I should take solace in a couple of facts. 1. My iOS Apps have been selling oddly, this week. Usually I sell about 1 copy of SpikeDislike, every day, but this week I seem to be getting oddities like Puzzobomb and StringyThings suddenly springing back to life. .. sure it's still a max of 3 a day, total, but... it helps! and it's odd! 2. My daily analytics stats have doubled. Of course, I should probably also point out that for the past two months, my lack of AGameAWeek has caused the stats to halv...

Today's long, long, long day of development was 100% iOS related. Having put it off entirely yesterday, I figured I'd better port that level builder doohickey. I opened TextEdit on the Mac, copied the level builder function from BlitzMax, and set about converting it, line by line, to something that XCode would compile for iOS. 800 lines of code, an estimate of "should only take a few hours, surely!" and then a completely exhausted Jay who just about managed to get the thing working 8 hours late...

And I'll be doing nothing again, today. .. well.. .. I say nothing.. What I mean is, I don't have a great big 12 item checklist to do, and I won't be struggling to type by the end of the day!!

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.. ---

Feedback

Got a little feedback, yest...

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 up for it. Pha...

Tap inside to see Jiro25 playing the NeonPlat Adventures Beta!

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!

Fuck game developers, and Fuck their publishers, too..

I've always found Flash slightly more complicated than it needs to be. For a few years I attempted to learn various versions of the official Flash demoes, and SoThink's 900% cheaper clone. They were ok, but they weren't designed for coders. Flash was an artist's tool, with tweening and vector graphics and all that other none-codery stuff.

I'm thinking along the lines of the good old EasyAmos, here! Although, whether mine is easier or not isn't for me to judge, is it!? <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/EasyCoco.png">

(URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_0593.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_0593-300x200.png" alt="" title="IMG_0593" width="300" height="200" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-1314" /> Is Barry The Spelling Bee going to be the star of my next iOS game?!

Today I've been continuing to fiddle about with all the framework's drawing methods. The engine seems rather fickle, and will sometimes do a bunch of big sprites, and other times do a buttload of tiny ones. I've currently got the settings to a nice middleground. It can handle quite a bit, so long as you don't give it mountains of giant sprites to contend with!! <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo-1.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/u...

<img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/HammerTime.png" >

This week saw the launch of "<a href="https://monkeycoder.co.nz/">Monkey</a>", the next-generation of BlitzBasic. <img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/monkey1.png" alt="" title="monkey1" width="332" height="56" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1233" />

I don't usually do Friday updates, but today, day two of working on this game, I got things looking quite nice. Figured I might as well post about it. No gameplay (collision detection/death/scores/etc) yet, but I got a nice simple looking engine going, as far as scrolling, base enemy and shooting's concerned. The current enemy are Base enemy. They sit on the scrolling landscape, and shoot at you. <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Shooty-Bang-Bang-Screenshot_18-...

Hello all!

Unfinished Or, to put it another way, this game got to about 70% done, I got really stupidly bored with it, I lost interest, and I still bothered to get it to about 92%. At 92%, I gave up. Here's a game at 92%.

Oops, forgot to post this, yesterday! No matter. After last week's retro styled "random" game, I decided to go for something similarly retro, but much less random. I've drawn some supercheap gameboy style sprites, and have been building a batch of quick and easy jumpy platform levels. I've done 11 levels so far, and am going to go the "Start from level 1, see how far you can get" route, so theres no checkpoints or anything. Just start, and hope you don't die.. 9 lives seems adequate, so far, but I m...

54 games. Last year I only managed about 30-odd, so I think that's pretty good going. Sure, it might not have truely actually been A Game "Per" Week, but I did at least keep the ratio up. If I hadn't taken the time out to build the framework, I probably would've actually achieved the target a little better The stats show I was pretty much on top of things up until that point, but then things got slower and slower until my buffer zone was all dried up. Anyhoo, this is a nice big lengthy re...

54 games. Last year I only managed about 30-odd, so I think that's pretty good going. Sure, it might not have truely actually been A Game "Per" Week, but I did at least keep the ratio up. If I hadn't taken the time out to build the framework, I probably would've actually achieved the target a little better The stats show I was pretty much on top of things up until that point, but then things got slower and slower until my buffer zone was all dried up. Anyhoo, this is a nice big lengthy re...

Awww.. A missed week. They're quite rare, nowadays, but there we go. If Apple could get their act together, I could've said "Y2:W48 : Cardagain iPod", but.. guess that's not happening any time soon. Nearly a whole week since I submitted my game, and still no feedback at all. SUCKS.. So, what HAVE I been doing this week?

This week I've drawn a train, and some tracks, and am currently in the midst of desperately trying to get the train to behave upon said tracks. So far, it's a stuggle! Trying to get each carriage to turn at the right time, trying to account for the 30-odd track pieces that I've drawn, and trying not to make it look rubbish. .. meh, what can you do! <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/tighttrain.png"> It looks a wee bit unrealistic, but it gets the job done! (hint for future Jay ...

OK, so I finally got my DevLicense, and the first thing I did was to slap the test engine onto my iPod Touch. If you've tried that, you'll probably found exactly the same thing that I did. ...that, rather than going "Weeee!" it went "... plod... plod..." at about 2 frames a second. This is not a good thing. Today I've been experimenting with all kinds of things. I've figured out how to draw images to a "buffer", and then have that buffer be one of our UIImageView things, so that it...

With all the Mac stuff, I've not had a chance to do a new game. NOOoooooo!!!!!! I suppose I could rush something in the next 24 hours, but I'm much rather be playing with those extra trimming, and getting things a little nicer. First off, Gravity Bombs. Not touched it yet, but it definitely needs at least one tweak. .. the Mac's "Superior" (bah) Magic Mouse has a lot going for it, but it also has an inability to right click whilst holding down the left mouse button. Which is pretty much a require...

A couple of days ago I posted my first test compilation of a Mac game. I asked for test-based feedback, and absolutely nobody responded, whatsoever. We're just going to have to go for the "Worked on mine, *shrugs*" approach for these!! Today, I'm rereleasing the game from Wednesday with a quick fix, and also releasing a bunch of other games that I've written in BlitzMax. We've also got JNKPlat and Gravity Bombs to come, but I want to tweak those a little before I rerelease them. Anyway, here's ...

WarioWare DIY arrived via lady-postman at about 12pm today. I finally finished tap-tap-tap-tap-tap skipping my way through the tutorials about half an hour ago. My god, talk about mind-numbing pap! Every little bit of "How to make games" all drawn out in a way that only Nintendo could manage! To give them credit, it's actually a fairly competent tutorial, and I can see it being really helpful to most.. The "And/Or" tutorial, in particular, was quite comprehensive even in it's fairly short manner. ...

Blocks and Spikes are in the engine now, as are the default sound effects! Seems a bit of a long time for Blocks and Spikes, but those Blocks are always more complicated than they oughta be! Work is coming along at the regular rate, but I'm now starting to think about the frontend of the game. Not entirely sure what I'll be doing for it. I might try to replicate the DS's menu screen, since that seemed to work out nicely. We'll have to wait and see!! Tuesday, if I can get it don...