A decade is over, and what have I done?
373 games, created a new blogging script for here, rewritten the Socoder forum, started a few new sites and more!
Oh, and a brain tumour!

It's been a wild and crazy decade, and over the next few days I'll be looking back at the best (and worst) games from the decade.

2010 - BlitzMax
2011 - Touch Control
2012 - The Bad Year
2013 - Monkey-X
2014 - OUYA!!
2015 - The Gap Year
2016 - Forget-V
2017 - Cuddle Me
2018 - Ringing the Changes
2019 - Overload

2011 - Touch Control

I began this year with a larger remake of the SpikeDislike game that had proved so popular in the 2010 Advent Collection, then curiously decided to try remaking all of the Cascade Cassette 50 game from the 8-bit era.
This plan didn't last long, because, really, those games were dire!

There aren't as many games in 2011, but that's because a fairly large number of the games have had to be removed from the list
For a long while, I was coding (or at least attempting to code) AGameADay over on the website PlayMyCode.com, but in the years since doing that, the website has been abandoned and is no longer with us.

Booo!

-=-=-

Ten of the Best

(in order of release)

Super Spike Dislike (aka SpikeDislike)

Aaah, SpikeDislike.

Hastily rewritten after last year's Advent Calendar to be slightly more substantial.
The game really did seem like a firm favourite, so I then spent time working on an iOS release.
After the whole iPad Debacle, where I suddenly found my iOS games broken on the "new" device, I gave up trying to write my own engine on the devices, and instead opted to use Cocos2D.
The iOS version of SpikeDislike was released with HUGE (for me!) success, earning critical acclaim and even a fair amount of cash (enough to cover the cost of a new window on our house!)
SpikeDislike's success would propel me into the realm of "slightly vaguely known developers" being on a few Indie Dev lists (as long as the list tried to include, like, 1000 people, and struggled to pad out the last few names!) for a little while.


Royal Rescue


The first of the Cascase 50 Remake games.
This one actually turned out alright.
Gravity is maybe a little bit "too" fast, but the idea of taking old horrible Cassette 50 games and making them a teensy bit more playable seemed like it might be worth doing.
This game was .. OK!


Fantasy Center


Three games later, this game was NOT OK!!
The original was quite tough, and somehow I think I made it harder.
A simple little platform game with timing issues galore, and so many ways to die that it's insane.
As a youngster, I actually remember thinking that this was a fairly decent game.
Sure it was simple and BASIC, and it wasn't anywhere near the perfection of Manic Miner, but it was fun little game.
My remake was all a bit crap. It was FAR too true to the original, and it failed as a result.
This was the game that made me realise that the whole Cascade 50 thing was a bad idea, and I gave up here.


Horizontal Shooter Gen4


Every new framework, I like to experiment with the abilities of buffers, and feedback and more.
Horizontal Shooter usually gets a remake as means of testing out nice and simple graphical effects.
Can I draw tons of lines? Can I store that in a buffer? And can I get nice fading effects and the like to work together nice and fast?
In this instance, I couldn't draw good lines, I had no buffer access, and feedback was broken depending on the system.
All of that was out the window, so this game had to make up for it with Neon Glows and different gameplay mechanics.
.. It turned out alright!

It doesn't look the same as older H~S games, but it definitely isn't a bad version.


Mr Swing


An interesting experiment in simplicity, taking swing mechanics from Spiderman and turning it into a fast paced action game.
The gameplay works well enough, but it's a little more unpredictable than I'd like.
I wonder if this sort of game would work better if there's less hooks to grapple onto?


Tiny Ass


Shoot the one remaining asteroid, and .. Oh dear!!
This is a lovely mechanic that was revisited in the future, under the different name of "Space Popcorn".
The original name "Tiny Ass" (Asteroids) would end up bringing some rather worrying referral URL's, so I figured it best not to reuse that name.

I'm slightly worried what'll happen once this blog post has gone live!


Matrix Blaster


I do enjoy the idea of Matrix Blaster, and it works great if your vision is perfect.

Unfortunately, even slight colour-blindness makes this game hard to see properly, and that in turn makes it impossible to play.
The characters all randomly splodged around at various brightnesses and colours, and the combination makes for a really hard way to illustrate danger.

I've often wanted to revisit this game, but trying to figure out how to do it without resorting to just drawing giant bombs or something, is quite hard.


Word Trundle


As I started doing this list, I was about 100% certain that this game waas identical to later "Letter Lattice" games, with the words being in a wordsearch style.
Trying it, I was surprised to find that the words hidden in the grid are actually snaked around, not in straight lines.
This makes everything all that much harder, and I'm glad that, in future itterations, I kept the words a bit more wordsearch-like.


Extreme Unicorn Racing


A lovely game, but one that I worry more and more about replicating each year.
Unicorns run along their paths, but giant colourful explosives along the way might end up with you losing quite badly.
You pick a unicorn, place a bet, and then hope for the best.

"Gambling Mechanics" aren't exactly the best thing to make games solely about, though, and I think this sort of game might work better if I could work out some kind of action gameplay to go along with it.
Perhaps have the player try to disarm the mines before anything nasty happens?


Sheep Goes Left


After the minor success of SpikeDislike, one of the biggest and most often repeated complaints about SpikeDislike was the lack of level structure.
I knew that SpikeDislike wouldn't work properly in that way, so opted to make a similar, but different game, which could do just that.
Jump over spikes, avoid spikes and dodge spikes, but as a little sheep!

The game is split into tons of little levels, and the whole game had a wonderful soundtrack to go with it, just how all the feedback had asked for.
I gave the players exactly what they wanted!

The game recieved an insane number of complaints that it wasn't like SpikeDislike at all, and that it needs an endless mode, like how SpikeDislike was.
Seriously, what is wrong with these players!?!?

And finally..

NeonPlat Adventures


I spent two whole months making this game.
With a calendar-based level select, 50 animated characters, tons of graphical worlds to play through, millions of levels, boss enemies, and a different powerup for each and every enemy character.
This was HUGE.
A massive game, but one that I really enjoyed making.
Every day I was adding another character, drawing new elements, tweaking the level generator, and absolutely enjoying every single moment that I spent making it.
Along the way, a group of playtesters were giving me wonderful feedback, and many of their ideas were added to the game, making it even bigger and better.

This was absolutely a labour of love, and the final release..
..failed on its arse.

The game got nearly none of the attention I expected, and barely anyone played it.

I love this game.

Go and play it!


Created with Survey Creator

All of the Rest

(in order of release)

Evasive Action


Inferno


Mister Smash


Juggler


Sheep Goes Left DS