Welcome to the Top 13 AGameAWeek Games of 2013

No other Top-10 lists appear to want to give any of my games any recognition at all, which kinda sucks since I've made a whole bunch of REALLY great games, this year! I don't even get a token "Made a shitload of games, this year" mention!
Sucks!!

So, sod them all, I'll make my own Top-10 list.
And it'll be all my games, and I'll even add a few more just to make it a bit more 2013 relevant.
That'll show 'em!!
Mwa-ha-haaa!!!-=-=-

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This is the Top 13 games that I've created this year, according to current Jayenkai Archive View Count, as of Dec 18th 2013.

All games have been coded using the language Monkey.
All code was done by James "Jayenkai" Gamble.
All sounds were done by James "Jayenkai" Gamble.
Music, where applicable (not much!) was also done by James "Jayenkai" Gamble.
Almost all graphics were done by James "Jayenkai" Gamble, except the font, and a few occasional sprites by other people.

All games were developed between January and December 2013.

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13. Idigidragon Returns (351 views)

Bottom of the list is Idigidragon. That damn Duck Dragon keeps showing up, everywhere, and is usually in exactly the same game!
Launch your biplane, and try to shoot down the Idigidragon as he storms through the city.

A simple little minigame. Nothing too great, but fun for a few minutes. Just the sort of short and sweet, quickly made gameplay that keeps folk coming back to AGameAWeek!

12. Arcade Slots (353 views)

Five years ago, I created a set of little slot machine games as Nintendo DS homebrew. The games all used spriterips of classic arcade games, and recreated them as slot machines.
It worked out reasonably well, but I'm not really a fan of doing spriterip games, so the idea sat on the wayside for a long time.

This year, I opted to redo the game, using characters and themes from various AGameAWeek games of the past, and although the game turned out really nice, it never proved to be as popular as the original.

I put this down to two reasons. First, the game could no longer rely on recognisable arcade sprites for popularity! But secondly, people seem to be put off by the sheer randomness of the gameplay. Which is a shame, because that's how old slot machines are supposed to work!!

11. The Heist Again (360 views)

As I started a series of remakes/sequels, I began getting requests for certain AGameAWeek classics to be remade. One of the early requests was "The Heist", a game from a few years back, which is essentially a batch of mini games, tied into the storyline of a bank heist.

It's not a particular favourite of mine, but I decided to give it a go for the sake of trying it out with a touchscreen. This is another short and sweet game, and I'm still not entirely sure why it's as popular as it is!

10. All New Stringy Things (366 views)

This game is broken on certain devices. I had initially decided to spend April building a wonderful collection of Word Games, but annoyingly, some Android devices were corrupting my Word List data, making the game practically impossible to play.

I stopped adding new wordgames, instead tried to load the word list in various ways, but inevitably gave up on the whole project.
If you CAN play it, it works well. It's just a shame that more people can't play it.

I'll probably redo the whole thing in the future.

9. Kee Bo and Ard Makes Three (386 views)

A neat little puzzle game, seeing you control three characters through a series of mazes. Each character has their own path, and they occasionally cross over each other in order to get to their various goals.

This game works well on a touchscreen, more so than a mouse based PC, but it still works reasonably well on either.
I recently attempted to redo this for OUYA, but was shocked to discover how awful it is when you try adding controller options to the game. Some games work, others don't!

8. NeonPlat Raw/Extreme (534/504 views)

A pair of games sit together at number 8.
I honestly expected these games to be MUCH higher up the list. NeonPlat's one of my favourite games, and whenever I load it up, I tend to lose hours at a time playing the thing.
It's such a great little concept, and I'm hugely thankful to Authentic Kaizen of PixelProspector.com for having suggested the idea, so many years ago.

I'm truly baffled as to why it's not as popular as it oughta be.

7. Cardagain (565 views)

Cardagain was originally my first iOS game. It took a while for me to decide what sort of simple game might work well on touchscreens, and the decision to make a simple card based puzzler seemed inevitable.
Three years later, when it came time to make my first Android game, I chose to get the exact same game up and running, so that's what this is.
It's a neater, cleaner edition of the iOS original, and the code is a heck of a lot less screwy, due to me understanding the language a little better. My Obj-C original was a mess! Not that that matters to the player, of course.

Since this version is much before polished than the original, I've since uploaded it to Apple, in the hopes of replacing the original edition with a better newer version. It's currently waiting for Review.

6. Hoppy Bobby (844 views)

Whilst trying to come up with nice working modes for SpikeDislike2, I tried lots of odd "single button gameplay" play styles, and came up with some good, and plenty of bad ideas. Most of the good ones went into the final game, but one of them seemed too much fun to confine to the world of SpikeDislike.
Hoppy Bobby came from the idea of simply tapping the screen to jump between platforms (originally desert islands floating in the ocean!), and then evolved to allow for moving platforms.

As a simple gameplay idea, it proved to be deceptively difficult to master! A game that requires precise timing, and will probably cause a lot of swearing as you narrowly miss the next platform.

5. Blockman Gets Hungry (868 views)

Blockman Gets takes the simple premise of Pacman, then removes the ghosts, and changes the game into a puzzle game rather than an action one.
It's quite a fun little concept, and people seem to enjoy it once they've wrapped their head around the "different" gameplay style.

I've spent a long long time, working and reworking Blockman Gets, trying to get the touchscreen mechanics to feel "just right". I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I think it's probably gotten as good as it's going to get.
In this edition I opted to give the player a separate little onscreen DPad, just Incase they don't like the regular touch controls. I'm not sure it helps!

4. C3ntipong (973 views)

C3ntipong was part of my early Android-coding learning experience, and taught me little things like leaving plenty of touchy-space for players with tiny devices, that some devices don't do "screen leftover feedback", and not forgetting to move the score display away from underneath the player's thumb!

As a game, it's not quite as good as the original Centipong. I'm not entirely sure what's missing, but .. Something is!! But at least it's not as terrible as Centipong 2 was.

One day, I'll get it right!!

3. SpikeDislike2 (1656 views)

Aaah, SpikeDislike!
A game that was originally spawned from a random Advent Calendar game.. I quickly cobbled it together in about 20 minutes.

The game proved ludicrously popular, and earned itself a sequel (Super SpikeDislike) and it all took off from there.
Since the original was cobbled together so quickly, I hadn't left enough room for expansion, so this sequel was created with expandability I'm mind.
It features loads of different gameplay modes in all kinds of different styles, and even has a nice little Play'n'Pass multiplayer mode, too.

An enjoyable game of balls and spikes!
Fun for all the family.

2. BlastTrax (2294 views)

BlastTrax is a wonderfully colourful shoot-em-up, where you fly along a rainbow-coloured track, shooting a bunch of bird-like enemy creatures, as you try to get to the other side of the road.
Oodles of neat colourful explosions, and lots of weapons to collect along the way.

Not bad for a game that was originally going to be a top-down generic racer!

...

.. Wait.. BlastTrax is only at number 2?
Something is more popular than both BlastTrax AND SpikeDislike?!

Surely not!?

..
My Stats must be broken!!

...

1. Karl's Tiny Adventure (2391 views)

Yup, I wasn't expecting that, either.

A game which I considered to be "a bit shit", due to all the Android devices breaking the level format, and having absolutely terrible onscreen controls. And yet it appears to have somehow beaten all the other games of the year!

A lovely game in the style of the great 80s hit Manic Miner. I made a simple little engine that allowed for a more rapid-fire style of gameplay, whilst sticking to most of Manic Miner's rules. There are important differences between this and Manic, and as such it's definitely not a "remake" in any way, shape or form.. But it is still a nice little retro game that should ring a few bells, here and there.

To be fair, the game actually plays really well if you use buttons, and the Windows/HTML5 versions do indeed do that. But at the time I created this, I was too busy focussing on how badly the Android Touchscreen controls worked, and I totally ignored how well the game worked on everything else. D'oh!
It wasn't until I recently relaunched the game on OUYA that it became obvious how popular this game actually was.
It's a great game, and probably deserves a little more attention than it's gotten from me.

Perhaps, next year, I might bulk it up a little, and even attempt better Touchscreen controls for it? Who knows.