All games must start somewhere, and Alien Deathmatch 2 starts right here!


This isn't the most entertaining shot I've ever posted, but it does show that work has now actually begun on the sequel.
Read More

Another quicky, today.. In fact, it's a little later than usual, but that's only because I'd only just thought of it, this morning!! Panic coding at it's best..

Wheel of No Prizes sees you spin the wheel, guess the place name, Hangman style, and carry on as much as you can until you've run out of lives.

Neat!


Nice and simple stuff, but with obscure image sizes, and really meant to stress test what I can and can't do with my 2D-in-3D engine..
If this all works, I'll be quite happy!!

You can Download Wheel of No Prizes here, and try to guess some of the places!
(They're all Cities and Towns from USA, England and Wales, and are all gleamed from Wikipedia, so if there's something really really obscure in there, you can blame the wiki!!)

..I got an X360, and I've really been playing the heck out of it, lately.
It's fun! I'm worried it'll RROD at any minute, but while it's still going, it's still fun.
And last week I bought Geometry Wars 2, for 800 points, as well as Geometry Wars 1 for 400 points.
Lovely stuff.
Except, there's something annoyingly wrong with GW2.
It's all nice and glowy, but the "lovely glow" is also really really annoyingly blurry...

I bought a VGA adaptor for the console, and have it hooked up so that everything's nice, and crisp, and clear. When playing GW2, it looks like someone's splodged a ton of Vaseline all over the screen.
It's really annoying!

More than anything, I keep reaching for my glasses and trying to clean them. It's a basic reaction that I use whenever things look a little too blury.. Only it's not my glasses. It's the damn game! And the more I play it, the more irritated by it I get. It's a shame, because it's pretty much ruined the game for me. I can't play it for more than ten minutes without getting another eye-strain related headache, as my eyes struggle to unblur the image.

On the plus side, I can now head back to GW1 and get much better highscores, because I can ACTUALLY SEE IT!!

Bah, humbug.

400 points > 800...

Whenever I fail to enjoy a game to it's fullest, though, I usually find myself wanting to "Do the game myself, only without that annoying feature", so it's with this in mind that I'm planning on creating Alien Deathmatch 2.
I'll fix the issues with the last one, add some new features, work out a bit more of a structure to the game, and try my best not to rub vaseline over everything.

Nice, crisp, clean graphics!
That's the way to do it!!

If you're slightly above the age of people who are still meant to be pissing about playing silly games, like I am, you probably remember Gearworks, from the Amiga/C64 era.

I don't know why, but the game suddenly popped into my head, this week.
So I made a quicky clone.
It's not perfect, there's loads missing, and there's no editor in sight, but as a testbed for my still growing 2D-in-3D engine, it does the job.


Basic rules.
There's a red and a green cog onscreen, and you're given a random selection of cogs to place onto the grid.
The cogs won't all fit together perfectly, so you need to dot them around so that they will..
The red cog spins, the green one sits. Get the green to spin, and you beat the level.

Nice and easy!

If I can be bothered, I'll add more later. For the meantime, there's 9 levels to play through.

You can Download The Gear That Works here.

Having headed back to Blitz3D (from BlitzMax, with it's annoying incompatibilities) I decided to make something quick and easy to test it out.
Snake!
With a 1 minute timer on it.
Get all the points you can, as fast as you can.


The online scoreboards are in, and .. um.. that's about it.

You can Download Snake Here

In what can only be described as a complete disappointment, I've given up with BlitzMax.
Technically, the engine's great, the language runs fast, and things are good.
But.. It doesn't run on some systems..
And some of the features I'd really like to use run really stupidly slow on certain other systems.
It's a big downer.
And it's certainly most notable with Horizontal Shooter, and it's need to have a background that can be (shock horror) turned off!

It'd be less annoying if the Slow systems were the ones turning off the background.. Less processing power = less features.
Annoyingly, though, in most cases it's actually the BETTER systems that end up having to turn it off.
Very curious issues, and not the type of thing that I like to have to deal with.
I've always coded games fairly quickly, and like to imagine that when I'm done, they're going to work!

With BlitzMax, that's not always the case.

And it's a shame.

So, this week I've headed back to basics, and am currently playing about with my 2D-in-3D engine. For those keeping track, I created Centipong and Alien Deathmatch using this technique.. It's certainly capable, and I've not had any complaints about it not working.

Good stuff.

Unfortunately, since I've spent pretty much all week trying to get a nice Tile Engine up and running (with no working end results, might I add) I've not really got any games going.

Which is a shame.

But I'll carry on playing about, and hopefully by next Tuesday we should have a nice new game up and running.
I'm tempted to recreate an older game.. And, honestly, I feel like I might re-re-redo Horizontal Shooter, just to make a nice happy fully working version.
But we'll see what happens.
I might come up with something a little crazier by then!

This week's Wednesday Workshop #173 was a redoing of an old one. Wednesday Workshop 1 asked us to make games using only 5 objects onscreen.
Rather than doing that, I opted to take my original 5 object game, and remake it, turning it into a slightly more interesting game.

It's still not anything amazing, but at least it's something!


Hit Z/X to bounce the ball, and use the cursors to move it left and right.
Then keep heading upwards.
You get bonus points if you keep hitting the same coloured blocks, but as you get higher there'll be more colours to get in your way.

Nice and easy.

You can download Ball Up here

This week I decided to remake Centipong, this time for the DS.
It's pretty much the same as it's always been, except now it's portable, stylus playable, and has the pickups unlike the Mobile edition.
It's not all 100% yet, though.. More to come, and plenty of tweaking to be made.


In the meantime, you can Download Centipong DS here, and get kicking some Centipede Pod!

I spent most of this week rebuilding a few of my older games with the new Highscore stuff, so there's a couple of nice new-ish games to play.


First off, we've the 3rd version of Horizontal Shooter.. Get it here. It's pretty much the same as ever, but with Mr Scouter from the original, thrown back in for good luck.
The new highscore method should help ward off nasty hackers from the scoreboard system.. Or at least for a little while, anyway.

There's 3 more inside!

Read More

Dum-dum-durrrr..
Over at Socoder, someone (Naming no names.. he knows who he is..) figured out that the encryption on my Highscore system wasn't exactly the most foolproof of encryptions, and that it's fairly easy to hack in a few fake scores.
Can't have that!

So I worked my arse off, early this week, and a new encryption method has been successfully trialled and put into place. It's no super-amazing method either, but it oughta do for a while.

The extra workload has meant that I might not get time to make a new game this week. (boo!)

In the meantime, though, I have been retrofitting the new scoreboard back into the games that already had them, and I also figured I might as well start popping it into some of my other older games, too.
Expect, on Tuesday, a nice big lump of games, all sporting brand new online scoreboards, but most of which you've probably played before if you're a regular here..

Still.. I've a few days left, though, so.. You never know.. There might be some bonus extra game in there somewhere!

Wootsocks..

This week, I haven't entered the Wednesday Workshop. Instead I had a try at the Monthly one (#013), which asked us to create a game with lots of guns, and bullets and shootyness.

Since I'd already done a decent enough shooter the other day (H~S) I decided to try my hand at something a little different.


Read More

Due to all manner of obscure things happening this week (A HD Crash being one of them..) this week's effort isn't anywhere near as good as last week's!!

Still, a game's a game, even without a titlescreen, music, sound, an ending, scores, or anything else like that..
..
*cough*
...

A guy called Afro, over at Socoder had modelled a few little 3D objects. We all decided that the aim of this week's Wednesday Workshop #169 would be to take one or more of them, and pop them into a game.
Due to my rubbish lack of 3D knowledge, I just grabbed pictures of them, and used those instead!!

Out popped a game.
It's not much of a game, but it's something to play with..

You can Download Afro's Chair here..

Enjoy!!

A while ago, I made this. Horizontal Shooter.
Fly about, shoot the bad guys, guard the good guys.
A nice enough game, lovely lines all over, but somehow lacking in something extra.

This week.. I added something extra!


View on YouTube

Read More

A quick update, albeit not a proper one..
If you download this new version of JNKPlat, you can use the inbuilt editor to play around with all the nice new features I've been adding in, lately.
I've not really gotten around to building a bunch of levels, yet, though! So you'll have to wait for that.

I'll be posting a new version next week with some new packs of levels, and maybe even a bunch more new features, too!

Head inside to find the list of new features..
Read More

A sequel/repeat this week, as the Wednesday Workshop #167 asked us to create a game with 2 main characters.

At first I considered doing a Bill and Ted game, but couldn't think of a decent gameplay element other than "Move the blocks".. That'd be a most excellent waste of the characters.

So I resurrected Bibbleman and Bobbleman, and just used them instead.
Still the same game, mind.. So if you're worried that you're missing out on a Bill and Ted game, open up the gfx, replace them with Bill and Ted stuff. .. See.. It's a rubbish Bill and Ted game!


Use Bibbleman and Bobbleman to move the balls into the blocks, and then get going on the next level.
There are 5 whole levels to complete!
Shouldn't take you too long.

You can download Bibbleman and Bobbleman here
Z/X to grab a block, Cursors to move, Spacebar to switch characters.

If you want more Bibbleman and Bobbleman, let me know...
...
So, probably not, then!

A game a week's going to be hard to keep going, so I'd like to have a nice bag of thoughts that I can pop into every now and then when the ideas start dropping off.

If you've a crazy zany game idea, now's your time to get it, if not made, then at least considered

Do keep in mind that "a game a week" pretty much reduces the complexity I can add to these things, so I'll be trying my best to simplify (See Platdude's Retro Collection!) any suggestions that come my way!

Ideas can be DS, or Windows orientated, so get going with your best! (/worst!)

This week's Wednesday Workshop #166 asked for us to create a game that uses lots of Balance.
I couldn't come up with anything!

So, instead, here's JNKPlat DS 08.

It's a complete restart of the engine, coded wholly from start, but using the old sprites so as to keep the good old fashioned style of the last one! (Although, had I redrawn the sprites... they'd pretty much have ended up the same, anyway!)

Read More

I'm not entirely sure who came up with this idea, but it's been roaming around the internet for the past few years.
This week's Wednesday Workshop #165 was to create a game using only one button.
So, Heck, why not!
??
I grabbed the generic Cowbell Hero logo from the net. I'm still not sure who originally designed it, but there it is.
In went Platdude, and a few silly songs, and then a few extra songs from the folk at ModArchive.com, and within just a few days the job was done.
??

??
And now you can play it, and be happy that Guitar Hero's a little more complex than that, and thus well worth the money!
yeay!
??
You can Download Cowbell Hero here.

This week's game will not include Super Online Highscore functions. The way it works makes it impossible to stop people from cheating.
Ho hum..
 
In the meantime, here's a couple of bonus games.
 

Space Loops

This is last week's WW entry. Nice as it is, it now also includes online highscores. Right click on the titlescreen to update them. Type on the titlescreen to change your name.
Sorted!
Now try to beat the highscore!
You can download Space Loops here
 

Spider

Originally, this game was a little example thing that came with Blitz Basic. For Wednesday Workshop 150, we had to take one of the examples, and smarten it up a bit.
Now, 15 weeks later, it's been given online highscores, too!
Yeay!
You can download Spider here.
 
 
And now, to sit and wait for this week's game.
It's a corker

I'm not the type of person who usually does a lot of things! For starters, you'll probably notice that 99% of my games are locked to the refresh rate of your screen. If your screen's higher than 60hz, my games will run all that much faster.
The reason for that is that all my systems are set at 60, and.. to be honest, I tend to forget that other people's aren't!
Whenever a game relies 100% on framerates and specific timings, I'll more than likely bother to sort that out, but usually I'm onto the next game before I even consider it!
 
So, to all those who find my games are too fast, all I can suggest it you try running at 60hz for a change, and put up with the flickering that it brings
 
The otherside of my lazyness is that I usually don't bother to do much more than a single highscore on my games, if at all! It's just so much easier to plonk in a Highscore variable, and leave it be. No complaints, and it does it's job.
Over the past couple of days, however, I've been working on a new online highscore system, over at Socoder.net. This is a nice simple, and importantly an easy to impliment way of getting your highscore variables up onto the net, and retrieving a highscore table for all your minimalist effort!
 
With any luck, should I bother to add the one or two lines it requires, it should mean that all my future games will have little scoreboards attached.
It's not much, but at least it's something.
 
As for what this week will bring, I've not yet decided. The Wednesday Workshop #165 is "Games that require only one button", so if you couple that with highscores, it'd probably be something like the good old Yeti Sports. But like I said, no decision has yet been made. We'll all have to wait and see!