Last week saw the two year anniversary of (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/2012/08/home-again-home-again-jiggity-jig/">this post), where I waffled and rambled on about my health condition. Mum suggested it was about time to write an update, so this is that! Two years on, and although I'm marginally better, I'm still somewhat stuck in a fairly similar position.

A quest through the stars, as you beam your crew down to the planet, wander through the perilous path, and blast off in a rocket! <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Space_Rocket_Adventurers_20140819A_thumb.png"> <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Space_Rocket_Adventurers_20140819B_thumb.png">

OK, I think I've worked out most of the kinks in my papercraft arcade machine. (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/2014/07/got-paper/">Previously...) There are still a few niggly bits, most notably that top bit, where you can't quite wrestle it into place without getting gobs of glue everywhere.. And there are oodles of little white gaps everywhere, which I really oughta sort out, but if I'm honest, that's probably more down to my crappy hand-eye co-ordination at the minute. (Shaky hands makes for terrible...

Occasionally, I base games upon crazy bits of coding that seem fun to play with. Sometimes games can form from odd little artistic doodles that look strange and unusual. Other times, I'll start with a sound effect, or a piece of music, and allow it to fester away until a game has emerged. This week is different.. This week, the game's idea came solely from the stupid mock game title that randomly popped into my head. *shrugs* <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Alien_Spindome_20140603A_...

You wait months for a new AGameAWeek iOS game, and then two come along at once! Apologies that these weren't posted some time last week, but they've been sat in "Waiting for Review" status for AGES!! Much, much longer than the regular "7 days" wait.

This time last year, I reattempted the game Microbes, but it didn't really work out as well as I'd hoped for. This year, I opted to give it another go, and have mixed in oodles of lovely glowyness! Seems to have done the trick! <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Disc_Blaster_20140311A_thumb.png"> <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Disc_Blaster_20140311B_thumb.png">

When I first bought my iPad, I never imagined the amount of "work" that I'd end up doing on the thing. The fact is, it's SO much easier to have your iPad on hand, than it is a giant laptop. That's not to say I don't use my laptop. It's pretty much an essential part of AGameAWeek. You can't exactly do your coding on iOS, so the laptop is there for the majority of the things I do, but over the course of the last year-or-so, I've found myself doing smaller bit-tasks on my iPad. I figured I should probab...

I don't normally do "Postmortem" type blog posts, but figured I might as well start. Not sure whether this will become a regular thing, or not, but I thought it'd be nice to keep track of what happens after I post each game. In future I might leave it until a good few days have passed, but the world of AGameAWeek tends to flow fairly rapidly. We'll have to judge it as it happens. Anyway, welcome to the newest section of AGameAWeek, where I take a look at the stats and things, to help figure out if the...

A brand new site has just been launched. Interview an Indie does exactly what it says on the tin. Blog creator (URL "https://Twitter.com/g_unitt">George Unitt) sends email questionnaires to indies, and posts the replies Simple and effective! First up, ME! O/yeayo/!!! You can (URL "https://interviewanindie.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/an-interview-with-jayenkai/">Read it Here).

Forewarning : I'm not entirely sure if I'll be able to finish off this week's game in time! For one thing, it feels like it should be a little more complex than it currently is. Loads of extra stuff could be added, but I probably don't have the time to add it all in. Secondly, however, is the current issue I'm having, health-wise. All of 2012's nastyness has left me slightly off-balance, and kinda queazy a bit. For the most part, I'm managing quite well, but this week's game.. (URL "https://AGameA...

Over on the Monkey forum, a discussion about level data set me off thinking about making this post. Whenever I put levels into my games, I tried to keep them as small as I possibly can. I've been doing it this way for years, and always figured it's nice to compress my data into something that's easily shareable. .. True, I rarely ever get around to actually making these things easily shareable, but for the most part I try to keep things as minimal as possible.

The internet is a place for trolls and complainers (like me!) who like to gripe at every opportunity. For the most part, we tend to ignore these types, which generally means that comments sections have become largely ignored. Here at AGameAWeek, the opposite has happened. There are apparently no trolls daring enough to even attempt to play my games! I seem to have scared most of them away. As a result, there are no trollers or complainers here, and since those are the types that make up the 99% of the ...

Since I just answered this on the Monkey Forums, and created a nice little image to illustrate it, I thought it might be useful to repost my description here. Here's roughly how I achieved the Glow effect on NeonPlat. First, draw your sprite in a RAW form, then make a copy, make it bolder, then blur it all up a bit. Finally, load both the RAW and the BLUR into your game, draw the Raw first, then draw the blur over the top. It really is a simple effect, and depending on how large your blur-sprites ar...

Rather than have a bunch of different posts all over the place, as usually seems to be the case here, I thought I'd create a game-specific page and dump all the reviews onto it. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/BlastTrax_Logo.png"> BlastTrax seems to be gaining a teensy bit of attention, although exactly how much of that is due to one particular reviewer bombarding me with his over-excitement, thus making it feel like there's a bunch of excitement when in fact it's only his own exc...

@Madgarden's wonderful little retro shooter has finally been released to iOS, this week, so that's getting the Weekend Retreat treatment! It makes quite a change from AGameAWeek's fast pacing and insane difficulty levels, as you leisurely float from side to side, gently blasting away at the bad guys!

Every Single Week

Not Good Advice

The following is not advice, and should not be taken as such. People often ask me how I manage to do AGameAWeek. Particularly, how I manage to cram everything into a single week, and then somehow manage to do exactly the same thing every other week, without going crazy. What follows might possibly help you understand a little more of what goes on in the world of AGameAWeek. Or it might just be a whole bunch of rambling waffling text. Not sure!! ...

Apologies that this post has taken me so long to publish. I actually wrote most of it about 3 months ago, when I first released SpikeDislike2, but it's been sat on my Mac on a Sticky Note, and I kinda forgot all about it! I remembered it, the other day, when I submitted SpikeDislike2-Lite to Apple. What follows is a checklist/guide for compiling your (URL "https://monkeycoder.co.nz">Monkey-coded) game onto iOS.

A somewhat simple remake, this week, as I couldn't even be bothered to add anything new into the mix. To be honest, this is one of those "Desperately trying to keep up a rate of AGameAWeek" games! It's fun, though, and now works lovely on an Android device (assuming your Android device of choice plays nicely with it!)

Over the past few weeks, a terrible issue has appeared, and it's been quite noticeable. It's caused my Stringy Things project to get stuck, as well as creating multiple issues in lots of other places. The problem is as follows.. Not all devices are the same!!!

I don't know.. I was playing around in PaintShopPro, and stumbled upon a nice little silly effect for backgrounds. This image has no purpose whatsoever, but it quite nice, so.. um.. yeah, that!! Enjoy! (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/wtf.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/wtf-1024x1024.png" alt="" title="wtf" width="590" height="590" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-2571" /> Click for 2048x2047..!?)

So, here we go again. We're up to Year 5, and hopefully we'll get a full year out of it, this year (nnngh). With Monkey, we get a chance to go back over our previous games, and remake them for a new audience, with iOS, Android and Browser based versions. I expect this will prove to be an exciting year. Given that we can play at showing off, what games do you think would work best, and adapt well to the new touchy/mouse based gameplay options? Or, what games could prove to be an obscure tricky challen...

I've been mulling over this post for a few days, now, but the guy at work mentioned them being super cheap, and I found myself in a more pressed position. Would I, or wouldn't I?

Rant Ahoy!!!

A game? Again? Yup! Made a (URL "https://www.playmycode.com/play/game/jayenkai/not-the-same">nice little mazey thing), where you have to trek around a random maze. The maze isn't hard, but it's one of those nice "harder if you don't do it right!" style of things that I have a knack of making. Not sure why I keep doing those! I just seem to like their insane difficulty! Perhaps, in reality, my games are actually really really piss easy, and it's just me that keeps playing them wrong!? *shrugs*

I've always found Flash slightly more complicated than it needs to be. For a few years I attempted to learn various versions of the official Flash demoes, and SoThink's 900% cheaper clone. They were ok, but they weren't designed for coders. Flash was an artist's tool, with tweening and vector graphics and all that other none-codery stuff.

Another week given away to my body's desire to make me be a lazy git! I'd happily allow it, if I wasn't so damned busy! Tonight, after a week of doing nothing, I now need to write a blog, write a newsletter, and then wake up and write another game..! Thanks for that, Mr Migraine!! So, what's been happening today, then? Well, first off I wrote (URL "https://www.playmycode.com/play/game/jayenkai/space-battles">Space Battles), which is another bog standard minigame thing. Baddies, bullets, shooty sh...

I'd already got bogged down into doing the Socoder Newsletter, there, when my beepy alarm reminded me to do my new daily bloggy thing! Good job I set that, or there'd be no blog today!