I’m taking a few hours tonight to go through the archives and put up some of my finished/unreleased/unfinished game jam projects onto github. Ludum Dare 26 is next weekend and I want to have a simple URL to send people to to try out my stuff.
Category Archives: Guelph Game Jam
Guelph Game Jam 4 Liveblog 2: Map Imported
It’s 45 minutes late, but the map loader now properly imports a level (converted from a Google Docs spreadsheet) into a Javascript array, then selects the proper tile in the tilemaps image to make the level.
Here’s an image.
Now onto actually designing the level and making the game.
Liveblogging Guelph Game Jam 4
NetHack – Plane of Fire (Photo credit: ludios)
Guelph Game Jam #4 just started. I’ll be liveblogging here, tracking our progress on our Rogue-like. It’s Michael Hoyle and Me, along with a touch of art asset assistance from Amy.
The theme of this game jam is Growth.
We’re still trying to figure out how that will be implemented in our idea for a Rogue-like, but our first few ideas are pretty promising.
It’s going to be a tight schedule because we’re breaking my first rule of game jams: don’t build your own engine. Hoyle and I have been building a small Javascript Rogue-like engine for the past week in preparation but there are still a few things left to do. I’ve come up with the idea of taking the first two hours of the jam to complete the features of the engine that we need today then taking the remaining 6 hours to make the game.
If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to be ruthless and pull the plug after those two hours and switch to the game. If we let it slip and say “we’ll do one extra hour on the engine” we’ve lost.
Wish us luck!
On Game Development and Akihabara
Syrup Dispensers From Hell is coming along quite well. I’ve decided to use the Legend of Sadness base for the game, which plays and looks a lot like a Legend of Zelda title. Instead of having our hero travel into a cave, he’ll be travelling into a breakfast restaurant to save us all from horrid syrup dispensers.
This time around I’ve got a lot more experience working with Akihabara so I’ve been able to work harder on gameplay and graphics rather than learning how the game engine works. Designing tilemaps for a game, as a programmer, is tough work. It’s not that I dislike working on art or even that I’m not artistic, but what looks great in The Gimp looks like shit when it’s tiled a hundred times.
Doing graphics for a game is basically incrementalism combined with healthy doses of iteration. You tweak a pixel, test it in-game, hate it, go back, tweak another pixel, hate it, go back, and so on.
A neat feature that I discovered today was Akihabara’s ability to scale the size of the game display by a value that is less than 1, meaning that it does not need to zoom to an integer value. Currently I’ve got the game displaying at 320×240 with a zoom of 2.5, making that actual output 800×600.
Well, back to work :)
And We’re Off! Guelph Game Jam 2 Starts Now!
Image via Wikipedia
The second Guelph Game Jam has just started at the ThreeFortyNine co-workspace. The goal? To make a game in less than a day. We have about 8 hours to design, build, and test our games. Then the last bit of time is spent playing everyone else’s game.
I did this a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The theme this time is ‘Monsters.’ The game designer can take that in any way, whether it be about monsters, being a monster, defeating monsters, etc.
As was the case last time, I’ll be live-blogging my progress here and on my BitBuilder game developer Twitter account.
BastardBlaster Running on iPhone
Pretty neat! Still a few graphical glitches. Thanks goes out to my buddy Chris for the screens and test.
Play My Game – BastardBlaster
As of this posting it’s a very early version with still much of the stock artwork and enemy types. But, it’s fun and playable. Go Akihabara!
The story goes that you’re a BastardBlaster, conscripted to battle everything in the world that’s annoying. Flat tires, Blue Screens of Death, when you go to eat pizza and there’s none left… the list goes on and on. If it’s annoying, you shoot it.
Less than 40 minutes to go! Rush!
The game is coming together really nicely, but some stuff is unfinished! *gasp!* Time to rush!
Margaret Gissing helping with BastardBlaster artwork
I’ve got the anime-ish characters (Terry and Skylar) in, but since I’m a programmer and I’d like to spare you my attempt at drawing artwork, I’ve asked Margaret Gissing to help out with the 2D sprite pieces.
Will post once I have the work from her :)
Had a great bowl of pizza for dinner
Mm!
Everyone’s favourite.