Blog - Top 10 of 10 - 2010

24th December 2019

A decade is over, and what have I done?
373 games, created a new blogging script for here, rewritten the Socoder forum, started a few new sites and more!
Oh, and a brain tumour!

It's been a wild and crazy decade, and over the next few days I'll be looking back at the best (and worst) games from the decade.

2010 - BlitzMax
2011 - Touch Control
2012 - The Bad Year
2013 - Monkey-X
2014 - OUYA!!
2015 - The Gap Year
2016 - Forget-V
2017 - Cuddle Me
2018 - Ringing the Changes
2019 - Overload

2010 - BlitzMax

Starting the year with the last of the previous year's "Twelve Games of Christmas", I then went on to attempt a few remakes, had a fun "Month of MAR10".
I played around with a new engine written using BlitzMax and use that to learn about doing proper Resolution Scaling.
Towards the end of the year, I finally started to experiment with iOS development, and got my first couple of games onto the AppStore. It wasn't anything big, but it was a step in the right direction.

-=-=-

Ten of the Best

(in order of release)

Twelve Lords a-Leaping

Out of the Twelve Games of Xmas, I think this one turned out the best. It's a very basic Jet Set Willy rip-off, and carries on endlessly.
It's nothing magical, but it has just the right "feel" and even has a lovely recording of the Amstrad JetSetWilly theme, too!

Munky Tests his Engine

This is one of the last typing games that I've made.
Trying to make games for so many systems, and touchscreen devices and the like, is making it harder and harder to achieve something as simple as this, and that's kinda disappointing.
This has a lovely amount of parallax, some nice speedy typing to do, and it's a nice end-of-an-era for these sorts of games.

Box's Adventure

I really do enjoy this game.
It's a mini RPG of sorts, but one which allows for a restart point each level.
With a calendar-based level select, and daily level types, it's the sort of game that I don't normally make.
I've attempted to remake this on various occasions, but it's never quite ended up as playable as this original did.

Munky in a Mario Costume

My favourite of the "Month of MAR10" saw Munky navigating a giant underground/castle environment trying to collect coins for some reason.
Taking the time to design a great big level was fun, and Munky's new abilities helped to improve the gameplay.
I don't normally try to design levels like this, but on this occasion, it felt necessary.

JNKPlat 2010

JNKPlat releases are always made with care in mind.
This release was based on the lessons learned from the DS08 edition, and includes a number of new elements that hadn't been seen on PC, previously.
In quite a few ways, the added screen scrolling actually broke the logic of certain old favourite levels, so everything needed to be remade from scratch.
Quite an important version, as the lessons learned would be taken across to future itterations, but I do hate losing the chaos you could create when working in a specific resolution.

Gravity Bombs

This is a gentle relaxing game about shooting bombs around the screen.
The controls are a little wonky, though, with you having to drag a launch from one of the corner turrets.
Other than that oddity, though, the game's nice and gentle, the physics seem to be spot on (albeit "gamey"), and the explosion sounds are kinda calming, too.
Aaaaah...

RetroRaiderII

A lovingly crafted game, with a whole map screen and scrolling text and stuff!
A recreation of the previous year's RetroRaider, featuring a nice realtime level editor that lets you build as you play.
Unfortunately you still need to editor your level in a text file afterwards, to change the name of the level, add a description, insert your name, and more.
I'm always too lazy to add "power" features to my editors!

Cardagain

This was my first foray into the world of iPhone Development. Crafting a game that needed simple touch input and is nice and big and chunky to fit onto a phone screen nicely.
With a nice selection of backgrounds, and different card designs, I took my time to build up what I imagined would be a great little iPhone game.
Learning all about assets and Retina assets, and more. Figuring out the icons and stuff. Aah, the fun.
And then, of course, a month or so later, Apple brought out the iPad and my lovely game with all it's specifically drawn background iPhone-sized screens, got completely busted!
Bah, humbug!!

Space Clusters

This is a simple enough recreation of the Amstrad CPC game "Space Hawks", in which, rather than shooting bullets at the player, the invaders wait to be destroyed, then drop giant bombs at you instead!
I enjoyed this so much that I've recreated it a number of times, since, with each itteration being.. More or less exactly the same!!

Platdude's Retro Advent Collection

And then there was the Advent Collection.
A set of daily games over Advent that spawned one particular favourite.
Each day, I made a game with a silly rhyming name, and day five was a game with a ball jumping over some spikes..
"Spike Dislike" was born, and over the rest of the decade, that one little game would keep popping up again, and again, and again, and again!!