If you'd like to contribute to the lifestyle of someone who makes a great number of freeware games, there are a variety of methods to do so.
Feel free to donate anything you feel comfortable with. Every little helps
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Developments

Not thinking straight is a symptom of flu!
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Shoebox has been limited to a 30fps mode, simply because initial tests showed my crappy laptop to suck at trying to run it at 60fps, and the fan kicks into gear!

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Background progress is coming along nicely.

I've currently got the level renderer to come up with a nice selection of coloured floors from 3 prerendered ones.. It can do plain, and chequered, thus giving us 6 possibilities of floors. Every room that's separated gets a random floor. Nice and simple.
(They have to be prerendered colours because Blitz is a bit slow at basic 2D stuff!! bah, humbug..)

It shouldn't be creating rooms with alike colours right next to each other, so I'm currently working on fixing that.. But even if I can't it's not exactly a biggy, right!?!
Good!

Meanwhile it's helping to make things look a bit more interesting and somewhat different from the previous version.
You'll probably also noticed that I finally got around to making the doors look a little better, too!.. Although I have just noticed that the vertical doors are highlighted the wrong way around.. d'oh! (*fixed*)

Most of the sounds are back in place, but gameplay elements aren't quite up and running yet.
The weapons don't upgrade without you manually hitting cursor keys to do it, the baddies won't appear without you hitting 1-6 to trigger a wave of aliens, and worst of all, there's not even a score yet, let alone multipliers!!!
That'll come later.

For now, I need to have a play with the editor!

The "Text Layer" seems to be rather limited.
I can print at any position, I can change the colour, I can change the font size..
.. But any changes made will affect the entire screen's worth of text.

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Developments

I'm not far off the end of the long-haul.
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Week Two, on the Island.


The week started with a bang, as all the villagers gathered for the opening of the island's campsite.
Even Mr Angry Brows decided to be slightly less mean, on this occasion.

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A quick "game" tutorial type thing for a silly little game, created using PetitCom/SmileBASIC on the Nintendo Switch.

If you've grabbed a copy from the Japanese eShop, you should be able to follow along, since the program itself now includes a complete English translation.

I'll assume you're using the program with a USB Keyboard attached, but if not, most of the keyboard functionality can be accessed by hitting the [-] button on your controller.


From the main menu, hit the Make a Program button.

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Honestly.. I'm DONE with Mobile.

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Each week, after a game's release, people submit their thoughts on whether they liked or disliked the results.

If you'd like to join in with the feedback, leave a comment on the game, email me, or just Tweet at me!

This week's game is Monsters Ate My Cheesecake!

RSKGames

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Two years ago, I was riding high.
I was preparing to launch the biggest and (IMHO) best EVER version of SpikeDislike.

SpikeDislike3 was due to be, without a doubt, one of my most important releases EVER.
I'd put months of work into it, and if anyone knows me, they know that that's a HUGE amount of effort from me.

It was ready, it passed Apple Review, it launched, and then I released the Android one.

All was good!
All was golden!!
\o/hurray for mobile gaming\o/

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Developments

Hey, look at that!
2 iOS Releases in 2 weeks!
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Developments

Pixel-based collision detection is all but impossible with Monkey-X, due to the simple issues of rotation and scaling, along with more complicated screen resolution and orientation complications, and then the complete lack of 100% accuracy when it comes to drawing to buffers. (Although that last one is mostly down to Android, which likes to dither any and all images when the screen doesn't quite have full colour available.)
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Developments

Ugh.. Right when I'm in the middle of a good coding spell, down I go with Flu'ish gubbins again.
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There are hundreds of great sites that I should probably link to, and much like linking to my hundreds of games, I've always found it a bit of a mess once I start trying to cram it all into a small sidebar on the right of the site.

As such, I've finally opted to create one great big link-page, full of everything I could think of within the short hour or so that it took to add it!
If you're missing from this page, let me know!!

Programming Languages BlitzBasic I've used pretty much every flavour of BlitzBasic since the Amiga, and I'm still using it today. BlitzBasic, Blitz2D, Blitz3D, BlitzPlus and more recently, BlitzMax have all held a special place in my Archive. About 90% or more of my games are written using a Blitz language. Monkey-X Monkey-X is a Cross-Compiler language, with modern day mobile-device targets available, as well as the main exe's and even HTML5 and Flash. Monkey is my current language of choice. And it's even created by the Blitz team, too.. (Boy, am I a fanboy, or what!?) PlayMyCode Created by brothers Joe and Seb Lenton, PlayMyCode is a fully featured programming language that exists inside your browser. Create an account (free) and you can code your own little games directly inside the website, and then play the games inside your browser. You can also share your games with others, who can also peek inside your code, and even Fork your projects to create their own offsprings. It's a wonderful little website, and I've made oodles of games using the thing. Cocos2D A few of my iOS games were created using Cocos2D. I found it to be a nice comfortable library, it worked pretty well, and it did exactly what I needed it to. It's a good language, especially since it's free. The only reason I stopped using it was because Monkey-X came along, and saved me the hassle of having to port everything to different languages all the time!

Rapid Developers OneGameAMonth Website creator @McFunkypants decided to take the concept of AGameAWeek, and transform it into something more stable, and achievable. He created a website where developers could post their monthly projects, and would gain scores for doing it. It's easy enough to get started. Just log in with your twitter account, and post a link to your first project. Then a month later, add the next.. And then another! CaffeineKid CaffeineKid jumped on board with the whole OneGameAMonth idea, and has successfully managed to create a whole bunch of great little Android and OUYA games over the course of 2013. Unfortunately, he's not updated his blog since April, so I've just linked to his #1GAM page, instead! Make365 Alexander Shen has taken things in entirely the opposite direction, and decided to try to create something new EVERY SINGLE DAY!!! From simple craftworks, to larger projects, Alex is really taking on an epic project, and it'll be fun to watch him attempt to create new things through the entire year! NMcCoy For a while, NMcCoy was trying the whole "AGameAWeek" thing, too, but then one of his games got ripped off, BIG TIME, and .. then.. it all ground to a halt. He continues to make games, and has recently switched from a basic blog-style website, to a totally forum-based site, where he posts frequent screenshots and other things.

Twittersphere A random selection of folk on Twitter, in no particular order. Spinal_Cord : Fiddles with old-tech to make new things. LorenBednar : Makes lovely spritesheets CaffeineKid : Makes plenty of games! GigerPunk : Makes videos of his old C64 collection.. Also, has many chickens! RetroRemakes : Rob makes games with very flashy graphics! Nyarluu : Creates lovely retro-styled games, full of colour. MadGarden : Created GlitchMachine on iOS! Also made lots of other more popular stuff, but GlitchMachine FTW!!! Ste Pickford : Created Plok, and Sticky Balls, and Magnetic Billiards, and loads of other stuff! McFunkypants : Created OneGameAMonth. chinnyhill10 : His avatar is an Amstrad. o/yeayo/ Jamie84303 : Writes for SentralGamer.com. Craig Grannell : An Apple Fanatic, and frequently published magazine writer. Another World : Enjoys playing retro/handheld games. Sobtanian : *BLOCKED*

Forums SoCoder The spiritual successor to BlitzCoder and CodersWorkshop has been up and running since 2006. It doesn't look awesome, it uses oldskool html techniques, and it relies on an old crapped out, creaky server which is in desperate need of an update. ... But it still works, and it's got a fully fledged oldskool community of coders standing by to help with any obscure coding queries. Fact : SoCoder was hand-carved by my very own hands, using Programmer's Notepad and not much else!! If you ever need to discuss something in a forum style layout, that's the best place to reach me. RetroRemakes The community hub for all things retro. The site used to be entirely about making remakes of classic games, but over the years has sprawled into a general all-purpose retro meeting area. If you want the heads up on anything blocky and pixelated, this is probably the best place to find it. Curly's World of Freeware A lovely community of Freeware-Hunters, who scour the internet in the hopes of finding the best free games that are out there. More Other random sites you might spot me on, are.. GBATemp A site dedicated to hacking, homebrew, and other such stuff. TouchArcade If you've got an iOS device, this is the forum for you! TIGSource A forum for Indies, which mostly got trashed when the whole Kickstarter thing turned up.

Don't worry, I'm still working on the same game, it's just that the game's changed quite a bit.

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Developments

Uhoh! Forgot about colours!!!
That's going to make NeonPlat Adventures particularly tricky, should I want to include an HTML5 edition.
.. and, of course, I DO want to include an HTML5 edition, so I guess I'm going to have to retackle the whole "multicoloured scenery" issue.

And so I spent most of yesterday drawing some basic template scenery and getting it all ready. I added a whole new section to my re-renderer engine, and now it's spitting out high quality assets in 9 different colours.
Since I'm starting off with 4-colour greyscale assets, the resulting .png files aren't "too" big, and ingame they'll only be used in the html5 edition, so they should (*should) be safe enough to use.



Reason : HTML5 is RUBBISH at recolouring images. Scaling, Rotation, Flipping, Transparency.. They're all fine. But as it to make a white image slightly redder, and all hell breaks loose! HTML5 becomes slow, grotty and rubbish, and is inexplicably bad at attempting such a thing. WebGL is much better at dealing with this, but I try to keep my games working on as many target devices as possible, so plain-old HTML5 it is!

Later I'll see what they're actually like inside the engine, but first I need to start working on a level generator.
Lots of things to think about, and plenty of possibilities along the way.
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