Blog - Top 10 of 10 - 2018

30th December 2019

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

2018 - Ringing the Changes

OUYA was gone.
Razer gave up with Android TV Consoles.
Mark Sibly gave up with Monkey-X.
My faith in anything iOS had left a long time ago.

It was time for some pretty drastic changes to my devkit.
As with any devkit switchout, I tried all manner of different languages and prebuilt engines, before ultimately deciding to go it alone.
I created a brand new framework, from scratch, using nothing much more than basic C++ and OpenGL.

Over the course of the year, I built up a whole bunch of little games in the new framework, porting them to Windows, Mac, Linux and even 3DS as Homebrew.

Last year's Highscore framework was integrated, and everything seemed to flow well enough.

.. But it wouldn't last.

-=-=-

Ten of the Best

(in order of release)

Flappadiddle Doo

The first game in the new framework, which had been mostly a list of my target specs.
Background buffer, audio functionality, fast loading, and working on all possible targets.
The game itself is a much bulkier edition of the previous year's Flappadiddle, featuring a selection of playable characters and different worlds to beat.
Everything I aimed for with the new framework, I managed to fit into this one little game.

On a Space Shooting Trail

Although the background buffer had worked well enough for Flappadiddle, this test revealed that it wasn't fast enough for realtime effects.
As such, this edition of "Horizontal Shooter" required everything to be redrawn every single frame, thus greatly reducing the effects available to me.
In addition, trying to add a lovely neon glow to everything resulted in some pretty horrific slowdown depending on whether I played it in a window or fullscreen.
I guessed that's an issue with OpenGL and Windows, and simply opted to avoid using it in future.
Overall the game runs smoothly, but is nowhere near as nice as previous versions.

Micro Clampett

Turning the adventures of Clampett into a more generic platformer made for a much more fun game, and the "dart" enemies were much more avoidable.
I'm still not sure if this form of Clampett is quite what I'd like, though.
The character's Clamping abilities can be more or less ignored entirely, and the game is still perfectly playable.
Needs more work!

Squashly Boop

A fun recreation of the "Mario's Fiery Forth" games, but without Mario Spriterips leading the way!
The game works well enough, and there's a little variety in the enemy types, but there's not a whole lot more to the game than this.
A level structure probably would have worked better, but as it is, it's a nice test of the online highscore system!

Blockman Gets Retro

A return to the original game's view, with the whole maze being visible onscreen and no scrolling to speak of.
By this point I'd also decided to have less clutter on the screen, too, with just a simple "Eat" being displayed onscreen.
Cleaner, simpler and much more playable. This is the sort of game it always should've been.

The Link Janitor

Another puzzle game. This time creating lines between the various objects onscreen.
The game is simple enough, but some of the later puzzles can catch you out.
It does take a while before it starts getting tough, though.

Pogo The Fridge

Another attempt at a random platform level generator, and a fun little game with a fridge at the helm!
By this point I was getting more interested in generation techniques than gameplay mechanics, and although the gameplay works, it's definitely not the most imaginative.

Generic Snake Clone

I really did hope that this game would get a little more attention, much like "Every Good Bird Deserves Flappyness" had a few years prior, but unfortunately it seems like calling a game "Generic Snake Clone" seemed to put people off from playing it.
This makes me sad

The game is wonderful, even if it is just another "Gag" game.

Foldapuz

In September, a fresh idea entered my mind.
With all the generators I was building lately, would it be interesting to make a paper-puzzle style generator?
Something that makes the sort of short puzzle that you see in newspapers and the like.
For a short while I worked on a framework to house such creations, and slowly but surely, the Foldapuz website was born.

Generators are coded to make puzzles, and the results can be printed out onto A4 sheets, sliced, folded, and pocketted as tiny notebooks of puzzles, for future solving.

It's not popular at all, with the site rarely being visited by anyone but me, but it's been an outlet for my puzzle generation skills ever since.
There are currently over 60 different puzzle types on the site, and every single morning 8 puzzles for each type is generated, creating nearly 500 puzzles every single day!

JNKPlat 2018

And at the end of the year came JNKPlat
It'd been a good number of years since the last "Proper" JNKPlat game, and I took the time to make a lovely engine that ran on all devices well.
A fantastically well put together rendition, with bonus costume items being rewarded for each level pack in the main adventure, as well as a lovely Outro when you complete the game!
The level editor works great, too, and even features online uploading to ease the task.
Everything in this edition flows exactly how a good JNKPlat adventure should!

Created with Survey Creator

A Few Failures

Roland Eats a Stale Biscuit

This game is too hard!
I posted a new version of this onto Petit Switch a couple of days ago, and it's also too hard.
I'm not sure why this game is so hard, but it is.

Quadoban 2

Another of those "Remaking things I only just made" games, sees the Quadoban block pushing game getting a remake.
This game is near identical to the previous version, with simply a different selection of levels leading the way.
I very rarely make games identical, and this is probably a prime example of me desperately running out of any fresh ideas.