For the past few years, I've been building and rebuilding a silly little experimental shooter thing called "Horizontal Shooter" The basic gist is that it's a bog standard horizontal shooter, but with a weird control scheme, and a tail to catch things in. I also tend to use Horizontal Shooter as a simple testbed, to see what a language can/can't achieve in the realms of simplistic blurry lovelyness. This time around, since we're also focusing on mobile devices, I've decided to flip things around, and ma...

Time for an update to my Monkey Framework! This week I noticed that, having upgraded my version of Monkey recently, Android's Back Button was no longer being recognised, so I took a bit of time to figure out why that was happening, and updated the Framework to suit the new methods.

The Download

(URL "https://socoder.net/monkey/Framework_13_10_20.zip">Jayenkai's Monkey Framework, as of 20th October 2013) | (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/2013/10/monkey-skeleton-13_10_20/">Bl...

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.

Another week, another sequel. This week, we're revisiting the puzzle-maze world of Kee, Bo and Ard (Occasionally spelled "Key, Bo and Ard" due to me forgetting the spelling of the green character's name!) I also need a couple of features tested, so there's quite a bit of rambling included below this post!

Although I am sort of planning things ahead of time, I'm not really doing a good job with the things I'm planning. In the majority of cases, the better AGameAWeek games seem to be those spur of the moment games that I cobble together fairly quickly. Anything over-planned seems to die a death, halfway through! At the start of May, I planned to do two fairly large projects. Both of those projects have remained untouched for at least a couple of weeks. Whoops!

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_128.png" style="float:right;"> AGameAWeek Gold takes a trip through my archive of games, and plucks out any games that may have been previously released on this day in history. Sometimes it finds recent games from the past few years of me doing AGameAWeek. Other times, however, it finds really really really old games, from a time when the concept of doing a new game every week wasn't even a gleam in my eye!

During a moment of boredom, I wondered how long it'd take to remake my lovely Testcard Generator. I attempted it in Monkey, and realised it wouldn't work very well given that I can't save an image. Then I tried it in BlitzMax, but that wouldn't allow me to work with images bigger than the desktop. (My Laptop is 1366x768, and I wanted at least 1920x1080) In the end I opted for Blitz3D. Blitz3D lets me work in practically any resolution I can imagine, while scaling it nicely to fit on my screen. Lovely ...

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_128.png" style="float:right;"> AGameAWeek Gold takes a look at the games that I've previously released on this day in history. It's basically filler material! But that's ok, because it's usually a nice trip down memory lane.

Hardly the worlds most imaginative title for this week's game, and mostly a cop-out graphics wise, but I was trying out a gameplay style, so that's where most of the focus went. Was it a success? .. You decide!!

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!!!

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_256.png" style="float:left;"> AGameAWeek Gold looks back on the history of my huge Jayenkai Archive. Each day, we trawl through the archive to find games which have been previously released on this day in history. Some days, there are no games. Other days there are oddball crazy quickly cobbled together gameplay experiments. And then, some days, there are real gold games. The games that stay with you, and can be just as enjoyable many years later.

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_128.png" style="float:right;">AGameAWeek Gold looks back on this day in history, and plucks out any and all games that I've previously released on this day. It's a fun, adventurous, and seemingly random trip through the Jayenkai Archives. Join us, as we test really old games to see if they still run on our modern systems!

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_128.png" style="float:right;">Occasionally, our flick through the Jayenkai Archives fails to pick up any games that I might've released on this day in history. As rapid as my game development is, I'm just not THAT quick! But other times, it'll pick up more than one! Today's one of those days..

A few days ago I set up an official AGameAWeek branded page on Facebook, along with a Twitter account. I wasn't sure how "busy" I could keep the two elements, but so far they seem to have their fair share of posts. If you'd like to follow the all-new adventures of AGameAWeek, you can (URL "https://www.facebook.com/Agameaweek">Like AGameAWeek on Facebook), and (URL "https://twitter.com/AGameAWeek">Follow AGameAWeek on Twitter). For the most part, I'll simply be posting links to things that I post ...

Last night I spotted something odd. On the ign.com/wireless frontpage is a little Top Ten list of "Top iPhone Games Out Now" And for some very strange reason, number 5 is currently Spike Dislike 2.

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_128.png" style="float:right;">AGameAWeek Gold. An occasional trip down memory lane, to take a look at games that I've previously released on this day in history. Much like every other element of AGameAWeek, these can sometimes be great games that you'll play for hours, or bags of garbage that you throw away after ten seconds of looking at it at going "Umm.. no thanks!" Today's game from the past is an example of the latter.. With Zombies!!!!

A good old fashioned old-skool platforming game, harking back to the good old days of Manic Miner and that sort of thing. This week is VERY Manic Miner esque. Collect the items to open the door, dodge the baddies, jump around, die a lot, get to the exit, sorted!! <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ssa1.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ssa1-300x225.png" alt="" title="ssa" width="300" height="225" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-2728"...

Last week, one of my quickly cobbled together test tunes for JMTrackr was the old Manic Miner ingame music. If you download JMtrackr, you'll find it in the Retro folder. I created it quickly, made a little mp3 of it in random mode, and plopped it up on Socoder. People seemed to fall in love with the idea of me making a Manic Miner clone, and over the course of the past few days, that's escalated somewhat.. People really seem to want me to make a Manic Miner type thing.

<img src="https://socoder.net/AGAWGold_256.png" style="float:right;">As we continue through our adventures of old crappy games, we'll occasionally trip over the odd one or two that wasn't even part of AGameAWeek. In fact, today's game-from-the-archive outdates AGameAWeek by a good few years. Good grief, this game's actually nine years old! *tests the game* And it still works!