The ball from Pong, the gameplay from Tetris. The name seemed blindingly obvious to me. But over the course of the past few days, I've received an inordinate number of complaints about the name. It should be Breakout, it should be Asteroid, what!?

The AGameAWeek 2008-2009 Retrospective

(URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-one/">Part One), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-two/">Part Two), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-three/">Part Three), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-four/">Part Four), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-five/">Part Five)

The Home Stret...

The AGameAWeek 2008-2009 Retrospective

(URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-one/">Part One), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-two/">Part Two), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-three/">Part Three), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-four/">Part Four), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-five/">Part Five)

AGameAWeek...

First things first, here's this week's AGameAWeek game. I've done a few dozen "Get the Greens" before, so I figured I'd keep this one short. Simply put, get the greens, and avoid the holes. No enemy this time, just you and the floor, so if you're nice and gentle you could probably get quite far through and score a decent score. As it stands, my highscore is currently 15 points. .. So, not a super-high-scoring game, but definitely one you could beat me at! Since I've made...

Nice and big, specifically in the title, so as not to get ANYONE excited! I will be VERY surprised if anyone gives a rats ass about this week's .. um.. "game".. but here it is anyway. "Made for my cookie", although it's not a cookie anymore.. it's a viewty.. this J2ME Java App will allow you to play along with a real-world game of scrabble. See, lately I've been playing a LOT of Scrabble. I bought a ??40 "Scrabble 60th Anniversary Edition" set, thinking it's be all nice and lovel...

I can't believe I've still not finished this yet! Seems that, no matter how much work I do on this game, it's still not quite done. This week, I finally decided on the complete "Not Chance" and "Not Community Chest" card selection. 12 of each, ready and waiting in the engine. Next, I added all those lovely patents. They're all in there, each one displaying on a nice little card, along with the creator's name. I haven't yet gotten around to actually printing the bulk of ...

Well, not all suck. Let's take a quick run through my week, shall we? Tuesday Posted last week's game, got prepared to work on PatentWars some more. Created a few nice looking player counters, got them moving around the board, all is well. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/counters.png"> Wednesday That little red counter looks really really neat. Attempted to mould it, somehow, into a Socoder logo. It worked! <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/...

I'm a calm person. I will happily settle with what I've got, and be glad that I have it. I don't own a copy of Flash, I can't afford it, and I'm not going to steal it. So I carry on making games in Blitz, and whatever else I can get my hands on. So, with my £100 Phone, from LG, (The KP500 'Cookie') I started to write games using the freely available MidletPascal. It's a wonderful piece of software, and it does many great things.

Today I start a new feature, mostly due to 2 odd posts in my spambin. 1. Invispnib writes.. Should they even be there? Please comment on this video clip. I don't think Robert Cooper or Brad Wright would ever let these two ever have any serious part on Stargate Universe. Well maybe the brunette??? The link in question Now, usually, I'd set that to spam, and kill the bugger. But it is, indeed, a stargate related video. Which is odd, because I'm not sure I've mentioned my love of ...

<a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/2008/11/and-a-smidgeon-of-vaseline/">Vaseline gives me migraines</a> Anyway, we managed to go, what, 30+ years of gaming without it, so I think we can manage! Maybe.. Even more extra lovely glow, today. With a few tweaks, the background's starting to smear! Not sure why, but damn if that doesn't look cool!! You'll be playing away, and the background colours all start to smear outwards, as if puddles of colour in some water. Lovely stuff.. An...

H~S~R's coming along, nice and slowly. As I add each new little thing, I spend about an hour playing with the lovely swooshy swirlyness of it. Mmmm.. The whole Texture-Buffer-Blurry thing has really added some niceness to the game. And, just for good measure, you can turn off the texture section. So, if the game's not quite up to speed, turn off the blur, and the game carries on without it. Every element in the game has 2 layers. The Sprite, and the line. Lines are left in the background...

It's been 30 weeks since I last tackled Horizontal Shooter. The last time, I used BlitzMax. It was wonderful, and gave me all manner of nice swirly effects for those lovely background lines. Mmm.. Until it came to running it on other systems, whereby a huge amount of incompatibilities arose, and the game kinda fell on it's arse and died. Oh dear. 30 weeks on, let's give it another go!

So, Red Dwarf. I know there's a lot of complainers out there, but I loved it. OK, it wasn't old Dwarf, and it really missed the laugh-track. But that was good! A good story, great acting, loads and loads of little injokes. Good stuff! More please! ---- No AGameAWeek this week, I took a lazy day. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Good! Meanwhile, here's a progress report. AGameAWeek I started a game last week, but the lack of a certain element made the game completel...

Giving yourself more work! Bugger. Last week I bought myself a new phone. A lovely little phone! LG "Cookie" KP500 Touchscreen, and stuff. It's nice. But it's time for me to complain, as I usually do. See, the thing is, Java games. Proper ones.. That you'd pay cash for online.. They try FAR too hard to make themselves look good. They desperately attempt to fling hundreds of "nice" "polished" "wonderful" sprites around the screen at once, like they've worked oh so hard on the game to make ...

Yesterday I filmed some stuff, a nice big 250Mb video file, and posted it to Youtube. It took 2 hours to film, and then about 2 more hours to upload, before YouTube spent another couple of hours decoding it, before finally deciding that they weren't going to bother showing it in HD. FFS So, rather than go through all that, and waste another entire day trying to sort it out, I'll just post the annoyingly blurry crap that YouTube have left me with. IDE = Blitz3D Art = PaintShop Pro (7, the go...

Uno's a card game, Connect 4's a board game, Battleship's a board game. Arcade?! Who the f'k are you kidding Microsoft? See "Wii Virtual Console : Arcade" for further details. *sigh* So, whilst I wait for this Wednesday's dull as f'k "Arcade" game to be released, I should probably get some work done on my own AGameAWeek. If anyone has any quickly doable ideas, I'd love to hear 'em!

Game #2's turning out quite well, except it'll probably need to be taken down a peg or two. Currently it's, shall we say, a little psychedelic! And, that's only amplified once it gets onto the blurry DS screen! Lots of motion + lots of colour = lots of Weeeeeeee!!! Not a good combination. It looks great, but it's probably not going to look that great for long. Which is a shame. The player's in, and I'm ready for adding AI to the game. Once that's done, Game #3 w...

This time around, every game will have it's own quickly made titlescreen. Not wanting to spend too much time doing each one, I figured I'd get away with doing NES style titles. They're simple, but effective. I'm deciding all this, now, because it's so much easier than having to frantically throw it all together, later on, with 10 or so games all needing to be worked out! So, the style right now is, Title of game at the top, highscores below, and "Press Start" below that. Nothing...

Doing your homework on the back of the bus.. A crazy week of illness, busyness, and a party, have meant that this week's game had to be done.. .. um.. today! And, as you could probably guess. I ain't got Jack! There's still a game, though! Take a look inside to see what it is..

( border="0"><tr><td>Blimey! What a year, eh! I decided to round off the year with a nice big, old fashioned list, with everything in it. Except this doesn't have everything in it, because I've forgotten to add the DS games.. I'll do that later!! (Took me about 3 hours to do this, so I'm not going to tweak it, now!!) Anyway, here's a nice great big list of every game (again, apart from the DS ones) that I made in 2008. It's quite a big list, too.. 31 Games. OK, so maybe not a ...

Next up, Countdown.. Or, it's meant to be, but I can't seem to get it started properly.. I've grabbed a batch of Carol's letters and numbers, and I've got the vowel/consonant packs ready, the number solver's working as it should, but so far, those bits haven't come together to make a full game.. It's just bits here and there. Needs work, but with Xmas literally days away, I'm not sure that it'll get any. If it doesn't turn up on Tuesday, assume I'm taking the week off, from AGameAWeek!! Meanwhile,...

Yesterday was spent playing with the editor some more. As the game and editor become more closely entangled, I'm finding lots of little extra tweaks that need to be made to the game, so that the editor can be that little bit more complex. Here's a nice list of things you can currently tweak within the editor.. The start weapon (1-16 so far.. there are 16 forms of Basic weapon, and then the Super weapons on top. I've yet to add any Super weapons, yet, though!) and also how fast the weapo...

<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot009b.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot009b_thumb.png"></a> An editor! Today, I finally got around to making the editor. Starting nice and easily, I'll be adding bits and pieces as I go, so that .. hopefully.. when you get hold of it, it's not as empty as it currently is!

Haven't done a thing, today! Actually, that's not entirely true. I spent most of this morning playing about with the Enemy Spawning layout code, and tweaking it to be a little fairer.. One of my annoyances when playing Geometry Wars is when you're running in one direction, and a bad guy spawns RIGHT in front of you, giving you a fraction of a second in which to go "Oh, FFS!" and then die horribly! Maybe I'm just rubbish at it (so says my gamerscore), but that always pisses me off. So, I've tried to ens...

..I got an X360, and I've really been playing the heck out of it, lately. It's fun! I'm worried it'll RROD at any minute, but while it's still going, it's still fun. And last week I bought Geometry Wars 2, for 800 points, as well as Geometry Wars 1 for 400 points. Lovely stuff. Except, there's something annoyingly wrong with GW2. It's all nice and glowy, but the "lovely glow" is also really really annoyingly blurry... I bought a VGA adaptor for the console, and have it hooked up so that everything'...

I spent most of this week rebuilding a few of my older games with the new Highscore stuff, so there's a couple of nice new-ish games to play. First off, we've the 3rd version of Horizontal Shooter.. <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=49">Get it here</a>. It's pretty much the same as ever, but with Mr Scouter from the original, thrown back in for good luck. The new highscore method should help ward off nasty hackers from the scoreboard system.. Or at least for a little while...

A while ago, I made <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/?p=14">this</a>. Horizontal Shooter. Fly about, shoot the bad guys, guard the good guys. A nice enough game, lovely lines all over, but somehow lacking in something extra. This week.. I added something extra!