Folk who previously visited my DSBrew site will now find themselves plonked into this site. This is AGameAWeek, and here I write a game a week! Just as it says! I opened up my own little DSBrew site a while back, and started cataloguing DS games, but soon realised that keeping a DS Homebrew catalogue + writing a game a week didn't really work that well together, so DSBrew got left behind. Up until today I've left it be, rotting away in an unused corner of the internet.. But.. There have been 4 new ...

Today I started on the online highscore stuff. Having sat playing AD2 for a while, again, last night, I figured I'd better get a move on and finish the basics off. So, into the database we go, and I've set up the tables. I implimented the basic checksums to ensure each level is unique enough to qualify, and I additionally added a secondary "Bag" table, that can hold new levels until they're ready to be downloadable. Always something new, ready and raring to be sent! Next up, work on the...

Today I did a few fiddly little menu based things.. Things like... 1. The menu->Level switch now plays the "Beeeoooo-weeeee!" sound as the level starts. 2. There's a progress bar whenever a level is being rendered. ('cos it takes a teensy bit longer than it should! 160x160 tiles over a 5120x5120 pixel area!!) 3. When you die, you now go splatter, as opposed to the game just stopping, and unceremoniously dumping you back at the menu again. 4. The screen fades to red, then black when you die...

<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot011.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot011_thumb.png"></a> It's getting there! Slowly but surely. I got the levels to doodle themselves, and everything swooshes around quite nicely (if a little blocky!) I've had to implement a menu buffer image to keep the speed up (even if it is still a teensy bit slow) but everything's looking good for the menu. At this point, I'll probably have a "Hold mouse over X obj...

The main menu of AD2 is still pretty much a blank screen! Albeit a red blank screen, with a couple of white rectangles sliding into place.. So is the addiction of the game at this point, that it's quite easy to click the mouse, and accidentally play for 20-minutes.. whoops! I have managed to tweak a few ingame things, though. And the Menu -> Game -> Menu transitions are more or less working, except for one small thing. I'm not sure how to fade in a level, at this point. The last game ...

Another week working on Alien Deathmatch means another week that I've not done AGameAWeek, so it's back into the big bag of failures to see if we can dig anything new out. No.. But, the lack of anything new, and finished, doesn't always mean nothing on this Blog.. Let's bring back the old "Experimental" tag from way back when, and show off a few random bits of unfinished garbage.

<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_menufail.png"> Today, I really need to buckle down, and pad out the menu a teensy bit. As you can see, it's... a little bit empty right now! I'm still not sure how everything's going to fit onto the screen, but I found a nice font last night so it shouldn't be too hard to get everything nice and padded out, whilst still being jam packed with menu-style goodness. After that, I really should start to add some kind of scores into the gam...

Yesterday was my long work day, and since I didn't get up until about an hour before I was meant to go, I didn't really get much work done! Still, no matter, today's a longer day.. Unfortunately, most of today was spent playing GTAIV Oops! ... Note to those who are getting used to my "Play it, now make it!!" habit... I'm not going to make a GTA game!! That would be nuts! So, there's nothing to report today, other than the fact that I'm enjoying GTAIV. I'll get back to work tomorrow!

With the editor in, pretty much, full swing, I'm heading back to playing with the bugs again.. Update Having been undecided for a while, I eventually decided that the green bad guys should explode with a nice little puff of green smoke.. <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot010.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot010_thumb.png"></a> This is what happens when you turn off the death routine, fill the screen with Greenies, and then tou...

I'm quite happy with the level compression, now. Things are nice and trim, and everything's fitting into a small enough area. So, today I'm thinking about how the server should work.. Note, I've not added the server yet, but I'm definitely getting prepared! What I've decided to do is implement an Author name and Level name directly into the checksum. This way, when the server checks your game for new levels, it can automatically dig out the new stuff, and it'll know what it&#...

To stop my head from exploding from all the compression stuff, I decided to play with the theme tune, today. First off, I tried something different. It was rubbish. Next up, I tried the old theme, but rejigged. It's not terrible.. But it's a shame that it's not better. I'll be tweaking it along the way, and seeing what else I can come up with. I'm not sure what'll happen ingame, right now. The last game didn't really need it, so I don't think this one will...

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...

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...

I'm ashamed of myself! This site's meant to be a game a week. I'm meant to be challenging myself.. True... Making Alien Deathmatch 2 is a challenge all of it's own, but I was wanting my own special little site with it's own special little gimmick, and it'll all look a little bit worse for wear if I leave a second week without a new game... So, let's have a rummage through Jay's directory of leftover bits, and see if we can come up with something special.. How abou...

<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!

Yesterday I said I'd be working on something else.. I didn't! Alien Deathmatch keeps dragging me back in Today I played with the weapons a bit more, to try and get a nicer feel to all the different main weapons. I also messed about with Particles because unbelievably I'd forgotton to put the things in! Silly me! After that, a teensy bit more Alien AI work, and some more background tweaks managed to keep me busy through most of today. They'r...

Since we're already up to Saturday, and there's still an amazing amount of work to be done, I think I'm going to bump the deadline for Alien Deathmatch 2.. (OMG!! Missed Deadline!! WTF?!!?) So, with that in mind, and since we missed AGameAWeek last week, I'm quickly heading back to Wednesday Workshop for a nice quicky idea.. This week's challenge is to create a game that works just as well played with a pen and some paper, as it does ingame.. For my entry, I'm not 100% sure, but I think I'll probably...

I won't post a screenshot.. you wouldn't be able to tell the difference!! But there is a difference.. Today I spent most of my day working a little more on the "Building up" stuff. That is, setting things up so that you start off easy, and things gradually get tougher. I've put into place a huge number of little variables, all over the place, that should help decide how things progress in a level. Again, these will (somehow?!) be accessible within the editor.. once I bother to start it!...

With random spawning added, and basic weapon upgrades up and running, the game's getting much more like a game, now. <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot007.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot007_thumb.png"> Basic Bog-Standard Arena</a>

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...

Background progress is coming along nicely. <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot006.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot006_thumb.png"></a> 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 b...

I spent most of last night tweaking the graphics. For starters, I've jigged about the whole Background tileset. If you've bothered to poke around inside the old game, you'll have noticed that bg.png contains a great big pile of unused "Inside a Wall" stuff. It was originally going to serve a purpose, and fill out the black, but eventually I decided that having plain black nothingness would be good enough, and the black stayed as black. So, they're now removed from the tileset, the odd ye...

The other day I considered redoing the whole wall structure. I considered making nice wonderful multidirectional walls, and levels with all kinds of diagonals, straight, and maybe even curves. It seemed like a good idea. Then I started to work on it, and... well.. it wasn't exactly super fast! In fact, things were painfully slow. As the game struggled to draw a single wall, with nice detail like the old one, I realised that drawing an entire arena in that way would only lead to drastic slowness o...

Splatterhouse!! <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot002.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot002_thumb.png"></a> So far the 6 different aliens act as follows. (But this might be tweaked once the walls start to get in the way!) <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot003.png"> Note : If adblock's not letting you see the images above (due to it blocking "ad2_" images!) you may want to "Whitelist this whole site".. It's safe.. I despise a...

Nothing Alien Deathmatch related today (since Saturday's the day I work the most, and get the least actual coding done.. and sit and watch Stargate a lot.. ) However, today, a Spanish fellow named Adael made me a level editor for JNKPlat DS 08! It's online, it's Javascript based, and it's right here. (Update : It's been nearly a decade since I posted this... It's not there, any more!!) <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/AdaelEd...

No need for a screenshot tonight, as there's not really anything worth looking at! Everything I did today was invisible background coding stuff! So nothing fancy to look at, but still some nice new things. I started off by squeezing the whole pixel by pixel arena out into a great big map array. I'm hoping (!) that it'll make things that bit more precise once I start adding in some walls (probably tomorrow) Basically, rather than having the player walk past/into/occasionally through blocks o...

All games must start somewhere, and Alien Deathmatch 2 starts right here! <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot001.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot001_thumb.png"></a> This isn't the most entertaining shot I've ever posted, but it does show that work has now actually begun on the sequel.