My mum likes crosswords!!! And, heck. I like crosswords, too! Except, the trouble is, there's not really a decent crossword game on the DS. Don't get me wrong, there's a fair few games, and The Times (released this week) in particular, has a cracking selection of clues/answers, and some really nice layouts. In fact, it's really quite nice, and would be fantastic if the actual game UI wasn't so mind bogglingly bad. And, I'm not saying it's "A little bit bad.." I'm say...

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...

Much as expected, this week's AGameAWeek has become a Vib Ribbon style game. To be honest, I had this idea for a moment, last week, whilst doing the Go Left game. The idea stayed in my head for about a minute, before vanishing. But having finally gotten around to playing Vib Ribbon, this week, I figured it was time to put the plan into action, and with a nice time-saving addition (the graphics!) I managed to get it done in time. So here's J-Walker. <a href="https://agameaweek.com/complet...

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've had a couple of emails about the donate button already, so thought I should clarify why it's there. I write a game a week.. Sometimes they're good, sometimes their rubbish, and sometimes they're really fun, playable, and can keep you playing for a good few hours. I can do this, because I have a lot of free time. And by "a lot of free time", I mean A LOT of free time. The webhost is pretty much minimal cost (GoDaddy), the programming languages range from 0 cost (DS/XNA) to very mi...

A short and sweet game, this week. Would've been more (extra graphical niceness) but I ran out of time! Aw well.. Here's the basic form. <img src="https://socoder.net/workshop/dlds/184_go_left.gif"> Rules : Go Left, avoid spinning spiky things. There's 13 levels, and then it wraps back to level 3 but faster, and then continues to wrap, getting faster and faster all the time.. Infinite lives, so if you're really bored you can just keep going and going and going! Maybe! Yo...

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...

Since I currently have no PC in my room, I'm down to the bare essentials. I can use the downstairs PC to code on (and have a nice half-finished puzzle game ready for tomorrow), but all my music is sat on 2 inaccessable SATA drives. My TV shows are on there, my codings on there, and a whole lot more. Luckily, I found that DVDs with DivX content can actually be played on your Xbox. Stick in the disc, shuffle over to Video Library, and head into the disc to watch all your favourites. So, as lacking in...

PC 1 is dead. However, PC 1 made nightly backups from Drive 1 to Drive 2, so all my data's safe and secure. Unfortunately, They're both SATA drives, and PC2's a really old Celeron that doesn't have a SATA connector! So, although all my stuff's safe, I can't actually get to any of it! D'oh! If PC2 had any more than 1.5Gb remaining, I could've triple-backed my stuff onto this one, too. Kinda annoyed that I didn't, really! Oh well, hindsight, 20/20 and all that. So, until PC3 turns up, I'm back t...

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 ...

Next up, Countdown.. Or, it's meant to be, but I can't seem to get it started properly.. I've grabbed a batch of Carol's letters and numbers, and I've got the vowel/consonant packs ready, the number solver's working as it should, but so far, those bits haven't come together to make a full game.. It's just bits here and there. Needs work, but with Xmas literally days away, I'm not sure that it'll get any. If it doesn't turn up on Tuesday, assume I'm taking the week off, from AGameAWeek!! Meanwhile,...

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...

A more accurate title would be "Just like Windows Vista, here's a list of things I told you I'd be putting in, but haven't yet bothered to, so will be missing when I release the game.." Except I'm one person, and have spent four weeks doing this.. Not 100 people working for 4 years... ... *sigh* Vista sucks.. 1. Achievements, Good, bad, Pwnage, Suckage, any and all. I just haven't gotten around to adding these yet. There's a gap on the titlescreen, that's where they go,...

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...

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 ...

Folk who previously visited my DSBrew site will now find themselves plonked into this site. This is AGameAWeek, and here I write a game a week! Just as it says! I opened up my own little DSBrew site a while back, and started cataloguing DS games, but soon realised that keeping a DS Homebrew catalogue + writing a game a week didn't really work that well together, so DSBrew got left behind. Up until today I've left it be, rotting away in an unused corner of the internet.. But.. There have been 4 new ...

Today I did a few fiddly little menu based things.. Things like... 1. The menu->Level switch now plays the "Beeeoooo-weeeee!" sound as the level starts. 2. There's a progress bar whenever a level is being rendered. ('cos it takes a teensy bit longer than it should! 160x160 tiles over a 5120x5120 pixel area!!) 3. When you die, you now go splatter, as opposed to the game just stopping, and unceremoniously dumping you back at the menu again. 4. The screen fades to red, then black when you die...

<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot011.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot011_thumb.png"></a> It's getting there! Slowly but surely. I got the levels to doodle themselves, and everything swooshes around quite nicely (if a little blocky!) I've had to implement a menu buffer image to keep the speed up (even if it is still a teensy bit slow) but everything's looking good for the menu. At this point, I'll probably have a "Hold mouse over X obj...

The main menu of AD2 is still pretty much a blank screen! Albeit a red blank screen, with a couple of white rectangles sliding into place.. So is the addiction of the game at this point, that it's quite easy to click the mouse, and accidentally play for 20-minutes.. whoops! I have managed to tweak a few ingame things, though. And the Menu -> Game -> Menu transitions are more or less working, except for one small thing. I'm not sure how to fade in a level, at this point. The last game ...

Another week working on Alien Deathmatch means another week that I've not done AGameAWeek, so it's back into the big bag of failures to see if we can dig anything new out. No.. But, the lack of anything new, and finished, doesn't always mean nothing on this Blog.. Let's bring back the old "Experimental" tag from way back when, and show off a few random bits of unfinished garbage.

<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_menufail.png"> Today, I really need to buckle down, and pad out the menu a teensy bit. As you can see, it's... a little bit empty right now! I'm still not sure how everything's going to fit onto the screen, but I found a nice font last night so it shouldn't be too hard to get everything nice and padded out, whilst still being jam packed with menu-style goodness. After that, I really should start to add some kind of scores into the gam...

With the editor in, pretty much, full swing, I'm heading back to playing with the bugs again.. Update Having been undecided for a while, I eventually decided that the green bad guys should explode with a nice little puff of green smoke.. <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot010.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot010_thumb.png"></a> This is what happens when you turn off the death routine, fill the screen with Greenies, and then tou...