I've been meaning to start mentioning McCoy's AGameAWeek games for a few weeks, now, but am usually too busy on a Wednesday to think about it. D'oh!!

No matter... Today I'm at work, and have incredibly managed to remember, so here's this weeks.

Avoid Spikes is one of those "uhoh!" games that regulars here will be all too familiar with.
They usually occur when you've spent too long on a project, and would rather it wasn't rushed, so you quickly bang together something else in the meantime!

Not a bad game, given the circumstances!!

He's also developed 6 other weekly games, so far, and appears to be doing this properly! Good for him! Let's hope he keeps it up!!

and I've just realised that's last week's game!! I'll post again once he's updated! Silly me!

A great little platformer, this week, albeit one without an end!

Well, there is an end, but I'm not 100% sure anyone will reach it. Having said that, I'm probably not the world's best person to ask about that. I suck at playing!

Anyhoo...


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On Tuesday I'll be posting the last of my planned Mar10 games, and it's going to be a wild ride to see what oddities appear for the next couple of weeks.
After that I've got the whole JNKPlat10 to do, but that'll probably be more of a background thing.

In the meantime, I'd like your game ideas, and what better place to pop them, than into our ever-present Suggestion Box, over on the right.

I'll peek inside the spam filled mass of suggestions once I've posted this game, and try to dig out any recent suggestions.
I used to do weekly mailbag posts, but the ideas kinda dried up! Let's give that another whirl, shall we?!

If you've any suggestions/game ideas/anything else, let them be known!!

As most of you know, I'm a bit crap at designing levels. I tend to leave that kind of thing to random generators, or other people!
Today I'm designing a level, and it's taking AGES!
It's already 10 o'clock, I've been at it for about 2 hours, and I've managed to make about 1/8th of a level.
That's 1/4 of it done, for those counting!
It's nice and filled, though, with plenty of bits and pieces to keep you hunting around.


A couple of neat little add-ons, this morning, though. They've been added to keep things interesting, and yet.. again.. I'm only 1/4 way through!

God only knows what kind of random chaos I'll be trying to add in by the time I get to the other side of the level!

I've got the basics down, and am now working on getting a nice big level to play.
At first I was going to build a bunch of levels.. But.. um.. Time is of the essence, and all!


This little screen resembles about 1% of the total level area, and it's proving a wee bit tricky to fill the whole thing in!!
Probably should've gone for something smaller..
Never mind!!


I was also going to give munky all manner of wonderful little moves, but..
.. That's not happened!

Never mind. It's fun to play as it is!

Tuesday : Munky in a Mario Costume

It's already the fourth day of making Munky Mario, and yet I've hardly got anything going. Yikes!
Munky runs and jumps and falls around the level, but there are no real obstacles or other gameplay elements yet.
Lots to do, and with the realisation that Sunday is Mother's Day, I've one day less to get it all done.

Uhoh!

No matter, all I need to do is build a few little objects and then start making some levels for it all.

...... Uhoh!

This week, Munky in a Mario Costume.
Next week, possibly Blockman in a Mario Costume.
Third week, I should probably do Greenie in a Mario Costume, but that's more 'cos he'd look funny, than for any gameplay reasons!

That brings us to April, and with my head spinning with ideas about "The BIG JNKPlat game", I'm not sure if I really want to attempt that.
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Ever since I came up with this whole MAR10 Costume idea, I've had three games in mind.

1. Ted Bob was a great game, and needed an update. By making it More Mario, I could easily add extra bits into the mix.
Job done, turned out nicely.

2. "Monsters Upside Your Head" played bizarrely, but nicely! Redoing that in DK style seemed obvious, but didn't quite turn out exactly as expected.
Job attempted, didn't turn out so great.

3. Munky running around with a Mario Costume on..
I'll be honest, this is just a silly image, but the idea of taking the Bowser-Castle levels from the original SMB, and replacing mario with a space munky!? Hey, that's good gaming, right there!!
Not sure entirely how this game's going to turn out, but I'll try my best.

Today, I draw a munky...

The next couple of weeks, though, are a bit of a blank.
I have 2 more Tuesdays to go, a whole batch of characters to play with, but I'm already running short on obvious ideas.
I'd love to see Greenie in a Mario Costume, but what would that play like?
And what about Blockman? Trying to mesh together Pacman and Mario almost makes no sense at all.
Hmm..

Thoughts?

Oh, and Platdude already had a Mario costume in JNKPlat 07..

Result : Platdude in a Mario Costume feels very very wrong, given Platdude's control method!
And, I just spent about 20 minutes playing that, so.. Go have a play!

Download Ace Paceman here.
Week two of our fantastic little MAR10 quest sees an old obscure character, from This game, whose name was quickly thought up by Spinal, over at Socoder. (He's the guy that made DSision, for the DS!)
Thanks Spinal!!

From this...

To this...

A nice little tweak, methinks.
Although, if I'm honest, this game could've been better.
It's another case of "Ran out of steam", whereby the idea seemed more fun than the actual game.
Oh well, never mind.

The game's still great to play.

You can download the game from The Jayenkai Archive, where it's available for both Windows and Linux.
And don't forget your DVD case!!!

---

AGAW Scoring : 28 weeks, 35 games, still more to go and thankfully I'm still ahead!

---
Framework Updates

1. Bitch mode is now included.
2. Linux Fullscreen should work!!
3. Many forgotten tweaks!

A bit of a chore, this week, to be honest.
I started on a game, expecting it to be nice and fun, but it's not really been all that great.
Instead it's been one of those "By the numbers" type things, and there's not really anything special about it, at all..

Aww well, not to worry, it's still a game!


Tuesday : Ace Paceman vs fireballs and spikes in a nice simple DK-inspired runaround.

Moving from DS to iPod Touch has been a decent improvement, but.. boy, do I miss having buttons!!
There's also a fair few other little bits and pieces that aren't quite right.
WordJong, for starters, is only about 1/10th of the game it was on the DS, And, what's up with the audio, it's like something keeps messing with the sounds on the thing.
I dunno..
It's odd.

But there's one thing that I miss most of all. And that's ZooKeeper.
Sure, the iPod has Bejeweled, but it's just not the same.
ZooKeeper had that wonderful frantic nature, where you could shuffle two pieces, then shuffle two more, then more, and more, and keep the combo-chain going for AGES, whilst the game whittled away in the background trying to keep up.
I LOVED that.
Massive chains created by you, not by the somewhat random nature of falling blocks.

Then there were the challenges, too.
Trying to beat all those silly little rules, like catching 10 tigers without any other animals, and things like that.
They kept the game playable.

I much preferred ZooKeeper.
It was so much better.

I don't usually repost this here, but. What the hey!



Sign up, it's fun, and weekly, and written!!

Socoder Newsletter

"Best viewed in Peiplum"

#045 - 5th March 2010



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Hello all



The worst thing about writing AGameAWeek is that

horrible lack of feedback.

If you spend 6 months writing a game, and get only

one bit of feedback, that's enough to depress you.

If you write a game a week, you also get very little

feedback, except the lack of feedback happens every

single week!

You write a game, nobody cares, rinse repeat.

If I wasn't already nuts, this'd quite easily send

me over the edge!



Currently Listening To...

Old Amiga Mods!



In the Workshop

Your last remaining life..

http://socoder.net/index.php?topic=1908



In the Shoutbox..

Onions, Castles and Days of David.



In the Mudchat

Fixing

Testing

Drawing

Listening

and not bothering..



Join in, it's occasionally fun!


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Oh dear, I'm WAY behind, this week.
I spent most of yesterday doing odd little bits of behind-the-scene Socoder stuff, so I'm a wee bit behind.
Then, today, something that should've been a 10 minute job ended up taking AGES to do!
I hate things like that!
Not to worry, though. Our main character is drawn, and he now has a fantastic Mario costume to wear.

He's even been given the name "Ace Paceman", by Spinal, over at Socoder. Because, for one reason or another, he never really had one before.
It's a nice name, and it'll do for the job.

Tuesday : "Ace Paceman in a Mario Costume"

wootsocks!


Disclaimer : I know that Ace Paceman isn't that recognisable as one of my main characters, (he didn't even have a name until yesterday!) but this time I'm going for "style of gameplay" over "silly chr in a Mario costume". In my head this is quite a playable little fun repeatable game, and hopefully it turns out to play just as nicely.

And so it begins.... A whole month of MAR10 games, featuring your favourite (or not) Jayenkai characters, all dressed up like Mario! Hurray!

Ted Bob in a Mario Costume

Taking the character, and the gameplay, straight from Three French Hens, I've upped the stakes, upped the hens, and even added....
!!!!OMG!!!!

TWO PLAYER MODE!!!!

but you'll need a friend for that!

Both control sets are in the Tab-Options, Down doesn't do anything (but was needed for the menu!) and Jump and Up will do the same thing, so feel free to take up either side of the keyboard so you can play against each other nicely...


Of course, it's entirely playable on your own, too. There are 3 difficulties, changing the number of available jumps, and the number of hens, although it does get pretty tricky in hard mode!

There's pickups, too! Yeay!
I'll let you figure out what those do.. They're not too hard to figure out.

Downloads are available in the Archive

You can grab the Windows version, the Linux version, or even the DVD Case!

Oh, and although I did turn off the "Debug info" thing for future games, I appear to have forgotten to do it here! Tap F12 and it turns off all the nasty numbers!

---

AGAW Scoring : 27 weeks, 34 games. Still up, but my lead's getting shorter!

We're about to enter MAR10, here in the UK, so I might as well show off a screenshot for Tuesday.


Yeay!

First game in MAR10 will be "Ted Bob in a Mario Costume"
Ted Bob, of course, being the character in the 12 Games of Christmas's "Three French Hens"

You can play the original version here.
The new one will have some powerups, and probably some different end-game rules.

To be honest, I keep playing it, and as such haven't yet even begun to code half the gameplay!
Aw well, at least it's fun!

Tuesday : Mario Costume #1!

*Very ranty, and quite wordy!*
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Since mid-December, when I stupidly came up with the idea to make 12 games over the course of Xmas, I've been lagging behind.
So, So, SOOO far behind.
And I've been trying desperately to catch up with loads of stuff.

This week, I released my framework.
It's still not quite done, and the music engine definitely needs a whole boatload of work.
But it's getting there.
And with that nearly out of the way, I'm finding myself finally able to take a few minutes to do something other than that damned framework!
*shakes fist*

It's about bloody time!!

So, back to my 100-item todo list.

Tonight, I can finally check "JNK Archive +" from the todo list, having gotten around to adding "Updating" to the admin section!!
This allows me to upload Linux .tar.gz files into the archive, and also update the things without having to plod through FTP folders.
For me, it's easier.

For you..
Look!!
Linux in the Archive!!
Oooooh!

And there's even nice new little "Game Case" buttons, for those DVD Cases I've been doing!
Fancy!!

If I update any further, I'll let you know. For now, I can finally start posting links to the Archive again!!

I've been trying to come up with a neat idea for MAR10 month for ages, and no matter what I think of, it's usually a case of "But I already did that!"
So, instead of worrying about the fact that I've already done things, I'm wondering what would happen if I took the things that I've already done, and added a Mario element to them.

This brings a few nice elements.
1. I can add stuff to older games.
2. Old games on Linux! woot!
3. I can bypass the fact that I'm nicking Nintendo's character, by suggesting that it's "Just a Costume" *cough*

So, over the next 5 weeks (there are five Tuesdays in March!) I'm going to be heading back into the archive and resurrecting some games that weren't quite as good as they should've.
They're all getting a Mario Makeover, and they'll be redone nicely.

The first one should look a little like this..

Albeit with a more Mario'y background. I've not started on that, yet..

Okeydokey, here we go!
If you've got BlitzMax, prepare to see the insane chaos of Jay's coding style!!

ARRRGHHHHHHH!!!!

The framework, as it is, at this moment in time.

The music engine isn't all it oughta be, I've really not had the time, and I'm quite annoyed that it's not finished yet.
As such, the app also isn't done, and it'll all have to wait another week.
dangit.

No matter, here's what is here.

1. The framework.
2. The basics of the Music Engine.
3. The Wordlist functions, too.

Infact, this is pretty much what I'll be starting from, each and every week, from here onwards.

A fresh copy of the framework, and I'm ready to go.

Will anyone else?
Only time will tell!

Downloadable from here, and if any updates occur, you'll see them there, along with the ever increasing list of older versions.

Part one of today's awesomeness is a huge update to last week's game.
I was going to do a seperate game, but I've had no time, what with working on the music stuff all week.

Dangit.
And, wouldn't you know, I even forgot to make any music for this, too!
d'oh!

No matter, here's Box's Adventure (aka BadgeBox) version 2.

There's not much Badge-Related additions in the game.
There's an explosive version of the attraction badge, but you need to get both before it'll work.
There's also a Teleportation badge, where you can place a marker, and then hit the button to teleport there.
Both of these badges will randomly replace two of the other badges, on random levels.
Have fun trying to find those!!!

Other big advancements : Dark levels, Wide levels, Close levels, Hard levels, Timed levels, Levels with piles of badges nearby, and levels with everything further away.

Neato!

And, if you were previously worried about there not being enough levels (although I'm not sure if anyone ever wanted to complain about that!!) there's.. um.. .. ... a few more levels in this one!!

Downloads! : Same links as before, only slightly bigger!
Windows : 5.2Mb
Linux : 5.1Mb (Compiled under Ubuntu 9.10)

Or, you can find both editions on the Jay Archive page, here.

Enjoy : Framework's coming later.