This week's Wednesday Workshop #186 was to create a nice Asteroids game.
As I started creating it, I was planning a nice Horizontal Shooter-esque game, with powerups and all kinds of crazyness.
But I ran out of steam midway.
A shame..


BUT.
It's still a nice swooshy game, with fancy particles, and nice explosions.

It's mouse controlled, like Horizontal Shooter is, so just roam about, avoid the asteroids, and blow 'em all up. When there's less asteroids left, more will appear, and on and on you go until you're dead.

No powerups, but if you want a better version, I'm always here to help!

I did plop in Generic Highscore Table, though, so (as always) type in your name on the titlescreen, and rightclick to upload your best scores.

You can Download Disasteroids Here.

Enjoy!

This week, I've been working on an Asteroids game.
On Thursday, it was a bog standard Asteroids game, that seriously needed updating.
On Friday, I changed the controls to mouse. The game plays like a cross between Asteroids and Horizontal Shooter.
On Sunday, I tweaked the controls further, and added particles.
And today, I spent some time tweaking the difficulty.

At this point, the gameplay's "OK".
It's not amazing.
And, I think because of that, I've kind of stalled.
Right now, the game has no music, there's no background, there's no menu, there's no powerups, there's no online highscores, and there's no real "Weeee!!!" fun to the game.
Which is a shame.

But I'll carry on, as I always do.
Tomorrow I'll settle down and persevere with the game, and we'll all see what comes out the other side.

See you tomorrow!! Hopefully with a better game than I have right now!

Much as expected, this week's AGameAWeek has become a Vib Ribbon style game.
To be honest, I had this idea for a moment, last week, whilst doing the Go Left game. The idea stayed in my head for about a minute, before vanishing.
But having finally gotten around to playing Vib Ribbon, this week, I figured it was time to put the plan into action, and with a nice time-saving addition (the graphics!) I managed to get it done in time.

So here's J-Walker.


Hit the cursor buttons in time with the music (directions are as shown in the logo) to guide J-Walker towards the end of the music.
Only 3 tracks are included, but they're easy enough to add.. Unplayed instruments, 01->12 for the different blocks.. Have a nosey at the included tracks to figure it out!

And, if I can find anything good, I'll add some more music later.
..
Maybe!

Meanwhile, you can Download J-Walker here.

I've had it in my desk's cupboard for years.
I bought the game not long after my original Playstation broke, thinking I'd pick up a PSX cheap somewhere..
I never did.
And, I never bought a PS2, or a PSP, or PS3, or anything else that could play it.
Over the years, I've tried it on Various emulators, only to have them spit it out, and die..
And yet I kept it, hoping to eventually play it some day.

Yesterday I finally DID!
And it's a cracking game.
A wonderful piece of music based gaming, all nice and happily playing with all my music.

So, with my mind entirely in Vib Ribbon mode, don't be surprised if this week's AGameAWeek has a slight music game style.. In fact, just a few days ago, I said on Facebook that I was considering doing a music/platformer.. So I suppose this was inevitable!

Will it be done by Tuesday? Who knows.. But if it's not, I'll carry on working on the idea until it's all happily working.

And, before everyone gets excited, the chances of me figuring out and working with MP3 Beat Detection is minimal. This'll more than likely use the XM format reader thing that I made for Cowbell Hero... albeit a bit more complex!

Every so often, I like to rant here, for no real reason.
Today, whilst playing Burnout 3 on my Xbox Classic, the whole "Customisable Soundtracks on the X360" issue appeared once again, so I figured I should rant about it.

See, on Burnout XBox, you used the game to pick the soundtrack, and then that played it in the background.
But, it ALSO stopped the music when you crashed, turned down the music when there was information to be told, and other useful things.
But, for some really bizarre inexplicable reason, the X360 can't do that. (*To the best of my knowledge, based on the games I've tried it with.)

Instead, the X360 has it's own little player. You start a playlist, and it sits blindly in the background playing all the tracks selected, without any care or attention to what's going on in the game.

Crash a car in Burnout, the music carries on.
Get to a cut scene, with important dialogue, in GTAIV.. the music carries on.
It's mindless, dull, and completely kills the entire point of having "Your music in the game"
Because, really.. it's not.
Really, it's "Your music on the closest CD player, your game here, and nothing inbetween.."

In GTA : San Andreas, if I got out of a car, my music stopped, because it was the car's radio..
In GTA IV it doesn't.. It sucks.

And so the horrible nastyness of X360's "Customizable soundtracks" continues..
Bah, humbug!!

/rant over.

I've had a couple of emails about the donate button already, so thought I should clarify why it's there.

I write a game a week.. Sometimes they're good, sometimes their rubbish, and sometimes they're really fun, playable, and can keep you playing for a good few hours.
I can do this, because I have a lot of free time. And by "a lot of free time", I mean A LOT of free time.
The webhost is pretty much minimal cost (GoDaddy), the programming languages range from 0 cost (DS/XNA) to very minor amounts. (Blitz has a cost, but considering all the games I've made, it was well worth it!!)
I bought PaintShop Pro (7!) from Game one day, and it cost me £29.
I use ModPlugTracker to make my mods, Fruitloops to do none-mods, and CoolEdit to grab sounds, tweak music and more.
This is my Dev studio, and it all runs on minimal system requirements.
True, I now have a fancy pants QuadCoreHappyCPU doohickey, but for the most part I'll still be double checking everything with an age old Celeron, to be sure my games will run happily on everyone's system.
And the Celeron's graphics card cost £11.

What I'm getting at, is that the whole cost of all this is pretty dang minimal.
So, I don't need donations.
If I ever do, the donate button will get bigger, and there'll be a hundred signs pointing at it!
For now, though, it's not necessary.

But it's there.

It's there incase anyone's feeling generous, and wants to add a little something to help motivate me.

It's there incase someone out there feels like they have a few spare pence, and wants to help keep a freeware developer happy.

And, most importantly, it's there so that I can quickly and easily add cash to my bank account, without having to go all the way into town and fork out the £4 bus fare in order to get there!
Aaah, the life of a cheapskate!

A short and sweet game, this week.
Would've been more (extra graphical niceness) but I ran out of time! Aw well..
Here's the basic form.


Rules : Go Left, avoid spinning spiky things.

There's 13 levels, and then it wraps back to level 3 but faster, and then continues to wrap, getting faster and faster all the time..
Infinite lives, so if you're really bored you can just keep going and going and going! Maybe!

You can Download Go Left here.

I'm not sure if you figured it out from the picture I posted the other day, but it seems that the project I'm currently working on in XNA will turn out to be Centipong.

To be honest, I wasn't actually planning to do Centipong!
I was actually just shoving in a basic sprite, and getting it bobbing around on the screen, in order to duplicate my basic "Blitz 2D-in-3D" command set within the XNA environment.
So far that's working out rather well, and I've near enough created a nice little shell program which I can then (hopefully!) copy+paste about the folder, as if it were a template.
I say hopefully.. I mean, surely Visual Studio wouldn't end up with all my games being the same name, and breaking all kinds of crazy things.. Right!?
..
Maybe it would!
Who knows!

Still the basics are in, and so far I've not destroyed Windows, so all signs point to me actually being able to do this! Blimey!

And yet, I continue to play with the little Centipede pods, and.. Well, I suppose I might as well finish the thing off.
Yesterday, the sound effects all went in, and I started on a nice new mp3 edition of the theme tune (since XNA doesn't look like it's going to be playing mods any time soon.) which actually turned out rather well.
Today I'm going to carry on learning the ropes, and I'll have to sort out all that fancy-pants "Widescreen" stuff..

Meanwhile, here's a work in progress of the new theme.
: Download

Keep in mind that I'm working on a Celeron system with really rubbish "desktop" speakers, and that it'll more than likely sound better once I've a decent setup again!


Oh, and don't worry, there's still a regular game this week! I'll post it tomorrow!

I've said on other forums that this year will be my Xbox Live year.
That I'd take the time to learn how XNA should work, and eventually build things up so they work nice and happily.
Unfortunately, my coding's stuck in the 80's&90's, and I can't get out of my "horrible" Basic habits.
Well, other folk call them "Horrible" habits, but honestly, I just see most Basic commands as common sense.

I'd much rather write
If Keydown(1) Then End
than I would write
If (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) {this.Exit();}

And who can blame me!
So, for the past couple of days, I've been wrestling with the nasty horrible language, and I've actually managed to do rather well.

I've gotten a nice Keydown() function to work with both XBox 360 joypads, AND my keyboard. I've also gotten a wonderful set of 3D commands which work in exactly the same way as my Blitz 2D-in-3D language set.
So, the basic Input+Drawing stuff are in, and everything's flowing nicely.



Tomorrow, I'm going to play around with the audio of the thing, and if all goes well, I might have a nice .Net game up and running by Tuesday.

But, worry not, I'll also try to get another game running in Blitz, too.
Because, quite frankly, at the end of the day, it's bad enough for folk to have to download a game in the first place, without needing 100+ add on installs to run it!

This is all just a test, right now.



If all goes well, I might very well have a game on your Xbox in the near future.
Maybe!

A nice, quickly made game, this week.. For obvious reasons. Bah..

Still, a game created in 2 days can be just as much fun as a great big month long project.
..
Occasionally.

This game's a nice simple puzzle game. Your task is to get the blobs from the top of the sliders, down to their allocated areas in the bottom, by sliding the sliders left and right.
There's a constant timer, so try to get through as many levels as you can.

No scores, no level count, but .. for a change.. The Blitz Basic sourcecode's included in the archive if you'd like to build up the game a bit further.

In fact, I've even created this page, over at Socoder, which gives you a rough explanation of how the basics of the game were put together.

Is it useful?
Probably not..
But I'm bored without my Main system, so I figured I'd spend some time doing that

Enjoy!

You can Download Simple Generic Slider Puzzle here.

Since I currently have no PC in my room, I'm down to the bare essentials.
I can use the downstairs PC to code on (and have a nice half-finished puzzle game ready for tomorrow), but all my music is sat on 2 inaccessable SATA drives.
My TV shows are on there, my codings on there, and a whole lot more.

Luckily, I found that DVDs with DivX content can actually be played on your Xbox.
Stick in the disc, shuffle over to Video Library, and head into the disc to watch all your favourites.

So, as lacking in PC as I am, at least I'm not having to do without a few good shows.
Like Corner Gas.. (Highly recommended!!)

However, there's one all important thing that appears to be missing from my Xbox.
And, I never noticed it until this week, when I really really really needed it.

The X360 doesn't have a Browser.


WTF is with that!?!

Aw well, back to watching Corner Gas.

PC 1 is dead.
However, PC 1 made nightly backups from Drive 1 to Drive 2, so all my data's safe and secure.
Unfortunately, They're both SATA drives, and PC2's a really old Celeron that doesn't have a SATA connector!
So, although all my stuff's safe, I can't actually get to any of it!
D'oh!

If PC2 had any more than 1.5Gb remaining, I could've triple-backed my stuff onto this one, too.
Kinda annoyed that I didn't, really!

Oh well, hindsight, 20/20 and all that.

So, until PC3 turns up, I'm back to basics.
No 2D-in-3D stuff, no fancy smansy stuff, no premade gfx, no old sound effects, and not even my huge collection of mods to fall back on.. Just me, Blitz Basic, and my crazy whacked out imagination.
2 days to go until AGameAWeek day..
What'll turn up!?

Who's to know!

And, back to the old routine we go..

This week's AGameAWeek sees our old friends the Space Monkeys, rolling around in balls, through a maze, to get the bananas.. Again!
As with Super Monkey Balls, you needn't get all the bananas, just reach the goal, and try to get through all 8 available levels.


8 levels not enough? Tough..
I've got other things to code! (Like that Countdown game I started weeks ago, but can't seem to settle into!)
But if you like this game enough, let me know that you want a bigger one, and I'll probably set about doing it.. Maybe!

In the meantime, enjoy it as it is.

You can Download Space Monkeys Go Bananas here.

No new game again, this week, but here's my New Year's Resolution.

AGameAWeek

There you go!

I almost managed it for a few months, so I'm going to try and stick to it all year round next year.
If you have any crazy game suggestions, stick 'em below, and I'll probably get around to them when I run out!

(.. I wonder if I could make a great big Pot of Ideas script, where folk can dump their suggestions... That'd be handy..)


Meanwhile, don't forget that there's always something to do in Alien Deathmatch 2, with new levels appearing every day or so. Although, today's level is an old one.. Not sure why, there's still new ones in the bag. I might need to tweak the script a bit. But either way, the more you feed it, the more new levels there'll be. So keep making levels, folks!

And now, I have to stop being lazy, and get back to coding again.
If I can be bothered to start a longer month-long project, I'll probably start a dev-diary thing again, but otherwise I'll probably go back to my "One post a week, when I've finished AGAW" routine.
So, if I don't make a post before next Tuesday, have a great New Year!!!

After trying, for ages, to formulate a nice game-wide Achievement setup, Moshboy told me off, and made me just plain put the old ones in, lest I spend the next 8 years trying to figure out how to do the game-wide ones.

So the old ones are back.

They'll flag when you hit the following milestones.

Kills 50 100 150 200 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 2000 2500 5000 10000

Time 00:30 01:00 01:30 02:00 02:30 03:00 03:30 04:00 04:30 05:00 07:30 10:00 15:00 20:00

Multipliers 5 10 15 20 25 50 75 100 125 150 200 250 500 1000

So get to it!!
Same link as ever.
(And the bug's still not there!)

*sigh*

I must apologise..

I assumed I was right.

Never assume you're right!

I tried and tested, over and over, and I couldn't find a fault.

And then, this morning, I received an email, and through a couple of back-and-forths discovered that, indeed, there was something really really really quite wrong.
Thanks, Nathan..

I made myself a new fresh install, and tried to find the bug.
The bug happened!
I saw it!
I thought "WTF!?!" and then tried again, with another fresh install.

..
And it didn't happen!

And so I tried again..
No bug
And again..
No bug..
And again and again..
No bugs at all..

ARGH!!!

I must admit, at this point I was truly baffled.

And then, hunting through the code, I noticed why it was happening, and also why I hadn't noticed it earlier.

To start a game, I've been hitting Spacebar. It's right under my thumb, it's quick to get to, and I don't need to find it with the mouse... It's handy to have..

The bug happens when you, instead, click the start button on the menu.

*sigh*

Techy bit
In order to traverse from "Clicked Start Button" to "Start Game", I reused a variable. I made editmode=2, because editmode=1 is how the Editor's button also works.. When it gets to the "Check the keys" bit of the code, it also checks editmode, to see if the buttons have been clicked.
Nice and simple, and a quick way to make clickable buttons work.
Or so I thought.
What actually happens is that the editmode variable doesn't get reset when the game gets going, and because the game think's you're in editmode, it won't save a score..
Damn and blast!
So, now it resets, and everything's the way it should be.

Note to self : FFS, check your buttons occasionally, and stop relying on keypresses!!

Same link, now working!

Now that the code's opened up again, and I'm in the mood for tweaking, I might as well carry on and play with a few things, so expect another update later on tonight. .. Maybe..

You might have noticed a distinct lack of AGameAWeek, this week..
Since I'm getting little or no work done, this week, and.. what with being Xmas and all, I've decided to be lazy, and take a week off.

Nothing wrong with that!

If you feel you really need something new to play with, nip to yesterday's post, and you can grab the WhoSave thing. That's quite nice.. And you can pretend I posted that today, in time for the Xmas episode in 2 days time. Very festive!!

If you'd like to see something extra special, head inside for super secret Alien Deathmatch playing tips!

Read More

Blimey! What a year, eh! I decided to round off the year with a nice big, old fashioned list, with everything in it. Except this doesn't have everything in it, because I've forgotten to add the DS games.. I'll do that later!! (Took me about 3 hours to do this, so I'm not going to tweak it, now!!) Anyway, here's a nice great big list of every game (again, apart from the DS ones) that I made in 2008. It's quite a big list, too.. 31 Games. OK, so maybe not a game for Every week of the year, but considering I only just changed the site to "AGameAWeek.com" in July, that's not bad going! Next year, I'll try to keep up the pace, and get a whole 52 games out. .. Maybe! The entire game collection is all wrapped up in this nice big 32Mb file, right here.. And if you want to see it's contents, along with screenshots, descriptions, and seperate downloads for each game, the great big list is inside.

Read More

Next up, Countdown..
Or, it's meant to be, but I can't seem to get it started properly..
I've grabbed a batch of Carol's letters and numbers, and I've got the vowel/consonant packs ready, the number solver's working as it should, but so far, those bits haven't come together to make a full game.. It's just bits here and there.
Needs work, but with Xmas literally days away, I'm not sure that it'll get any.

If it doesn't turn up on Tuesday, assume I'm taking the week off, from AGameAWeek!!

Meanwhile, I'm planning to end the year with a nice big calender, with everything I made this year, all wrapped up, in nice big downloadable packages.. Well, maybe not big packages, but a list, none-the-less...

Next year, (2 weeks away!!) I've already got 2 major projects planned.
First is, obviously, a new JNKPlat.. 09 edition will happen, I'm just not sure when, or how, or what it'll be like, or on what system(s) it'll run. But it is planned.
As well as that, there's a Turbo The Tortoise remake that I'd like to do. But again, I'm not sure what form it'll take.
Right now I'm actually considering a completely different form than the original (Hisoft/Codemasters, C64/CPC/Speccy).. Take what was there, and.. tweak it.. A lot!!
But then, it's not really a remake if I do that.. More of a reimagining.
*shrugs*
We'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, that's my current thoughts, and plans.
If you'd like to push me in any particular direction, or suggest any games, or whatever, stick 'em in the comments. I'd love to hear some or your thoughts.

So, I spent a while, last night, playing with the graphics.
Now that the game's out there, and since so many people are complaining about it's lack of fancyness, I decided to make nice with the special weapons..


The game's now officially 75% More Whooshy, with the superweapons looking much more fancypants, and the dead baddies giving off a little red "poof!" as they go.

I've also switched the ingame text from Regular Font to Bitmap Font, at the request of someone who's NVidia card doesn't like regular text. The bitmap font is being rendered as 3D sprites.. Usually, this is ok, but occasionally, your system might not be able to keep up.
Sometimes Font is good, sometimes Bitmap's good.
You'll have to make your own mind up as to which is best for your system, so I left a switch on the main menu for it.

Um, I think that's all I've changed, but you might notice some other differences along the way!
Enjoy!

Alien Deathmatch 2 (Release 2)
Just plonk it over the top of your last one.. (And use Alien Deathmatch 2.exe .. I decided not to bother number/labelling each release, since it'd only annoy folk who've taken the time to add it to their start menu/make Bat files!!)

Note : This is the same link, and although it's newer+nicer, it's purely cosmetic changes, so no need to go telling everyone, since nothing major's happened gameplay-wise.