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!

I'm jumping all over the place, lately, aren't I!! With Skeleton files to update, Menus to rejig, and even super-complex Socoder work, there's lots and lots and lots for me to do! This morning, I've hopped back to Platdude's Retro Collection 2. Day 14 is a whole day away from Day 13. That can't be good! The game won't be finished for another year and a half at this rate!! Right then.. Menus! Previously I'd copy+pasted the menu system from the previous game. To b...

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...

OMG! The complaints are everywhere! I guess the general verdict is that my games are too hard. To be honest, I never thought of them as being "hard". I just kinda skip over the dull early parts, *ARRGGHH!! TUTORIALS!!!!* and get the player right into the game, instead. But folk are complaining. So a new plan of action must be decided. Today, I opened up my Skeleton frame doohickey, and decided to add a Game-And-Watch approach. The engine now has a simple "GameStyle" variable, right up top. Th...

I had intended to update this a fair bit. Add music, add extra pickups, things like that. But in the end, I instead decided to leave it as it is. This is (with added Highscore table) pretty much as it is at the end of the two hour session. A nice simple game, with a basic gameplay method. Guide the "worm" through the maze, grab all the blue + blobs, and avoid the barrels. They're very very volatile, so.. best to keep clear of 'em all.. (Although, you do get points for blowing them up....

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...

Uno's a card game, Connect 4's a board game, Battleship's a board game. Arcade?! Who the f'k are you kidding Microsoft? See "Wii Virtual Console : Arcade" for further details. *sigh* So, whilst I wait for this Wednesday's dull as f'k "Arcade" game to be released, I should probably get some work done on my own AGameAWeek. If anyone has any quickly doable ideas, I'd love to hear 'em!

As game time progresses, so do the many bugs that appear! With sprites drawing WAY out of bounds, and memory being messed up all over, there's chaos in the game. But a few tweaks here and there, and everything's coming together nicely! Another slight issue, though, cropped up suddenly. PALib warned me I didn't have enough memory for all the artwork! Uhoh!!! To be fair, it was 2* 512x512 pixel starfields, so it was kinda big. But even so, it wasn't directly loaded into the Video ...

A long forgotten game gets a remake today. Platfire was originally made, way way back in Wednesday Workshop #2!! To be fair, #1's probably the better game, style wise. (As in, it wasn't rushed within a few hours, since yesterday!!) But Platfire 2 is in the "It's super hard, and you won't get much of a score" style that I seem to be leaching onto, these days. Piles and piles of enemies will appear, and you just keep taking shots at 'em until you're dead. As I type this,...

Game 3 needed a few tweaks, here and there, this morning. Mostly due to the controls being a little twitchy. Plus, something's missing. And annoyingly, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the missing something is indeed Ingame Music! uhoh!! It's bad enough having to create a jingle for each and every game, but to now start building up a bunch of little ingame tunes, let alone a big enough collection that folk won't grow tired of. .. That's a lot of music to do! yikes! ...

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...

A nice quicky, this week. Having spent most of the week doing DIY, sorting out Socoder, and occasionally working on PRC2 when I get a chance, I've not had much time for a game, this week.. So, I did what all frantic coders do. I threw loads of colour on the screen, and hid the fact that I haven't done much work this week No levels.. As you move, pellets will replenish. No power pellets, either, so no eating up the ghosties.. Just You, Pe...

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...

Just a nice simple game this week, mostly done after my shouting at Worms, earlier this week.. It's nothing fancy, as I've been short on time, but.. We'll call it a Start.! Ship Flinging! 20 ships on screen. Each one counts their distance from their start place. Blast them all to the right, and get a score based on their total movement. Simple stuff. You can Download Ship Flinging here. If you want a complete worms clone, you'll just have to wait. Kinda busy right now!

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!!!

Game #1, Sokoban, required a nice scrolling tilemap, of infinite size. I spent a couple of days getting that all up and running, so that it'll do for other games, too. But today, Game #2, Surprise!, required a different type of map. Game #2 needs a wraparound map, so you can move from one side to the other, and carry on in a continuous loop. This means that as well as drawing tiles where they're meant to be, on the DS's 512x512 pixel Background Layer, I also have to draw tiles if they'...

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!

Bug fixes already! Oh dear! Sokoban had a bizarre map limit bug, whereby if you were off the left hand side of a small map, it freaked out, and the screen jiggled around like crazy.. .. oops! That got fixed early this morning, and then since it's Friday I took most of my time working on this week's AGameAWeek. (So I can bugfix Sunday and neaten it Monday, ready for release on Tuesday.) .. In many ways, I haven't done anything to PRC2! Maybe tomorrow! PRC2 : Still only 1 game....

I'm still building up the basic reusable map functions! Had some crazy memory issues, yesterday, but everything seems ok, this morning, so it's time to move from silly map things, to actually building the game up. Starting with a strange grouping of maptiles, I'm going to have to add crates, and a player, and get the movement up and running. It should be pretty easy to do, though, as all the arts ready and waiting. good-good! So with all that being done today (hopefully) I should be able ...

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!!

As mentioned the other day, whilst sorting out all the PRC2 stuff, I first created Sokoban for windows, using Blitz. So here it is. Nothing special. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/soko.png"> A is the hard pack, B is the easy one. or as I like to think of it.. A is really hard..! .. And so's pack B. B's meant to be "For children and beginners", but I could only get up to level 11! *sigh* I suck at sokoban! All levels are from David W Skinner's Sokoban Level Si...

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...