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!

Last night I sat down to jot a few readme notes for the Beta Testers. By the time I was done, I'd inexplicably written 1500 words of gubbins! Whoops!

I'm in preparation mode, now, and am trying to fix the outer shell of NeonPlat Adventures, so that the game looks a little less rough around the edges, for all the people who'll be playing the lovely beta edition on Friday. Today I worked on the menu a little, fiddled with that "about" section that I never bother to fill in, and added nice level open/close sweepy things that make things look a little less slapped together. They're still just slabs of coloured rectangles, but they swoop left/...

One of the hardest things about adding baddies to this game is, surprisingly for me, not actually drawing things! With NeonPlat I've created a weird skewed world, where nothing looks exactly as it should. This gives me a little artistic license with my artwork. .. or rather, I can be shit, and nobody'll notice! If something looks a little too odd, I simply make it look odder in the animation, and it somehow cobbles together nicely. Want an example? The Bats don't flap, they kinda invert-...

Over the past year or so, I've done a few month-long iOS projects, but NeonPlat Adventures is the first time in a long time that I've tackled a nice big Windows/Mac/Linux project. Today, 11th October 2011, marks the one-month anniversary since I officially started this project.

At the moment, I'm sending occasional beta editions of NeonPlat Adventures to two people. One is AuthenticKaizen (/PixelProspector). He got instant beta-status, because he started the whole NeonPlat thing. This is all his fault!! I've been sending him little hidden youtube clips, occasional "New Stuff!" screenshots, and discussing possibilities with him. The other is Spinal (/Spinal Cord) who recently redid SpikeDislike as Nintendo DS Homebrew. Spinal and I tend to think and code the same. ...

Hello developer, We added your games to our website. You can find the entries on <a href="https://html5games.de"> - and vote for it . In return we would love a backlink from you. Multiple banners and textlinks are on Thank you very much in advance and greetings from Germany The html5games.de team That's fantastic! Games get Spread, Games get Played, and more importantly they're all PlayMyCode games, so it's helping to get thei...

If you've been paying attention to this blog, or my Tweets, you'll have probably noticed a strange increase in Hat mentions, with no real purpose. Around about Day 3 of NeonPlat Adventure coding, I realised the need to do something new with the spheres. The Ice-thing would freeze a baddy, and then you could smash it. If that was all that the spheres did, then they'd be nothing special. The spheres needed to be special. Today, I finally got around to making some Hats! <a href="ht...

Back to NeonPlat Adventures today, and I spent a good 6 hours doodling away in Paintshop Pro, trying to get some nice new graphics for the game sorted. In all that time, I managed to draw (and integrate) 2 new World Themes, and 2 new Baddies. 6 hours for THAT?! *sigh* Still, the baddies are in, the worlds look fairly decent, and the game's still ticking away like it should. .. more to come! and no screenies, 'cos that'd be giving things away!

On September 30th, I had one game to cope with. Today I was juggling 4!!

One at a time. Get the task done, finish the game entirely, move onto the next. Our current task is NeonPlat Adventures. Let's see how much I added today..

NeonPlat Stats So Far Throwables : 3 (still the same 3!?) Objects : 8 Baddies : 9 Bosses : 1 Background styles : 1.5! (first complete, 2nd half done but needs tweaked so everything isn't dodgy looking blue squares!) Level types : 3'ish (depending on how I tweak the numbers) Music : 2'ish (2 very similar tunes, and a separate "Boss Time" tune.)

Had another Migraine day, today, and thus managed to accomplish bog all. 'tis a bit of a downpoint, considering how productive I've been over the past couple of weeks, but I pretty much ended up reading forums, messing about on Twitter, and.. .. Relaxing a bit. Because, apparently that's important, even when you're kicking ass making a really great platformer. Go figure!

Apologies for the lack of daily blog/rant lately. Work schedule is crazy, sleep schedule is crazy, and AGameAWeek schedule is also all messed up. .. Well... I say that..

Over a year and a half ago, I made a Music Framework thing to go in my BlitzMax framework. It achieved a fairly modest passable amount of music, and was used in both JNKPlat2010 and NeonPlat2. I stick in a few melodies, it goes twiddle-dee-dee, and out pops a bunch of pseudo random music. yeay!

The Demo, already!!!? This is nice and playable, so I thought I'd spout out a nice demo for everyone.

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!

Much as I expected, the initial burst of NeonPlat Adventure building, has now dropped to a stupidly slow rate. I'm currently flicking through all the possibilities for standard baddies, and super-evil-mega-boss baddies. Will the boss baddies be entirely seperate entities? Or will they, like previous NeonPlat games, be the same baddies, but megasized!? And what enemy types will work!? I've already cut out the unpopular "squishy" baddy. People didn't like him, because he wasn't catchab...

I've been mulling over this post for a few days, now, but the guy at work mentioned them being super cheap, and I found myself in a more pressed position. Would I, or wouldn't I?

For the past few weeks, I've gotten myself into a schedule on Wednesdays. Worklog posting on Socoder, iDev on the Mac, and now NNI Game of the Week, too. Today, all those things didn't happen.

Today's plan Make a Font Add a Baddy How much of the plan did I manage to actually bother to do?!?

<img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/platneonplat.png" alt="" title="platneonplat" width="128" height="64" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1847" /> Platdude vs NeonPlat

It's September. My boss is about to go on his hols, and I'm more or less at a nice "Not too much" level of codey work.

Something's been annoying me, lately. I've known what it is, but no matter how I wrangle the numbers in my head, it just doesn't seem to work out. So, apologies to all, but I'm going to have that well earned rest, whether my schedule accepts it or not..

I had planned a post, earlier. I was thinking the text through whilst walking to work.. I'm now home from work, and have sat down to write it. .. I need to learn to jot things down, because I can't remember what it was..