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...

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! ...

Off and on, a bit at a time, the past few days, what with the DIY, and the AGameAWeek, and the Socoder work the past few days.. So, rather than call 10 minute sessions a day at a time, I'll call them a great big long "Popping in and out, looking at the code, struggling to figure out what's wrong, and then going to do something else instead" day. It's a cheat, but since the annoying issue is still there, it still counts! I'm stuck on Game #2. And it's annoying that I'm stuck on g...

A nice quicky, this week. Having spent most of the week doing DIY, sorting out Socoder, and occasionally working on PRC2 when I get a chance, I've not had much time for a game, this week.. So, I did what all frantic coders do. I threw loads of colour on the screen, and hid the fact that I haven't done much work this week No levels.. As you move, pellets will replenish. No power pellets, either, so no eating up the ghosties.. Just You, Pe...

Game #2's turning out quite well, except it'll probably need to be taken down a peg or two. Currently it's, shall we say, a little psychedelic! And, that's only amplified once it gets onto the blurry DS screen! Lots of motion + lots of colour = lots of Weeeeeeee!!! Not a good combination. It looks great, but it's probably not going to look that great for long. Which is a shame. The player's in, and I'm ready for adding AI to the game. Once that's done, Game #3 w...

Bug fixes already! Oh dear! Sokoban had a bizarre map limit bug, whereby if you were off the left hand side of a small map, it freaked out, and the screen jiggled around like crazy.. .. oops! That got fixed early this morning, and then since it's Friday I took most of my time working on this week's AGameAWeek. (So I can bugfix Sunday and neaten it Monday, ready for release on Tuesday.) .. In many ways, I haven't done anything to PRC2! Maybe tomorrow! PRC2 : Still only 1 game....

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 ...

As mentioned the other day, whilst sorting out all the PRC2 stuff, I first created Sokoban for windows, using Blitz. So here it is. Nothing special. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/soko.png"> A is the hard pack, B is the easy one. or as I like to think of it.. A is really hard..! .. And so's pack B. B's meant to be "For children and beginners", but I could only get up to level 11! *sigh* I suck at sokoban! All levels are from David W Skinner's Sokoban Level Si...

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...

For DS Development, I use PALib and DevKitPro. DevKitPro compiles everything nicely for the DS, whilst PALib is a set of functions that makes everything nice and usable, as opposed be being a baffling chaotic mess! However, if you try updating it, a whole fleet of incompatibilities arise, be it because of DevKitPro changing, or PALib. And, it's not just little things either. A simple PALib upgrade will mean that pretty much all of my old games start getting little breaks in them, and it's a ...

A nice and simple game, this week. <img src="https://agameaweek.com/completeB/2009/Storm_of_Idigidragon_20090224A.png"> Since I'm trying to decide what style Platdude Retro Collection 2 should have, I decided to try out a style in Blitz first, and see how it looks. You might notice it's still a little Atari 2600. .. I'm not sure if I'll stick with that. But I do like the nice big chunky sprites, and the whole thing feels much more retro than PRC did, originally.. So.. I dunno...

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! And, as you could probably guess. I ain't got Jack! There's still a game, though! Take a look inside to see what it is..

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...

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. Over the years, I've tried it on Various emulators, only to have them spit it out, and die.. And yet I kept it, hoping to eventually play it some day. Yesterday I finally DID! And it's a cracking game. A wonderful piece of music based gaming, all nice a...

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...

A nice, quickly made game, this week.. For obvious reasons. Bah.. Still, a game created in 2 days can be just as much fun as a great big month long project. .. Occasionally. This game's a nice simple puzzle game. Your task is to get the blobs from the top of the sliders, down to their allocated areas in the bottom, by sliding the sliders left and right. There's a constant timer, so try to get through as many levels as you can. No scores, no level count, but .. for a change.. The Blitz Basic so...

No new game again, this week, but here's my New Year's Resolution. AGameAWeek There you go! I almost managed it for a few months, so I'm going to try and stick to it all year round next year. If you have any crazy game suggestions, stick 'em below, and I'll probably get around to them when I run out! (.. I wonder if I could make a great big Pot of Ideas script, where folk can dump their suggestions... That'd be handy..) Meanwhile, don't forget that there's always something to do in Alien ...

You might have noticed a distinct lack of AGameAWeek, this week.. Since I'm getting little or no work done, this week, and.. what with being Xmas and all, I've decided to be lazy, and take a week off. Nothing wrong with that! If you feel you really need something new to play with, nip to yesterday's post, and you can grab the WhoSave thing. That's quite nice.. And you can pretend I posted that today, in time for the Xmas episode in 2 days time. Very festive!! If you'd like t...

( 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!!) Anyway, here's a nice great big list of every game (again, apart from the DS ones) that I made in 2008. It's quite a big list, too.. 31 Games. OK, so maybe not a ...

So, I spent a while, last night, playing with the graphics. Now that the game's out there, and since so many people are complaining about it's lack of fancyness, I decided to make nice with the special weapons.. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/whooshy.png"> The game's now officially 75% More Whooshy, with the superweapons looking much more fancypants, and the dead baddies giving off a little red "poof!" as they go. I've also switched the ingame text from Regular Font to...

A sigh of relief, as the game is finally in an upload worthy state. I'm sure there's plenty of bugs, mounds of forgotten features, and odd little untweaked things that aren't quite right, but what's here is plenty enough to be counted as Release 1. <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=37"> Download Alien Deathmatch 2</a> 3Mb!!! The game, in it's current Release 1 state has quite a few new features from those in AD1. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_b...

Sometimes Copy and Paste works..

Having finally put the nice simple swooshy spawning sound back into the game, and got a couple of nice test levels up and running, and inside the scoreboard, and then got the whole "Nth position on the online scoreboard" display going, I decided to move onto more pressing matters. I already copy and pasted most of the control scheme stuff early on in the project, so to help give the game a little consistency, and so as not to have to recode the whole thing, to...

In the old game you could create levels simply by making little 64x64 pixel .png images. The game would load them as it found them, and convert them to levels on the fly. This was handy, but it didn't let you control all the possibilities of spawning, weapon types, and things like that.. This new one does! But what if you really liked your old levels? It's an extremely complicated procedure, so I've put together this step by step guide to help folk import their old levels into the new g...

Now I remember why the original Alien Deathmatch did this, too! If I check a directory for files (level directory!) to compile my list of levels, and then add a level in there (Downloaded) and then recheck the directory to make a new list of levels, Blitz has managed to keep a cache of the directory, and so refuses to show up any new ones. The only option is to close the game, and reload. *sigh* I'll have to create my own list of files, and update it as I go.. Still, the upload and download i...

<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/onlinegets.png"> That there's the first official online highscore! o/ YEAY! o/ But, boo that I had to manually copy and paste bits of text to get the level into the database in the first place!! I'm now working on getting the whole upload/download thing working again. Shouldn't take too long, but I think I'll have to discard the whole "Bag" idea. As much fun as it is to have a constant supply of new levels, it means you won't be able ...