This is probably going to be the last release

There's a couple of new tiles to play with, and 2 extra packs. One (with 12 levels) from me, and one (with 2 and a bit) from StudioFortress. (If you'd like to attempt the third one of those, load it in the editor.. I couldn't get past the flame-pit!)

I have a couple of extra tile ideas jotted down, but they don't feel like they'd add anything to the game, so I haven't bothered to add them in.
Other than that, I'm all out of ideas. If you can think of anything else that might be fun to add, let me know, and we'll maybe have another release sometime in the future.
For now, the game is as it is, and with 100+ levels it's not anything to complain about.


As always, Make me more levels, and I might be more motivated to add something extra into the mix.
Future releases depend entirely on your contributions.

Same download links, Newer versions. Pop it over the top of the old one, and it should keep all your scores.

Enjoy JNKPlat2010.

I have

AGameAWeek! Seems like a long long time since I last did this.
In reality, it's only been a month, but BOY did that feel like an eternity!

Let's have a look at this week's game..


It's all about shooting the coloured pods.
Controls might be a wee bit odd, at first, but you get used to them!
Hold the left mouse button to turn the launchers around, and tap the right mouse button to fire.
Try to hit alike colours with the right missiles.

If a hole explodes, it shoots out a bunch of new missiles, and they all go swirling around on the screen.

If you shoot a different coloured hole, it will slowly disappear. Rapidly with your launched missile, slower with any others.


You start with only 20 shots, and gain 5 extra shots for each round you complete. Try to remove all the holes in a vague order so you don't run out of ammo. If you do run out, there are 3 extra lives in the game, and you'll restart the same round with the same number of shots, and one extra for good luck.


Is it a good game? Honestly, I have no idea. I've been having fun playing around with it, and making nice pretty swirls, but.... As a game?! I don't know...
I'll let you decide!

You can Download Gravity Bombs from The Jayenkai Archive for both Windows and Linux. One day, I'll get me a Mac, and then I'll have to recompile all these!!

---

AGAW Scoring : 36 Weeks, 38 Games. The lead has fallen. Must try harder!

After the fun of a JNKPlat-based April, it's time to get back into the AGameAWeek spirit, and out of the silly ranty 2BeesInDePub mood that I'm currently in.

This week I'm playing around with black holes. Except they're not black.
The player has 4 coloured shooty bobs, and must fire missiles to clog up the not-black-holes.
Each hole hit blasts out more little missiles, and it all becomes a nice swooshy swirly colourful frenzy of dots.


Weee!

To be honest, this is more of a play-thing. It has scoring, but there's not too much there. It just kinda sucks you in, and you keep playing about with it, but..

Is it a game!?

I dunno.

It's very very swirly!

Tuesday : Gravity Bombs (unless I can think of a better name.. "Swooshy Swirly Colours" doesn't sound too much like a game's title!) and also possibly the last JNKPlat2010 release.

Send in your levels, guys, or the last release will be a bit piss-poor!

2beegames.com has, since May 1st, become IndiePub, but haven't bothered to claim indiepub.com domain, or indiepub.co.uk, or .net, or.. well.. whatever.


For the past month or two, they've been banging on and on about their all-new coming soon site, and how amazing and new it'll be. They were originally going for a nice bright yellow theme, with all nice sparkly-ness, and instead seem to have settled on kind of dull desaturated brown/orange theme, along with a complete identity change.
Still, their main features that they promised are apparently there. Somewhere. If you can find them.

Here's what they've added, straight from their "New" page.

Regular news and articles : Something that everyone promises on every website ever, (see AGameAWeek!) and hopes to god they can keep up with. Fingers crossed!

Experience System : One of those "Karma" things where people spam the crap out of the system in the hopes of getting a bigger score. Over at Socoder, I've a "Do it NOW" thing going, where if someone stops being active, their little scores start to drop. And shitty forum posts don't count. Hopefully the new 2BeesInDePub version will be just as good, and won't end up with older members lording stupidly high ranks, whilst releasing bugger all, over the newer talent who actually do the more interesting things, but haven't yet scored 17 bazillion points.

Asset System : If you draw a massive logo for a game, (or.. um.. a DVD Case ) or make a great theme tune or something, and want to show it off separately, you can list it as an asset. You can then attach it to the game and have the two linked. Neat idea.

Simple Play : If this works, it'll be fan-fucking-tastic. Apparently MY games will work in a little Java box, right in the browser. I still have my doubts, and have yet to see it in action, but.. Fingers crossed!!!


But for every upside there's a downside. (There are more downsides, but I felt it fairer to stick with the 1:1 ratio.)

Be aware, the site is still fresh, so they may be forgiven for a few of these faults. They have had it in Beta for about a month, and probably way more than that, but whatever..

Fucking Middle Click, Damnit : Middle clicking, via whatever the hell crappy javascript bollocks they've used, refuses to leave the current tab alone. If I sit on their homepage, and decide to middle click each of the news items, the first middle click will open the news in a new tab, AND open it in the current tab, thus fucking up my browsing experience completely.

But wait, there's more!!

New Topic : The "New Topic" button (which isn't loading, so shows the generic "No image" icon) doesn't work, and returns a 404, thus leading me to have to post this rant here, instead of on their forum.

Hang on, not done ranting...

Showcases : The area that you showcase your work, and the place where people go "OMG! Great Game!!" by looking at THE SCREENSHOTS.. Except, of course, there are no bloody screenshots. None, zip, nada. Obviously they've used the space for the all-important "Play Game" thing, but since that's not there, it leads most of the games to look like.. um... Well, like this..



Ooh, fantabio!

No New Games : Their fantastic frontpage no longer lists the newest games AT ALL, and their game list page only lists the last four. That's a deathly plummet from 12 to 4, and it's just not bloody well on. Without people clicking the tiny "Newest" link at the top of the game list page, all the new stuff is all going to disappear into a big vat of nothingness, and people will all end up playing the old "Top ranked" stuff over and over and over. It was already an issue when none-members came along and downranked games into oblivion, and it'll be more of an issue now that you can see jack all in the first place.
Handy Hint, that great big "NEWEST" header should be a link to the same place as that little tiny "newest" link at the top of the page.


It seems somewhat ironic that a rather good website has been replaced by a bit of a shit one... on May the 1st . .. . AGAIN!!! Exactly like how BlitzCoder got fucked over by CodersWorkshop, and killed half of it's community in one foul swoop.

Moral of the Story : If it ain't broke, yada yada..

WarioWare DIY arrived via lady-postman at about 12pm today.
I finally finished tap-tap-tap-tap-tap skipping my way through the tutorials about half an hour ago.

My god, talk about mind-numbing pap!

Every little bit of "How to make games" all drawn out in a way that only Nintendo could manage!

To give them credit, it's actually a fairly competent tutorial, and I can see it being really helpful to most.. The "And/Or" tutorial, in particular, was quite comprehensive even in it's fairly short manner. (or maybe I was tapping too quickly )

But, bloody 'ell, they should have an "I am a coder, I know this!" option in there!

Coming soon, Jay Makes Minigames! (and probably Jay Makes Minigame Engine soon after, knowing me!)

If you're a WarioWare DIY'er, shove your friendcode below.

3782-1929-5444

Mmmm.. Wallpaper!







If you'd like to make your own, follow this simple five step guide.

1. Press E to enter the Editor.
2. Draw a quick map.
3. Press F5 to test the map.
4. Press 4 to zoom RIGHT UP CLOSE!
5. Press F11 to take a screenshot.

The picture will be in the Files/ folder.

F1, F2 and F3 will switch between the three styles.

Very rarely do I get feedback direct, other than from the few of you who seem to hang around here a lot, but there is feedback out there.. if you really hunt for it!

This past couple of weeks have, as per usual, been all about the Two-Button-Jump.
"OMG! Two!? WTF!" and so on. I can deal with those complaints, I've heard them many a time before, and even added the extra one-button rubbishy mode to help those who can't shut up about it.
It's annoying, but what the hey.
*fingers in ears* "La, La, La, La, La!!!!" *fingers in ears*

---

The other common complain is the "He looks like Bart Simpson!" argument.
Yes, it's true, colour-scheme wise he does look a bit like Bart Simpson..
But that's purely co-incidental.
Platdude was originally "drawn" in raw code, using QBasic on a really old PC.
He actually looks like this.


He's a little off-colour, but given his arena and the fact I was using QBasic, they were probably the better colour choices. The fact that he's turned out to be a bit "Bart"-like is just because he's been brightened up a wee bit.

He's actually supposed to look like this guy..

But I couldn't quite remember exactly how that guy looked, and accidentally made his head, arms and legs a little bit too short.
I hope he isn't offended!

---

Next up, turning is too slow apparently.
The slow-turn was introduced with the One-Button-Jump, but if it's in the way, I'll get rid.
Next release, Two-Button-Jumpers will be able to insta-turn!!!

Hurray!!

---

Today, I stumbled upon this.

"cover designed by: chelinka"

I must admit, that's some damn fine work, there!

Let's see what we've got..
1. Level and sprite graphics from JNKPlat3D 06
You can tell, because it's got the 06 sphere, and the ugly as crap ladders..

2. Exit from JNKPlat2010 because that's the Dr-Who-Tunnel effect that I made the exit into, this year!!

3. Background, logo and.. maybe even the fluff from the 2010 one, too, but I can't be too sure.


For anyone interested, there's my version!
I did that 2 years ago, and apparently it went unnoticed.
Good think I have slots in my archive for those things, now!

If you're a member of the espalnds forum, let 'em know what's going on. They seem baffled by the many versions of JNKPlat! I tried to register, but it wanted me to sign up to a bunch of stuff I'd rather not.

View on YouTube

New tube video to match the newer 100 level release, including it's nice new graphical styles, and snippets from the first 50 levels.

Let's see if we can make it.. um... maybe 150 for the next one!?!?

Get them levels in!!

This is the 2nd release, unless you got the Editor Pre-release, in which case, this is actually the third!!
Oooh!

100 levels, with #100 having a nice big star on the titlescreen!

There's a couple of new tiles to play around with, but I've had no time to actually build any levels with them, due to silly bad-head days.
Bad head days suck!

No matter, here's the newer version.
You can grab the Win and Lin versions here. They're the same links, but they have bonus features

Newer Youtube will be done shortly!

So, I'm currently busying away redoing all of Sir Voe's gfx, and they're actually fitting in quite nicely. So that's going well.. Gudgud!

I've gotta start working on doing more levels, and I've yet to actually add any new tiles yet. Plenty to do, then.
Meanwhile, if anyone's making any levels, get'em in by Monday, and I'll attach them to the next release.

Ta muchly!!

We're not done yet!

In order to further our quest to redo DS08 in Bigginess, we've also got to redraw all of SirVoe's wonderful alternative graphics that he designed for DS08.

There's 3 extra sets of sprites, and it's taken me about 2 hours to redraw about 1/4 of the first sheet.

Uhoh!!
Rush time!!


Here's what I'm thinking. Each level pack is split into 4-level "parts" so, I might as well change the graphic set for each part. Give it a bit of progression..
(the splits are those "starting point" things on the menu!!)

Meanwhile, I've got the number of levels up to 99 (bah!!!) and once I've come up with a 100th, I'll start making Trailer #3. Because "100 levels of JNKPlat2010 in 10 minutes!!" would make quite a nice little trailer.

Now, Gimme More Levels!!!!

DS Converts : Part One
As much as I tried to make the 2 versions compatible, I did mess a few things up along the way.
Plungers and Darts move at a slightly different speed, and even Platdude runs at a different "steps-per-block" speed, too.
It's not a whole lot of a difference, but there's enough changes to have broken some of the levels.
So, rather than having a "Load my Levels" option, I'm doing things bit by bit, and tweaking them as I go.

Apologies to folk who made DS levels.. If you have, though, send 'em over and I'll shove them through the mountain of blitz code I've got, and see if I can make 'em playable again!

There are 39 levels in this pack, all from the first 4 level packs in the DS08 edition.
Plenty to play!

I'll carry on doing this some more, another day, so watch out for more Bonus Round material.. However, it's taken me about 5 hours to do these Simpler levels, so who knows how long it'll take for the tougher stuff!

It's Platdude Time!


Guide Platdude through 45 puzzling platform levels, dodging darts, fleeing flames and always being mindful of mines!


View on YouTube

A nice and easy game, with more buttons than you'd probably care for.
Cursors to move, Z to hold, X to jump left, C to jump right, and V for one single purpose!!

How many levels can you get through?!

Download JNKPlat 2010 for Windows and Linux here.
---

AGAW Scoring : 34 weeks, 38 games. Yikes, that soon caught up!

It's been three whole weeks since I made a post with that title, but we're ready to get going with the whole JNKPlat 2010 thing, and nothing short of a complete hard drive failure could stop it, now!!

*Jay quickly does a backup*


Mmm.. Luvly big shot!!

Hi-Def JNKPlat, Tomorrow!

Send in your levels, guys!

Woot! He's on his way! Everyone excited? Probably not!!

JNKPlat 2010's first release will be right here, Tuesday morning.
There's a handful of bits and pieces yet to be done, but as it stands it's entirely playable. Tomorrow I've got to set up lives and midpoints, but other than those there's nothing too "missing" in the game. I've even enabled one-button-method. Euwww!

Level makers should be preparing to send in their packs, for the end release, and I'll get strapping everything together nicely.

Here's hoping it's liked!!

On Sunday we had a new bathroom fitted, during which time we discovered an old leak which had previously gone unnoticed. In what can only be described as "Water Timing" the leak decided to smash through part of our kitchen.
dangit.
So, this week, we've been busy doing house destruction, removing part of the ceiling, and preparing to get a whole new one.
Although I've not really been doing too much towards it, the ceiling coming down isn't the big job, that's coming soon when we put the new one up.. It does seem to have soaked up oodles of my time, this week.
I've spent two entire days trying to get a small box on the titlescreen to list the names of the Level packs.
Two days!!!
A box!!!

It's hard to concentrate on your coding when there's so much more going on around you.
I'll keep plodding on, though, and with any luck JNKPlat 2010 will be with you on Tuesday morning.


Meanwhile, there's been hundreds of little fixes all over. From a bizarre string-based memory issue, to a slightly quicker framerate-tracker, and more.
In fact, this game appears to have upgraded quite a few of my framework's abilities, so that's nice, and with any luck I might use the spare week at the end of April to rebuild the rest of this years games, and pop 'em all online with sources.
That oughta keep a few people happy.
..
maybe..

..
or maybe not!

pic of the day

Might not be super impressive, but it's a start!

Folk who currently have the editor should be aware that there's a slight bug with the far right, and lower sides of the levels! Try not to go too far!! Thanks! I probably mis-counted something, somewhere, and it's all gone a bit pants!

Otherwise everything should, hopefully, be working just fine. Although I'm a little disappointed that I didn't test that. It popped into my mind a couple of days ago, but I was too busy trying to get the encoding to work that it then popped right back out again! Bah.

It'll be fixed by Tuesday!

Meanwhile, another little bit for editing folk.

If you're making a larger level pack, and want to spread things out a bit, place a "[Checkpoint]" before the next "[Level]", (inside the raw file in notepad) and once the final version's released, these will act as restartable points that the player can begin from. As opposed to always starting from level 1 in your pack, they can pick checkpoints once they're reached that level.

And I should probably point out, the player will be getting three lives again, just like the DS version.

To the 7 people who asked, the editor has been sent.

This kinda counts as a release, but since it's not a public release, it also kinda doesn't.

2 weeks in, and the game's coming along in leaps and bounds. There's a couple of DS08 tiles that aren't in there yet, but otherwise it's about the same game.


With 1 week left, I need to..
1. Add more tiles!
2. Do the entire frontend, 'cos it's a bit pants right now.
3. More niceyness
4. Levels! Must remember to make levels!!!
5. Probably more stuff, but nothing else written down!

If you asked, but haven't received, check your spambox, and if you definitely don't have it, let me know.

AGAW Scoring : 33 weeks, but still only 37 games. Still not bad, but I'm definitely slowing down!!

Think you've got what it takes to make JNKPlat levels?

Want to get your name into a game before the game's even finished yet?

Want to even get to play the game before it's even finished?!


email me, NOW! Jayenkai@Gmail.com
or post "Me!" (or otherwise) into the comments below.


A limited selection will receive the pre-pre-pre edition of the game, with a very simple batch of test levels, and the fully formed level editor, ready to build some kick-ass new stuff.

Pre-pre-pre edition will be sent out on Tuesday, so get your name in the hat before that happens.

Each person will be expected to build at least one fantastic level, and it'd be nice if you could build a couple more to bulk up the numbers a bit!!
The full release will probably be the Tuesday after, so you won't have a lot of time, but it only takes a few minutes to bodge something half-decent together.

Let me know if you want in!

Things aren't going too badly in the Level Editor.


A nice bar, Selectable objects, Test button, Tabs..
In many ways, things are about the same as they were before, and that's exactly how Platdude likes them!

Keen observers might notice the lack of lights and switches. The whole purpose of the lights was to limit what the player could see, but when you've got an option to zoom super-close, the game already has that limitation. As a result, I'm not 100% sure it'd be worth spending the time implementing any "darkness" to the game. Maybe later, but for now, having the ability to set super-close in the level's settings does all that it needs.

Speaking of which, I should probably make a Level Settings thing in the editor!