Don't you hate it when you plan to do about 3/4 things in a day, but the first thing inexplicably takes about 4 hours.. FFS!

As much as this is still technically playable, I wouldn't consider this to be finished. It started off well enough, built up ok, but then kinda got a bit dull and boring. Then I couldn't be bothered fixing the "Gets Stuck" issue. .. meh..

I was really hoping to start on Socoder today. I kinda promised myself I'd get shifting on that, on Thursday. Unfortunately, I'm at that "Must Finish!!!" stage doing Daisy Chains, and I'm finding it really difficult to pull myself away from it, both as a developer, and more annoyingly, as a player. Anyhoo, here's the trailer.

Part of the reason for making a generic reusable frontend for my games is that I can't stand doing logos! The things annoy me. They have to be "just" right, and each game needs to be done differently. A simple text "Name of Game" does me just fine!

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!

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.

A simple Breakout game with only one level. Taking the "Keep it in play" scoring method from Centipong, I've tried to make it so that clearing the first level in breakout doesn't always result in exactly the same damn score every single feckin' time. .. That ALWAYS pissed me off! So, keep the balls juggling to super-combo your score, and see how many points you can manage from just one wall.

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...

I currently seem to be lasting in 2 hour sessions at the minute. An hour of wide-awake, followed by an hour of drowsy half asleep nonsense. That's the followed by a 2 hour nap, and then the cycle restarts with me desperately trying to claw as much stuff into my wide-awake hour as I can before I start to fall asleep again. SUX!

I've suffered with migraines my whole life, so whenever one attacks, I can usually get rid of it by about mid-afternoon. The basic motions are as follows. Step 1. Paracetamol. Nothing stronger, since I've taught my body to control the migraines so well. Plus, if I DO take anything stronger, bad head waveyness occurs!! Step 2. Dark Room. A general tip from anyone. Lights out. Curtains shut. Close out the world. Step 3. Comedy. This one's a little unorthodox, I'll give you tha...

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...

Another Day, Another Game! Today's is a little bit tricky, I must admit, but it's a nice and simple one once you get the hang of it. Tap the colour co-ordinated cursor key, just as the two fellows are meeting, and you score points. If you're too late, you get no points, and lose a life. Easy as pie'ish!

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!

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

Today I did a bucket of iOS dev, but not the think I'd been doing previously. As with a whole lot of other iOS half finished games, it seems that Microbes (MLG) will be stuck in it's special little rut until I can fathom some sort of difficulty level system that actually tries to kill the player, rather than kinda bob about a bit. Meanwhile...

Yup, seems like I'm doing this, so I might as well make a neat little calendar that can keep track of my progress. This is a GoogleSpreadsheet thing, so if you keep bouncing back to this page as the weeks go on, you should see it get filled up nicely. Unless I give up, in which case you won't!

iframe based Google Spreadsheets no longer seems to work

It's been an incredibly un-British warm weekend, here. I'm not sure why. But the past couple of nights have been spent without hardly any sleep at all. I think I've had about 5 or 6 hours in the space of 48 hours, and. .. I'm now wide awake. Which is really quite annoying!

Since I'm now doing AGameADay for a while, I figured it might be somewhat of a change of pace if I also did one of those "blog" things daily. I tried doing this during my previous month off, and although it kinda worked, it didn't really last.. d'oh! Still, try and try again! As a reminder, I've set up a calendar alarm thing to bleep at me, every night, at 22:15GMT. Either that'll work really well, or it'll start to tick me off, to the point where I throw my otherwise completely and totally unused H...

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.

Rule Number One. If you're ever making a minigame collection, there absolutely MUST be a version of snake! This is a version of snake!

Today I've a few more PR'y bits and pieces for the Sheep Goes Left iOS thing to contend with. This is the WORST bit of iOS dev. Although.. to be honest, I didn't do ANYTHING for SpikeDislike. SpikeDislike just kinda took off on it's own, so the fact that sheepy isn't is.. well.. .. bah. Screw it, carry on. I'm considering my daily routine, and how I can slot in the AGameADay's. I might make some sort of timetable or something, so I can fit it all in, not sure, but we'll see. I normally have Sund...

The other day I suggested that a new set of AGameADay might be in order, since I'm totally stuffed for ideas, lately. Out of ideas, make the requirement more.... Sure, that makes sense, right?! Anyhoo, today I spent . um.. all day.. doing yet another one of those Framework things that I apparently love to do. This time I used PlayMyCode.com, and the resulting menu/score/game thing has actually worked out quite nicely. First game, Chase The Block, a simple chasey game. Created (using PlayMyCode....

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!

This week, I started a game on a grid. It started well enough, with a lovely grid-doodling method making nice colourful griddy squares, and a simple circle on the top for the player. Then I got to the point where I had to do character movement, and my head just kinda went "Ugh.. I just can't be arsed!!" (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/NoGoA.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/NoGoA-300x236.png" alt="" title="NoGoA" width="300" height="236" clas...

I love it. There are new features. There are old features remade. There are better ways to do things. Quicker ways to do things. There's a lovely set of notifications! The world of iOS5 is remarkably fantastic! But there are downsides.