Last year I drew some graphics!
A set of sprites and background tiles for a DS game based on the classic Alien Breed on the Amiga.
The plan fell apart soon after.

Last week I decided to resurrect it on the PC.
Sorry! This is another none-DS game, folks!
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Not as many fun little games, this time around, but weeks 61 through 90 brought about a few changes.
For starters, Coders Workshop closed down in week 64, which meant the whole Wed.Workshop thing was without a home. Consequently, I spent most of this period building up the whole Socoder website.. from scratch.. in notepad..

It took a while!
So, I missed a few workshops! As such there's only actually 14 games in this selection. There are some super special games, though.

The "CodersWorkshop" game is a miniature Top-down, Romp-around, Dungeon-esque game, only without much of the needed gameplay elements! There's a decent Picross game, with included Level editor. There's experiments with transparencies, tests with strange window resolutions, and there's even a backwards game thrown in for good measure.


You can Download the Collection here, and for more of the same, check out Weeks 01 - 30, 31 - 60 and my complete entry list.

Imagine if all your favourite Arcade games were in fact Slot Machine games.
Arcade Slots reproduces a handful of games in this style. With games ranging from Frogger to Hogan's Alley, there's plenty to keep your playing.

Download Arcade Slots.

	Pacman Spin the slots, and hope that Pacman can get across the level without hitting any ghosts. Eat the power pellets to give him more of a chance.
	Frogger Pick one of three positions to set Frogger off, spin the slots, cross your fingers, and hope for the best as he hops his way across the roads and rivers.
	JNKPlat OK, so this isn't really a classic arcade game, but it's fun to see Platdude run along the levels anyway! Expect even more finger-crossing, as he tries not to run into any spikes.
	Hogan's Alley In this game, the reels automatically spin. You have to hit the three buttons to shoot the bad guys. Try not to shoot the goodies!
	Simon Wait for the reels to stop, then hit the four buttons in the order shown in the center of the screen.
	Columns Using only three nudges, try to line up as many horizontal lines of gems as you can. A nice slow-paced thinking game.

Windows

H~S
Horizontal Shooter


Cowbell Hero



Retro Raider



Alien Deathmatch



Blockman



Centipong



Puzzobomb



JNKPlat



Munky Games

Nintendo DS

JNKPlat DS



Arcade Slots



Platdude's Retro Collection

Mobile/Java

Centipong Jr

If Centipong was a simplistic looking game with added 3D, Blockman would be the exact opposite. With levels so colourful they'd poke your eyes out, Blockman comes hopping along to rescue all the Blocklets.

It's a rather simple game. Grab the Blocklets, take them to the door. You can bring as many as you can to the door at a time, but the more you get safely home in one go, the more points you're awarded.
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Over the past few days, I've been building up Centipong bit by bit, and it's now become a much nicer game to play.
There's levels to beat, pickups to collect, and more centipede pods than you can shake a paddle at! If you enjoyed the previous version, give the new version a try. You'll love it!
Download it here : Slowly getting bigger! Just over 2Mb

What happens when you take 2 classic Atari 2600 games, and stick them together?

Centipong mixes Centipede and Pong to create a really weird almost-psychedelic game.
Smash the ball at the Centipede repeatedly.
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The DrunkenCoders Christmas Compo finishes tonight.

I bothered to enter the new JNKPlat Xmas Special (You can download that here) but it's nothing too special..
So, this morning, at around 8am, I decided to get my arse in gear and actually make something nice and snowy for the compo.
Around 5 hours later, give or take, and Snowman Attack is the result.

Run around and shoot the snowmen before they get you. You have 5 bits of health and a constantly running countdown. There are 4 powerups available, for health, extra time and weaponary.
A nice simple game, made quickly!
No hiscores, no online abilities, and not even any music.

Enjoy

Note : This is much more Game-Specific than my regular posts!
Bombliss is one of my favourite alternate Tetris games. It has all the playability of the original Tetris, and it also has bombs, and chain reactions and things, too.

Last night, I opened up the Tetris sourcecode for the Retro Collection, and started hacking away for it's Xtra Mode. (renamed so it looked more obvious on the menu) For reference, to start a Xtra Mode game, either hit X to start the game instead of A.. OR tap the far right of the menu item, where the new X's are.

So, starting off badly, things got progressively worse! First up, not only did the blocks have to rotate shapewise, but they now had to rotate "bit"wise, too. That is to say, once you start adding bombs to specific parts of a Tetris block, those bombs have to rotate into the right places as the pieces spin. That was awkward enough, and took quite a rewrite of my spinning routines to get it going right.

Happy that it now worked, I started adding the bombs into the play area. That was easy enough, since they're just layered over the standard array, and drawn on a foreground layer. Nice and easy to keep track of. Unfortunately due to the fact that I have no "Big Circle" sprite, I haven't added in the "2x2 Big Bomb" object. If I can figure out how to do it in the next few days I might add it back in. For the meantime, it's MIA.

Then came the time to add detonations. At this point I had to play Tetris Blast on my old Gameboy several thousand times to work out exactly how it all worked! I think I got things pretty similar, although minor differences will probably be noticable.

Detonations over with. I was starting to feel proud of my tweaks, and replayed the game in classic mode to be sure I hadn't broken the original Tetris game in the process.

Next up was the new falling mechanism. Since there are explosions throughout the playfield, the remaining bits no longer fall Line by Line, but instead Clump by Clump, with each seperate grouping dropping as it should. This bit has taken by far the longest time, and probably much longer than it should've done! In the end it was easier than I thought it would be.. (I was over thinking things again!)

If anyone else is recreating Bombliss, perhaps this might help. Do the checks line by line. For each line, find each group of blocks. If any block in a group has a block under it, hold the group up, otherwise drop the group. Much easier to do it line by line, than having to check every possible "under" block of every brick within a whole multi-line group!

And so, there it is.. Bombliss. It's done and dusted, and I'm pretty happy with it. I still have to tweak that 2x2 Bomb in, somehow, and I'm sure the scoring's totally off by this point, but it's at least playable the way it should be, and I'm happy that I can finally play a decent Tetris AND Bombliss on something other than my aging gameboy! Long live Tetris+Bombliss!

Oh, and I got ship-diving and power ups in the Invaders Xtra game, so it plays a bit more Galaga-Like.. Yeay!


Not sure when this next release will appear. Maybe once I've added plenty of Xtra modes.. But more than likely once I've added another 6 brand new games, instead!

The whole Gabby Gets a Turkey (logo on last week's post) game is being scrapped due to bizarre scale issues!? A white cat in white snow is a nice idea, except when you realise that a 16x16 pixel head is going to need a huge non-existant body behind it!? The whole thing just felt really odd, and I decided to just scrap it instead.

I know that the Drunken Coders people hate entries that are "X game + Xmassy theme added on later", and I came up with the Gabby game so's it definitely didn't feel like a tacked on theme.? ? That didn't work out, and for some reason (probably "18 games in 3 weeks" related) I'm all out of ideas.

So, if I want to do something for their compo, I'm going to have to go the "Tacked on" route, no matter what.? And if I'm going to do the whole "Tacked on" thing, I might as well do it in a way that most people would still enjoy.

JNKPlat + Xmas = JNKPlat : Xmas Escapades

Not sure exactly how to make everything super-xmassy, but there'll be presents involved somewhere along the line!

In the meantime I've added the first plus_mode to the? collection, with Invaders now occasionally dropping down ala Galaga.? I'm about to start adding some powerups, but am unsure what sort of powerups to add..? I think Double+Triple shots might be TOO powerful..? Hmm..

Those expecting another Saturday filled with happy retro memories have a long wait.
I took the week off!
Mostly because coding 18 games within 3 weeks takes quite a lot out of you, but also 'cos my DS finally gave up trying to hold onto the tiny shred of hinge it had remaining. (ie, it did that whole "R-trigger side snap" thing that DSLite's tend to do!)

During this week, though, I've been thinking about Galaga.
On the one hand, it'd be nice to make a tiny retro version of the Amiga classic "Deluxe Galaga" along with attack waves, and powerups and all that jazz.
On the other hand, I could just add powerups to Invaders, and quite frankly that'd be decent enough. There's already Invaders, Asteroids and Centipede. Surely that's enough shooters, right?

But then, if I add powerups to Invaders, you lose the plainer version of Invaders.
What I'd need is some kind of extra option in the menu, somewhere, to let you switch between "Invaders" and... .. "Invaders Plus"
..
"Platdude Retro Collection : 18 Plus!"
That sounds a bit of a dodgy title! But I think that's what I'm going to aim for.
So, over the next few days I'm going to be jotting down a few ideas, (I have my pad at the ready) and seeing if I can impliment some of those into the already existant games, to build up a collection of "Plus" versions for each.
Invaders, Centipede and Asteroids will be basic Powerups. As will, probably, Extract. (Hmm. Didn't I already make Extract with power ups on the DS?! Why, yes I did!!)

Tetris's "Plus" mode will more than likely be Bombliss, because I've been saying for a couple of weeks that I should make that.

As for Snake, Tron, Pacman, Frogger, Pong, Joust, Qbert, Spike Dodge, Missile Command, DotPop, Lights Out, 5-in-a-Line and Tune Tap....
Well, lets just say that Suggestions are welcome!

And, so's nobody gets too upset. This is only an idea, and it could still fall apart.. If that happens I'll just add some more games

Oh, yeah, and here's the logo from my Drunken Coders entry, if I bother to finish it..

Another week, another pile of retro-mania!

You get the idea by now, 6 extra games and the odd bugfix.

I had to redo a lot of Tetris, this week, since I'd ballsed up quite a bit of it last week! But it's all working rather well now, so you can happily settle down to a nice long game on Extreme modem and it'll now actually get faster as you head up the levels!

And the T shape's in it this week, too!

The Joust game's as good as it should be, without being much more. There's a great little Parappa-like "Tune Tap" game, and I'm not sure, but the 5-in-a-line game might be more confusing than it should be!

There's also a Lights Out game which is a lot more fun than I thought it would be, so thanks to Darig0n for that suggestion. Just took me a while to bother doing it!

Speaking of bothering to do things, I played about with the unfinished Donkey Kong game, again. I actually got quite a way through it, this time, but it's not very "Donkey Kong" like anymore! The main problem right now is that even though the game's engine is fun to play with, there really isn't much in the way of a point to it! So I held it back again! Maybe by release #78 you'll get to play it!

In the meantime, this is Platdude's Retro Collection v3, and it contains 18 games. (Not counting Racer, which is still hidden away in the rubbish menu.)

All of this Game Collection stuff reminds me of something.. It's time for another pack of Workshop games, methinks.

Every week at Socoder.net, there's a little game-making challenge. Create a game with the theme suggested. This collection features all of my entries from weeks 31 to 60. (11th Jan - 2nd August 2006)
As with the last pack, some of these are good games, some are ok games, and most are just experimental pap!


A multitude of games, ranging from the inane to the insane.
Decent stuff like PipeRunners, a 2 player splitscreen Pipeline clone.


Terrible games like Zombie where everything moves way too slowly.


And even games like Typing Arcade, where you have to type what you see to win.


And, of course, let's not forget Mario's Fiery Forth.
I've included v0.5 of that, which is a Post-Workshop edition, built up a little futher than the original entry.

Lots to see, and lots to do!

Download the Collection
For more of the same, see Workshop Entries, Weeks 1 to 30, or my Wednesday Workshop entry list.

A week later, and I've insanely coded a whole new bunch of games!

The Donkey Kong thing didn't work out, and is so mind-numbingly dull it hasn't yet ended up in the Garbage heap. But not to worry, Racer's in there.. So that'll be keep you occupied!

I managed to fix up the Dot Popping game, so that's back in the main menus, and I also added a few others, including Pong and Tetris, since the commenters below seemed to really want to have a decent Tetris game. For reference, I modelled it on Tetris DX, but that's probably not all that apparent!

Anyway, this is the new one, and there's much to play, so I hope you enjoy it. I really need a sleep now!

If you're following development of Platdude's Retro Collection hoping for a new batch of great games, then you're in luck! TWO great games have been added, TWO rubbishy games have been added, and ONE more game is being worked on right now, as I type this..
Games 1 and 2 are listed in the official page, the Missile Command and Extract games. Nice, simple, retro, fast and fun.
Game 3 was also simple and fast. It's the usual "Things pop up, then you tap them. You get a minute, score as much as you can" type of game. But it really wasn't all that interesting in the end, so it'll probably be scrapped.
Game 4 was a Donkey Kong esque game. Rather than jump OVER the barrels, you jump on the goomba-esque creatures (The Space Invaders!) and use the higher-bounce-jump to make your way up the level. Sounds great. Unfortunately it turned out to be a very dull repetitive game. Not too sure why! Oh well..

Game 5, currently in progress, really can't go wrong. (Hopefully!)
It's Pacman.
Nice and easy!
Two screens, twice the mazes, twice the bad guys, twice the power pellets.


Kickass!

For those keeping track, I'll probably dump all the failed games together into a super-secret menu, so you can at least get to try them out. And at this rate, I'll probably need more than one!

So, the first release has emerged, and I've changed the name of the collection.
It's no longer a Green Retro Collection, but instead a Platdude one.
Worry not, the games haven't changed. In fact I've even created a special page for it.

The Platdude's Retro Collection page lists EVERY game that's in the package.
So, that's the 6 that are in there right now, and also 2 in-development additional games that will be in the next release. I'll probably forget to update that in future! Oh well.

So that's the release. It's fun! Enjoy.

Platdude's Retro Collection was first released in November 2007. Each new release will contain a handful of new games.
How many will there be in the end? Who can say!

The latest release, Download Here, contains 18 games from the list below.

Note : If you'd like to play, but don't own a DS, you can use No$GBA to play the game.

Centipede Blast away all the approaching Centipede bits. Every piece that escapes from play removes 25 of your hard earned points. Rated 4/5
Snake Guide the Snake towards the numbered blocks. Pick up the number of points displayed on the Block. If it reaches 0, the block becomes a solid brick. Try not to crash. Rated 3/5
Invaders Destroy all the Alien Invaders before they reach the bottom of the screen. No bases to hide with and plenty of enemy gunfire makes this a super-rapid version of Invaders. A fan favourite. Rating 5/5
Light Cycles Guide your way away from the enemy lines in a rather basic remake of the classic Tron game. Rating 3/5
Asteroids Shoot all the floating Asteroids for whatever reason there ever was for doing it in any other version of the game! Asteroids is fun! Rating 4/5
Racer This game sucks, and has since been hidden away like some kind of rubbish Easter Egg.. Rating 1/5
Escape Grab the blue square and keep it away from the red ones. Pick up Green ones for extra points. Rating 4/5 : Windows version by Magicman
Missile Command Destroy the approaching missiles, before they destroy your bases! Every missile that hits the land takes away a point!.. The Green ones are worth extra. Rating 4/5
Dot Pop With 30 seconds on the clock, hit as many squares as you can. Will probably be renamed by the time you play it! Then again, maybe not! Rating 4/5
Pacman With two full screens of pills to empty, and eight ghosts running around, you'd better get moving. (Strangely, it's not as much fun as it oughta be..) Rating 3/5
Frogger No river, just 2 huge busy roads to pass. The top lot move faster, so you're gonna have to be quick to score any points. Get to the top and start again, but with more cars. Rating 5/5
Pong Just you, a CPU, and a ball too. And another ball if you play on High.. .. And 3 on Extreme. Rating 3/5
Tetris Much requested, and so eventually added. This game tries to be a Good Tetris game, and hopefully you'll enjoy it. I might add Bombliss later, since I really love that game, too! Rating 4/5
Buzzard Bait! Flap about and kill the other jousters. Collect their eggs before the re-hatch! Rating 3/5
Lights Out Tap the grid to invert a + of lights. Switch them all off to advance to the next level. Rating 4/5
5 in a Line Shuffle the grid around to match up 5 tiles of the same color in a single line. Do it quick, because you only get a minute to clear as many as you can. Rating 3/5
Tune Tap A tune is played, then you must repeat it. It's like a really cheap version of Parappa! Rating 4/5
QBert Hop around the blocks, color them all in, and avoid the flashing balls of death. Rating 4/5
Dodge Spikes Move left and right, avoid all the spikes, and collect as many coins as you can. Rating 3/5

And so it begins, the long boring task of making lots and lots of games

I lie. It's not boring!
Centipede took shape, gradually, over the course of a day. Most of the tweaking was in the main engine, as opposed to the game itself, since I had to be sure of all my different variables, and how all the pieces of the menu system would fit together.

Now that the main code is mostly sorted I should be able to get things done at a much faster pace. The actual menu design hasn't yet been decided upon, and to be honest I'm even starting to wonder if it'll even be a "Greenie" collection. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

In the meantime I threw in a small second, slightly related game. Snake.
You know the drill. Run from side to the other, grab all the blobs, and try not to kill yourself.
It's a bit slow. But then, every Snake game is. So it was whilst creating this game that I decided to add Difficulty levels into the mix. I'm not sure where the level will be chosen, but all the games in the pack should use a standard "Easy, Normal, Hard" setting in the main menu, somewhere.
Set it to Hard, and Snake becomes a much more enjoyable game.

More games to come, and suggestions for gameplay mechanics, or additional games are welcome.

Having started and given up on a fair few projects over the past couple of weeks, I've decided to go back to basics. It's time to bring return to the 8-bit Tiny collection, and get things started once and for all.

So today I got working on a base program that can use a series of includes to incorporate a bunch of games. I've designed a neat collection of generic looking graphics, and started listing games that may or may not be included. I'll try to make all the games as Repeat-Play-able as I can, but obviously some games will need to use preset levels and things, so that might be something to avoid for the meantime.

If all goes well it should be quite a little collection once its all finished. (if it ever IS finished!) I'm going to challenge myself to produce at least two games a week, and hopefully I can work quick enough to do more. I've recently enjoyed doing some super-fast coding, getting as much done in a couple of hours as I can, so I might even attempt to do some small games in that space of time, too.

I'll be releasing occasional versions of the game, as the amount included builds up. Depending on how the menu ends up looking I'd expect each release to include about 5 new games, so the first one should be up and running within the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for games they'd like to see/play on the DS (albeit in a tiny form) list them below.

My only worry, right now, is how to make use of the second screen.....

(If you'd like to see a list of possible games, you'll find it here.)

Retro Remakes are holding a Top Down 2D Dungeon challenge.
Socoder are holding a Remake a Workshop Game challenge.

In a way, these two coincide, since I'd already decided to remake Greenie's Gameboy



Adventure for the Socoder, before the Retro Remakes challenge was finalised.
So that's what I'll be working on for the next couple of weeks, a larger version of Greenie's Gameboy Adventure, complete with a proper storyline, a few more enemies, and more than just Jelly Babies for Greenie to collect!

Or at least, that's the plan, anyway!