Every character, when caught in a bubble and collected, can be "worn" like a "hat".
(They don't look like hats, but that's what I started calling them, and that's what I'll continue to call them!)
Each hat will give the NeonPlat a special skill, allowing him to do all manner of wonderous things.
The run through so far includes ball throwing, ice throwing, flower throwing, drop through the floors, hop in the air, shield, and many more.
Today, I added "Multiplier x2" an...

Saturday's my "At work for a while" day, so I usually get a lot less codey time done, but I still managed quite a few bits and pieces in the morning.
A couple of new baddies, and a teensy bit of AI are in there, as is something which may or may not be confusing, depending on whether you remember the 7 year old oddity or not.
Suffice to say, the bananas do definitely appear to be coming from below the arrow.
.. not sure what that's all about..

5 more, today! woot! That's 42 little animated characters I've popped into the game, now! (43 if you count NeonPlat!)
50?
Looking entirely possible at this point!
And I've done 8 backgrounds, now, too, so we'll probably want another 2 of those.

Until about 2pm today, NeonPlat's logo looked like this.
<a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/OldLogo.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/OldLogo.png" alt="" title="OldLogo" width="561" height="213" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1966" /></a>
Now it looks like this..

On Tuesday, things had started to go annoyingly slowly..
That part where the number of bug fixes grossly outweighs the number of fun happy additions you can be enjoying adding to your game.
But I did a lot of fixes on Tuesday!

1. Drew new baddies.
2. Tweaked level generator.
3. Made Ducky-Turret's weapon a bit more visible.
4. I also took another 6 items off my todo list, but I can no longer remember what they were, since I've removed them from my list!

Phase One was the simple test engine I release WAY WAY back in the very early stages of this humongous project.. .. last month!
Phase One was a basic engine, with simple platforming mechanics.
Taking the rules of NeonPlat and adding a scrolling background, I wanted to judge if it'd be enjoyed.
True, one piece of feedback was a little downbeat, but on the whole it's been well appreciated.
You can't please everyone, but the original's not broken, so hopefully that makes...

Tap inside to see Jiro25 playing the NeonPlat Adventures Beta!

Last night I sat down to jot a few readme notes for the Beta Testers.
By the time I was done, I'd inexplicably written 1500 words of gubbins!
Whoops!

I'm in preparation mode, now, and am trying to fix the outer shell of NeonPlat Adventures, so that the game looks a little less rough around the edges, for all the people who'll be playing the lovely beta edition on Friday.
Today I worked on the menu a little, fiddled with that "about" section that I never bother to fill in, and added nice level open/close sweepy things that make things look a little less slapped together.
They're still just slabs of coloured rectangles, but they swo...

One of the hardest things about adding baddies to this game is, surprisingly for me, not actually drawing things!
With NeonPlat I've created a weird skewed world, where nothing looks exactly as it should.
This gives me a little artistic license with my artwork. .. or rather, I can be shit, and nobody'll notice!
If something looks a little too odd, I simply make it look odder in the animation, and it somehow cobbles together nicely.

Over the past year or so, I've done a few month-long iOS projects, but NeonPlat Adventures is the first time in a long time that I've tackled a nice big Windows/Mac/Linux project.
Today, 11th October 2011, marks the one-month anniversary since I officially started this project.

At the moment, I'm sending occasional beta editions of NeonPlat Adventures to two people.
One is AuthenticKaizen (/PixelProspector).
He got instant beta-status, because he started the whole NeonPlat thing.
This is all his fault!!

Hello developer,
We added your games to our website.
You can find the entries on <a href="https://html5games.de"> - and vote for it .
In return we would love a backlink from you.

AnotherWorld wanted a complete JNKPlat history page thing, but found my old page a little (3 years?!) out of date.
Today, I updated it, and added some nice inbetweeny bits.
I give you, The History of JNKPlat!

If you've been paying attention to this blog, or my Tweets, you'll have probably noticed a strange increase in Hat mentions, with no real purpose.
Around about Day 3 of NeonPlat Adventure coding, I realised the need to do something new with the spheres.
The Ice-thing would freeze a baddy, and then you could smash it.
If that was all that the spheres did, then they'd be nothing special.

Back to NeonPlat Adventures today, and I spent a good 6 hours doodling away in Paintshop Pro, trying to get some nice new graphics for the game sorted.
In all that time, I managed to draw (and integrate) 2 new World Themes, and 2 new Baddies.
6 hours for THAT?!
*sigh*

On September 30th, I had one game to cope with.
Today I was juggling 4!!

One at a time.
Get the task done, finish the game entirely, move onto the next.
Our current task is NeonPlat Adventures.
Let's see how much I added today..

NeonPlat Stats So Far
Throwables : 3 (still the same 3!?)
Objects : 8
Baddies : 9

Had another Migraine day, today, and thus managed to accomplish bog all.
'tis a bit of a downpoint, considering how productive I've been over the past couple of weeks, but I pretty much ended up reading forums, messing about on Twitter, and.. .. Relaxing a bit.
Because, apparently that's important, even when you're kicking ass making a really great platformer. Go figure!

Apologies for the lack of daily blog/rant lately. Work schedule is crazy, sleep schedule is crazy, and AGameAWeek schedule is also all messed up.
..
Well... I say that..

A quick and simple Boulderdash clone, written using PlayMyCode.com

PlayMyCode games no longer work

Reason : I asked for PMC-Based Boulderdash clones in this week's Socoder Newsletter, so figured I'd best do one, just incase nobody else did..
If you make one, let me know!

Over a year and a half ago, I made a Music Framework thing to go in my BlitzMax framework.
It achieved a fairly modest passable amount of music, and was used in both JNKPlat2010 and NeonPlat2.
I stick in a few melodies, it goes twiddle-dee-dee, and out pops a bunch of pseudo random music.
yeay!

The Demo, already!!!?
This is nice and playable, so I thought I'd spout out a nice demo for everyone.

Another day, and still lots of back-n-forth on NeonPlat decisions.
There's a lot of gameplay emerging, and it'll be fun trying to pull it all off.
Even without a working editor, and still having everything be pseudo random, things are playable, enemy are spawning, and NeonPlat keeps enjoying himself!

Much as I expected, the initial burst of NeonPlat Adventure building, has now dropped to a stupidly slow rate.
I'm currently flicking through all the possibilities for standard baddies, and super-evil-mega-boss baddies.
Will the boss baddies be entirely seperate entities?
Or will they, like previous NeonPlat games, be the same baddies, but megasized!?