Thursday, December 6, 2012

Oversized Tetris

I made a touch version of Tetris for work. 
Xna running on Windows 8 being display trough a Smartboard. It was fantastic to see my stuff blown up so large.

Bit of an issue with the Smartboard drives, the touch events were registering as a mouse event. Was a bit of a pain and caused some lag.

Other then that great day! Raised a ton for charity :)





I can not into Art.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Interesting articles

How should Indie devs talk to the press? Like this apparently

Interesting view on Molynuexs' kickstarter. I don't agree as I see Kickstarter as an alternative to the traditional investment model even when you can find investors rather then something that should only be for those who can't get investors interested. Definitely still worth a read tho.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

I laughed


If found this in the comments section of a post about an indie game that was available via the developers site but no where else.
I laughed.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Codename: Pling


Overview

2D plat former. Goal is for a customisable Rayman-esque experience.

Tight jump controls combined with fluid movement. No metal slug style weapons or punching. Classic jump on head to kill.

User Customisation

Customisable looks and stats. Different image tokens unlocked using "coins" earned through level completion. Unlock "coins" can be purchased as well though in app purchases.
All stats available from the start.

Image tokens
Head
Torso
Feet

On launch 10 outfits of each. Each following a theme. Must be interchangeable.
Ranked common, cool, awesome.

Stats
Jump
Speed
Weight

Each capable of having  10 possible points allocated to it.

User has 15 point to allocate at the start of each level.

Power up found in the level effect these stats for either heavily for a  limited time or slightly for the entire level.


Level focus

On launch 3 "Areas" with 30 levels each.

Rank each run. Bronze for completed, Silver for competed with all tokens collected, Gold for completed under a certain time.
"Coins" awarded to the are basis of medal. 5 gold equate to one common, 10  equals one cool and 15 equal an awesome.

Levels should be completable in less then 3 minutes.


Tech Overview

Game build on Mono 3.0 using Farseer nightly as the physics engine.

Levels stored as flat XML files build tIDE generator

First launch on Windows 8 supporting touch, keyboard and gamepad.

M.I.A.

It has been a while since I posted! I know, I suck.

What I have got up to since I last posted?

I have:
Run a Marathon
Got a 140 hour Tefl cert
Released 3 internal work applications
Spent some time chilling in a hospital waiting room
Moved house

I do hope you forgive me :)

I will be posting in the next few days:
A review of my new PC
My Tetris application
The spec for my next game
My opinion of Mono :P

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Apologies!

When you work 70 hours a week in your day job and train for a marathon you don't really have the energy to code at the weekend.

I am building a new dev rig at the moment. I will post pictures this weekend :)

Till then, have a badly animated dude running!


Thursday, May 31, 2012

It Is Over - Update

A long silence on this blog! My bad :(

Have a birdy!








It Is Over is possibly reciving a name change to "A quite End"

Friday, April 6, 2012

It is Over - Art

So, the Moly Jam was fun! I am probably not going to upgrade the game. It was a fun POC but I don't think I will be upgrading it.

I am on holidays for the next 2 weeks. To tide you over till I get back here is some art from It is Over.



Also the Ludum Dare is on in 2ish weekends time so, of course i am in for that!

Sunday, April 1, 2012

MolyJam - Completed game

Sooooooo.............

A long time ago I learned that I was bad at drawing and because of that I decided to not do any Jams or game ideas where I needed to draw. More recently I leaned that I can do basic music so I can rely on that in a Jam.

This weekend I learned I cant write. I knew this already in the context of essays/emails/papers but I never realised it applied to game content till this weekend.

The game is not complete. All code is written but to make a game like this feel rich and engaging there needs to be at least 40 different scenarios at the moment there is 4.

Code complete for the end of the Jam but not content complete!


So the point of the game is you make decisions on government policies. The decisions effect six metrics Gold, School System, Crime level, Armed Forces, Health and Industry. It also keeps track of the groups who like and dislike you.

At the moment you cant lose unless you run out of money.

Only play if you are REALLY interested.

Controls are left right and space. You can play it here.


Saturday, March 31, 2012

MolyJam - On A Dime

Everybody get up it's time to slam now. We got a game jam goin' down. Welcome to the #molyjam.

I am working with :
"Imagine playing the only coin in the world and you're being used to decide on outcomes for all global debates."

The plan is to have the player choose the outcome of problems that the government faces. You have to balance attributes like cash, education and police force while maintaining the love of all the interest groups in your country.

So I'm 8 hours in, I have code written to take user input and process it. What is going to take longest is writing the scenarios.



Friday, March 30, 2012

MolyJam!

The MolyJam begins in a little less then 8 hours. I am in!
Check out the web page here for more info.

Current ideas I am look at are:

"What if you were half man half tree? You can only fight when in soil and constantly grow throughout the game."
"Imagine playing the only coin in the world and you're being used to decide on outcomes for all global debates."
"You start the game with no emotion, you must find and obtain them and then use them to find more. My game would have 120 emotions."
"How do you get past a fearless guard? You extract the fear of a pigeon you just attacked and transfer it to the guard. Now he'll run away."
"My Designer workshop #14 : Make a game where the player's only tool is a ruler."
"Imagine a platformer where upon landing on the floor you create earthquakes destroying tribes of little people. Would you still jump?"

Monday, March 26, 2012

It is over - Flash Game

Throwing together a quick flash game in preparation for next weekends MolyDeux jam.

It is inspired by this short film using this song.

Screen shot one:

All code is written! Just need to add  images.
Which is the hardest bit....

Monday, March 19, 2012

Movement and Style

Movement is now way cleaner. There was some rounding error which had caused movement to be jumpy and imprecise.

I have also added a debug console so that I can easily see what exactly is going on.
Awesome screenshot of nothing!





















Next weekend I will be doing the MolyJam! So expect updates about that.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Back end work

I did some backend work today. Level objects, object objects, lists to keep track of the the ui layers. All that fun stuff!

I have come across a bug in the movement. Due to a rounding problem the player can only move in 8 directions. That is on the to-fix list!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The Fall: UI Layers

The movement in The Fall is going to be simulated by the things around the player and how they move.

Objects on screen one are going to be purely background images. They will be 40% transparent, mostly very small and move at half the speed of the player to simulate objects long distances away.

Objects on screen two are physical objects moving at 70% the speed of the player. They will mostly be area rocks and shadows. They will not be able to interact with the player.

Objects on screen three are the physical objects the player will be able to bump into. There speed will be constant at 100% the speed of the player.

Objects on screen four will be the enemies and the player. There movement speed will be "non standard".



"SEAMUS! Why are you putting so much time into talking about how things are going to be drawn to the screen and move once there?" The answer to that question is simple. This game needs a sense of scale and movement. As it is a 2D game the easiest way to do that is to have a very defined speed to the objects and way of interacting with those things!

Also, my xbox RROD. I mad.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Fall: Launch Post

I'm creating a game at the moment targeted at touch screen devices. The core gameplay will be around using rhymetic set of gestures ti avoid a set of objects coming up from the bottom of the screen.

The current plan is to use moving background images and opponent movement to simulate that the player is falling.

I would love to use gameplay elements similar to audiosurf where opponents come in sync to the rhythm of the music.

Obviously in something like that the movement of the player is key so I worked on that today. See this screenshot!


















Ta Da! Nothing!

Saturday, February 25, 2012

How to make Dinosaurs angsty?

You end their world.

The game is simple physics game. You fire your meteor and hope you bounce off all of the dinosaurs.
Not too bad for 4 hours.



The game can be found here.
You need to have the XNA framework installed to run it.

Lessons learned:
If you can't draw that is ok, just go "artsy" and stick to a simple pallet.
Don't trust trigonometric code you find online. It may just be wrong.
Simple additions like a background take 3 minutes but add sooooo much.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Dublin Game Craft

The Dublin Games Jam is on today!
Sadly I can't make it in person but I will make a game for it just for giggles. The theme is "Dinosaur Angst" which is possibly the most unusual theme I have ever heard of.

Check out the site here: http://www.dublingamecraft.com/
Good luck to all involved :)