Thankyou Santa!! My issue with Super Mario 3D Land isn't the fact that it's in 3D. My issue is with the fact that the gameplay's in 3D. See, to me, SuperMarioLand was always a stripped down barebones edition of what made Super Mario Brothers great. As you played through SuperMarioLand, you noticed all the shortcuts they took, like how the levels seemed to be on a bit of a loop, repeating in a strange fashion. The whole game was fashioned to ...

A lot of elements are currently coming together, and things are getting a little more chaotic than I'd like them to be around Xmas time. If the past 2 years of Xmas themed chaos (12 games of Xmas, Advent Collection) have taught me one thing, it's not to EVER plan anything around Xmas! Presents, family visits and the general filling of my face with Xmas cake, will usually get in the way of the coding time, and as such I decided not to push myself into anything moronic this year. I apologise if you're deep...

When I was building the beta versions of NeonPlat Adventures, it always included a little readme file. The final release didn't have one, but I figured that was ok, because it was so simple it didn't really need one. The original readme was only really there to explain that beta peeps shouldn't mention the Calendar, and then I kinda rambled on a bit! Anyhoo, if you find yourself in desperate need of a readme file, this is it!

On Tuesday, things had started to go annoyingly slowly.. That part where the number of bug fixes grossly outweighs the number of fun happy additions you can be enjoying adding to your game. But I did a lot of fixes on Tuesday!

One of the hardest things about adding baddies to this game is, surprisingly for me, not actually drawing things! With NeonPlat I've created a weird skewed world, where nothing looks exactly as it should. This gives me a little artistic license with my artwork. .. or rather, I can be shit, and nobody'll notice! If something looks a little too odd, I simply make it look odder in the animation, and it somehow cobbles together nicely. Want an example? The Bats don't flap, they kinda invert-...

You could say I crapped out, and gave up. I aimed for 52. I aimed for a 2nd whole year's worth of games, within a startlingly short amount of time. .. But I probably would've managed it..

Too tired.. Instead, I've been working on Sheep Goes Left DS, which is proving 17,000,000,000% more popular than it's iOS rival. Quite why, I don't know, but the fact that it's being mentioned quite a bit is a good sign.

(Apologies, it's a bit "half-asleep/randomly ranty/jumping through topics/freeflow" today!!) As an iDev guy, I get 50 codes per Update for all my games. I can hand these out to reviewers or folk I know. Handy. So, off they go, sent out, willy nilly, to all the reviewers/people I can find, and see where it takes me.

I woke up bright and early, planning to get a whole load done on my DaisyChains game, today. I started the day by installing iOS5 v3. This was a bad idea. It took me about 2 hours to get everything installed, reinstall XCode, get the new iOS5v3 iPod and Xcode working together, and then wait for all the apps to pop back onto the iPod. *grr*

Lately I've done a half-a-dozen games where the main player must go left. I've decided to take a break from that, and made a super-imaginative new plan. In today's game, the player goes right!

Got the Google Plus thing today and spent about an hour or so playing about with it's features. Twitter Lists seems the closest thing to it, in that you follow people, separate them into different groups, then flick through the groups to read/interact. Unlike Twitter Lists, though, here the grouping works both ways.. Now I could happily clump a bunch of iOS reviewers into a single group and quickly fire off a PR'ish spam bucket to all of 'em at once, without pissing off all my regular "we want chat, not s...

Today I'm focussing my blog on iOS trials and tribulations. The basic steps of designing a game when working with iOS. These are pretty simple things, and should be apparent, but .. having played a fair number of iOS games.. they're not always done! Note, this isn't really about my actual development, as such, more the train of thought that generates the end result. In a future bloggy thing, I might focus more on the what/where, than the how/why that this does. Let me know if this is a goo...

Because sometimes you notice Platdude on the bottom of your generic tiles spritesheet and go "hmm.. what could I do quickly with Platdude"...

AGameAWeek teaches us one thing. Some games you win, some games you lose. When you lose, there's not a lot you can do. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on. This is a post about how I threw myself on the ground.

Seem to be having a bit of a down-session, lately. I'm pretty sure it's down to the fact that Sheep Goes Left is going mostly ignored. I'm going to try and give it a bit of a shove in a day or two, once the Lite edition shows up, but judging by the fact that it's getting next to no interest, I think we're already at the "aw well, next!" point. Damn, that's depressing!

Bonus iOS Game! <a href="https://bit.ly/SheepGoesLeft">For iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad</a> (£1.19/$1.99/equiv.) Got an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad? Grab Sheep Goes Left!! Go get it! It's out now! I'll be posting the semi-demo half-assed ported to Win/Lin/Mac edition as Tuesday's AGameAWeek, so you can try it out there, but the iOS one's much neater, has nicer menus, lovely swooshy bits, and even contains a wonderful little 20-track soundtrack! (woot!) Addition...

I might skip another AGAW, this week, sorry! I have a half-game play-thing half done, but I've just started another one of those spur-of-the-moment things that might take over my entire weekend. .. again.. <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/logo.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/logo.png" alt="" title="logo" width="320" height="160" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1414" /></a>

I'd love to, but considering it's taken me about 6 months to get around to fixing Ubuntu (just starting, may not go well!!) the chances of me fixing my DSBrew stuff is pretty darned minimal. Sorry!

JNKPlat It's a Platform game, but it isn't. It's a side-view Puzzle game, with Platformy events included.

I enjoyed my Month Off! I've written a lovely quickstart framework, I've built a game and a half, I've posted more Tube vids and Tweets in a month than any month previously, I've tried to keep up the blog, AND I even had time to relax!! A few games of GTA and Burnout meant my X360 was switched on for the first time in over a year! I've been playing YouDon'tKnowJack on the iPod (Highly recommended, even if it is Americanised questions), and listening to months worth of unlisten...

Still fiddling around with the basics of NinjaDuck iOS, and have actually done a whole lot of work since yesterday. Although, you still can't see any of it yet. I'm either going to have to set up a camera, or figure out a hacky way to do Accelerometer based gameplay in the Simulator. eeek! Yesterday Ninja Duck looked like this.. <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_0629.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_0629-300x200.png" al...

This week I remade Fantasy Center. It didn't turn out well, I lost heart, and I have now, in fact, lost faith in the whole Cassette 50 project. All these games really are a big bag of crap!

This week there shall be no AGameAWeek.

OK, I've gone through all the CPC Cassette, and here's the ones that initially jumped out as being at least vaguely redoable. |update| Old Google Spreadsheet doesn't seem to work.. |update| Next up, I'm going to start grabbing other editions, and going through them. Well, I say next up, I've gotta make this week's first, though! .. I'll go do that!

Think of this as a christmas present. (URL "https://socoder.net/uploads/1/AdventCollectionSource.zip">You can download the Advent sourcecode here)

What follows is a review from PlayThisThing.com I screengrabbed it, because they're probably going to fix the "little" thing at the top, and I want to continue to take the piss out of them. Here's me taking the piss out of them.