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...

Is that title subtle enough for Google, d'you think? This week, I've been getting to grips with MidletPascal, and dodging it's annoying mid-compile crashes, in a vague attempt to get some games onto my phone. Sorry folks, this week's AGameAWeek is entirely Java based. Boooo!! Or at least, unless you have a decent phone, anyway! <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/cookiea.png">

I've added bloom, and a few more tweaks here and there. The complete list of changes can be seen inside. Otherwise, the usual two things. And.. Same download link, much bigger file!

1st attempted Java App. It's a nice quicky program. Pick a time, click start, when time's up it plays a tune. .. Yeah, it's not much, but surprisingly the LGCookie (KP500) doesn't have one. So here's one.. Quicky Timer <-- about 70Kb

I'm taking a day off from H~S~R today, thinking ahead for next weeks game, which may/may not be a word game.. not sure.. Anyhoo, there are bugs, and Swarmer found a couple, so head inside to have a good read about 'em.

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!

<a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/2008/11/and-a-smidgeon-of-vaseline/">Vaseline gives me migraines</a> Anyway, we managed to go, what, 30+ years of gaming without it, so I think we can manage! Maybe.. Even more extra lovely glow, today. With a few tweaks, the background's starting to smear! Not sure why, but damn if that doesn't look cool!! You'll be playing away, and the background colours all start to smear outwards, as if puddles of colour in some water. Lovely stuff.. An...

H~S~R's coming along, nice and slowly. As I add each new little thing, I spend about an hour playing with the lovely swooshy swirlyness of it. Mmmm.. The whole Texture-Buffer-Blurry thing has really added some niceness to the game. And, just for good measure, you can turn off the texture section. So, if the game's not quite up to speed, turn off the blur, and the game carries on without it. Every element in the game has 2 layers. The Sprite, and the line. Lines are left in the background...

It's been 30 weeks since I last tackled Horizontal Shooter. The last time, I used BlitzMax. It was wonderful, and gave me all manner of nice swirly effects for those lovely background lines. Mmm.. Until it came to running it on other systems, whereby a huge amount of incompatibilities arose, and the game kinda fell on it's arse and died. Oh dear. 30 weeks on, let's give it another go!

So, Red Dwarf. I know there's a lot of complainers out there, but I loved it. OK, it wasn't old Dwarf, and it really missed the laugh-track. But that was good! A good story, great acting, loads and loads of little injokes. Good stuff! More please! ---- No AGameAWeek this week, I took a lazy day. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Good! Meanwhile, here's a progress report. AGameAWeek I started a game last week, but the lack of a certain element made the game completel...

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 ...

A bizarre mismash of random thoughts this week, alongside an eventual plan of action, and only a day to impliment it!! woot!

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...

Yesterday I filmed some stuff, a nice big 250Mb video file, and posted it to Youtube. It took 2 hours to film, and then about 2 more hours to upload, before YouTube spent another couple of hours decoding it, before finally deciding that they weren't going to bother showing it in HD. FFS So, rather than go through all that, and waste another entire day trying to sort it out, I'll just post the annoyingly blurry crap that YouTube have left me with. IDE = Blitz3D Art = PaintShop Pro (7, the go...

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.....

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...

BAH!! DS Coding is annoying!! Techy stuff inside..

Another morning complaining to GoDaddy. They didn't know what was up, so I sorted it out myself. Silly GoDaddy. Problem solved, eventually, but with no time left for any Game work today.. Shame. Still, there's always tomorrow. .. Or tonight

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...

This morning I started a bit more work on this week's AGameAWeek. (Tomorrow! eek!!) And then I thought to myself "Why don't I finish off that new Showcase design for Socoder.. Should only take about 10 minutes". It didn't take 10 minutes. Instead, it took all day! So, no work on my games, today! The new Socoder showcase style is now up and running. Prepare the linkage!!!

I just paid 400 points for Worms on X360. What the hey, right?! It's Worms... What could possibly go wrong!?! .. Well, aside from the things I ranted about, on the original DS version, a long while ago.. Well, would you believe it, there's something wrong with the Xbox Live version, too!

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...

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...