Gah! Extra hats today! I now need about 3 hats, and annoyingly I think I might need an extra bunch of baddies, which also means more hats! D'oh! Still, those can wait until after the Friday Beta. The things that can't wait, are those annoying things that build and build, until you realise you don't really have a whole lot of time.

Today I'm focussing my blog on iOS trials and tribulations. The basic steps of designing a game when working with iOS. These are pretty simple things, and should be apparent, but .. having played a fair number of iOS games.. they're not always done! Note, this isn't really about my actual development, as such, more the train of thought that generates the end result. In a future bloggy thing, I might focus more on the what/where, than the how/why that this does. Let me know if this is a goo...

I'd already got bogged down into doing the Socoder Newsletter, there, when my beepy alarm reminded me to do my new daily bloggy thing! Good job I set that, or there'd be no blog today!

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...

This week's game came out a whole lot better than I'd expected it to. It's still not fantastic, but given that the game only just started to fall into place yesterday, it's not turned out so bad. <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Chuffed_Tracks_20100720A.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Chuffed_Tracks_20100720A_thumb.png"></a> <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Chuffed_Tracks_20100720B.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/complete/Ch...

Still no name for the train game, so it's currently named "Jay's Train Game"! silly name! It's a bit more gamey, now. Some sort of cross between a proper sim-type thing, and a cheap arcade game! Odd. Needs a few more "This is happening" type notifications, but it's all falling into place. No idea if it'll all be done by the morning, but it's closer than it was yesterday, and it feels a lot more like I've bothered to plan it out!!! <a href="https://socoder.net/upload...

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 ...

Pain has engulfed my world, this week.

The framework's coming together nicely, and things are looking up. But there were Audio issues with various versions of Ubuntu (or rather, with the SAME versions of Ubuntu!!) that were causing the game to be silent, and then crash! Hopefully I've managed to fix that, now. There's a whole list of audio drivers available to the game, and all are nicely selectable in the nice Tab box. Unfortunately, you will have to close and restart before it'll change the driver, or else.. Well, it just...

Today, whilst uploading the new AGAW header for this site, I wondered if anyone would be interested in a simple little challenge. Question : Name all the games in the new AGameAWeek header. (URL "https://socoder.net/uploads/1/header.jpg"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/header_thumb.jpg"> (copy incase the cache isn't letting you see it yet!) Prize : The entire sourcecode to this week's "Munky Train 2" game...

AGameAWeek 2010 - Game Number One! We'll call this a test game, because the whole framework thing still isn't quite up to scratch, with all kinds of missing features! Plus I've put in LOADS of little quirks, things that should be quick have been made extra lengthy, and there's a bunch of redundancy.. This is half-done on purpose so that I can see what the available systems can and can't cope with. Hopefully we'll find that they can!! <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/compl...

That went as well as could be expected. Xmas intervened, family issues cropped up, all manner of snow based issues, and I pretty much rushed through the last 4 or 5 of those! Not that it was entirely noticeable. I happen to think the last two were cracking games. But which were your favourites? Three Hens a-Laying seemed remake-able, could be something more interest. hmm. OK, back to the world of AGameAWeek. AGAW Scoring : 21 weeks, 30 games. Woohoo! Jumped up a wee bit, there! This mea...

My mum likes crosswords!!! And, heck. I like crosswords, too! Except, the trouble is, there's not really a decent crossword game on the DS. Don't get me wrong, there's a fair few games, and The Times (released this week) in particular, has a cracking selection of clues/answers, and some really nice layouts. In fact, it's really quite nice, and would be fantastic if the actual game UI wasn't so mind bogglingly bad. And, I'm not saying it's "A little bit bad.." I'm say...

Today's work has been mostly of the external variety. First off, compressing a level.. I'm taking 160x160 pixels, each one being around about 16 different colors (give or take, depending on what walls/floors/etc I bother to add.) and trying to bundle them up into a teensy tiny bit of data. To me, compression's a fun time, where you get to play with lots of fiddly numbers, and chaotic maths, just to get large things down to size. Today, however, .png is annoying me. Because my 160x160 is dow...

..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'...

Over the year, I've started a whole big bunch of games. Occasionally I finish a few! Here's some of the ones that involve Monkeys! A mini competition was announced over at BlitzCoder. Create a game using no more than 150 lines of code. I created a silly game featuring a spinning set of monkeys, flying through a multicoloured tunnel. You had to shoot the monkeys. This became Space Monkeys 1 <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/shots/sm1.jpg"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/shots/sm1.gif"...