun game make. So, I'll split them back up into their seperate packs, and give folk a nice selectable menu system.

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...

I've taken onboard a few of AuthenticKaizen's suggestions, and there's now a slightly better edition of Disasteroids available. <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=33">Same download link, right here</a> The game's pretty much the same as it was on Tuesday, except with a few added powerups to play around with. There's also (I forgot to mention this anywhere, but it's in there!!) a "Chill" mode. Hit Tab to start the game, and you play without those little white cr...

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"> Rules : Go Left, avoid spinning spiky things. There's 13 levels, and then it wraps back to level 3 but faster, and then continues to wrap, getting faster and faster all the time.. Infinite lives, so if you're really bored you can just keep going and going and going! Maybe! Yo...

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 a nice littl...

I've said on other forums that this year will be my Xbox Live year. That I'd take the time to learn how XNA should work, and eventually build things up so they work nice and happily. Unfortunately, my coding's stuck in the 80's&90's, and I can't get out of my "horrible" Basic habits. Well, other folk call them "Horrible" habits, but honestly, I just see most Basic commands as common sense. I'd much rather write If Keydown(1) Then End than I would write If (GamePad.GetState(...