Developing Ramblings

[Pater Alf]

The Windows version is quite a fun game. Exactly the kind of stuff I need for my night shifts.

Will give you are more detailed oppinion after next week end (when I work night shift again).

I tried to play it during my last nightshifts, but unfortunately a .dll was missing and I didn't want to install it on my work computer (might get trouble if I install stuff). So no Greenie fun for me during night shifts...

[jayenkai]

Yeah, sorry. I keep nagging at the language's creator, but he claims it's not an easily solvable issue without having to delve into needing installers for the games. Kind of a pain in the arse, if I'm honest.
The OpenAL installer's small, and once installed allows all my recent games to run just fine, but.. Unfortunately, without it, nothing's bloody well working.
If all else fails, try the html5 edition. It should mostly run fine in your browser. *should*

[Pater Alf]

Now I feel stupid. Playing the browser version would've been an easy solution indeed.

[jayenkai]

Yeah, but with the .exe version, you can grab the .monkeystate file, and that's your save game. No way to do that with the browser edition, since it "saves" to a cookie.
.. If it's not one thing, it's another!!!!

I could really do with a super-mega-awesome server, and get a bunch of cloud-based saves, and proper online scoreboards and things.
Gonna have to make my own version of Steam

[jayenkai]

As a kid, I used to enjoy the original Sega 8-bit title Wonderboy. The version I had on my Amstrad was a simple straight-forward version. You ran along, jumped, and threw things at bad guys.

.. So, that's pretty much what I made, this week!
A nice and simple little retro game, with all the classic 8-bit stylings I could bundle together within the space of just a few days.
Luvly stuff!

Platdude in The Endless Forest

[Pater Alf]

Come on, jayenkai. Can't be Wonderboy without a skateboard. That was definitely the coolest item you could get in that classic.

Otherwise it's a nice work. Especially because there is some strategic thinking involved. Won't get you far to fire at every enemy. Instead you have to jump over several of them and spare the ammo for the ones you can't avoid.

But tell us: Is the endless forest really endless or is there a maximum number of stages?

[jayenkai]

Endless, all randomly generated so it never ends.

Fact : level 3717 of Path A should (*should!*) be a longer version of level 1 of Path B!!!

As for Skateboarding, I prefer Platdude's crazy-man running animation

[jayenkai]

Headed back into super-retro territory, this week!


My Little Rescue Helicopter
I've also sprite-ripped a certain sprite, somewhere in the game!! No idea if anyone'll recognise it, or even remember wtf it is, but it's out there, somewhere...
You can download My Little Rescue Helicopter here.

Also, this week, I've been playing with the site GameJolt. It's not a bad site, if I'm honest. Nice decent server, allows you to upload stuff, and deals entirely 100% in Freeware, so it's a lovely source for new games.
I think I'll probably be hosting all my HTML5 content there, in future, as it loads a heck of a lot quicker than hosting it on my own rubbishy server!
Shame about the adverts, but .. can't complain, they're paying for all the hosting!

[jayenkai]

More shooting, as I revisit my old favourite "Tiny Ass"!
I loved how the old version worked, but was never quite content at how the controls weren't quite good enough.
I've neatened them up, added some music, and rebranded the whole game.
Feels like a much more "complete" game, now, and it's really quite nice.
Space Popcorn

Unfortunately, I also had to format my hard drive this weekend, which has had the unfortunate sideeffect of breaking my Android dev-kit stuff. On some Android devices, the game is failing to install due to it being "Incorrectly signed", even though OTHER Android devices seem quite content with it. Not sure how I can fix that! Grrr..

[Pater Alf]

Space Popcorn is really a fun game. It's interesting that there are two different ways to play the game and get highscores. First of all shoot at everything, produce as many popcorn as possible and then get great scores when you use the gravity portal. This way you get high scores very fast, but it gets hard to navigate very soon. The other way is to play safe, just produce small ammounts popcorn and get low scores for destroying them. That way you can probably play for a very long time, but it takes forever to get really high scores.

Haven't tried the download version yet, but in the browser version it was a little hard to control the ship using the mouse. It seems it doesn't directly react to direction changes, because you have to give the command to change directionsome time before you really want it to happen (it's hard to explain, I hope you understand what I mean). It worked much better in some of your former games (e.g. HS ~ Horizontal Shooter) where you really had direct control.

Any chance to change it? Or maybe for gamepad/controller support (would be very nice to play this kind of game using a controller)?

[jayenkai]

Yeah, the mouse control isn't brilliant. Use cursor keys!!! And, of course it support controllers!!! Works brilliantly on OUYA. Mmmm.....

One of the key things I've been trying to do lately, is to fit as many possible control schemes in, at once, as I can.
Gamepads, touchscreens, cursor keys, analogue sticks, digital pads, they all oughta work, and I'm trying my best to make sure everything feels just right.. In this case, I lazily lumped on the touch/mouse stuff afterwards, so it's not the best, but.. It does at least work!!

[Pater Alf]

Unfortunately my controller (Logitech F510) doesn't work for this game (at least not with the browser version). But as said before, game is quite fun when I use the keyboard to control it. Just got a new highscore. Won't post it here though, think it's still very bad.

[jayenkai]

Yeah, can't seem to get controllers to play nice with browsers. Html5s still not entirely up to "exe" standards yet..
(In addition, I only get 8 audio channels to play with in HTML5!!! Eight!! Octamed on the Amiga could do that!!!!)

[jayenkai]

If you want to hear what I sound like (Hint : You don't!) click here to find out! YouTube

[Drasir-Vel]

That was a pretty good interview.

[jayenkai]

Seems like years since I last posted a Dev-Update.. In reality, it's not been that long at all, but I have been busying away coding somewhat larger games, recently.

This week, I've decided to take a break. It IS Easter weekend, after all, and if there's any reason for taking a break, a national holiday would appear to be it..

So, what have I been up to, since Space Popcorn? Warning : Linkage Ahoy!!!

Well, first I made a Parody game. A gently little Space Shooter called "The Final Warrior" in which you face off against the final warrior in an epic space battle that lasts a good 5 seconds or so, before the end credits roll. yeay!

Next up was a Platdude game. I've decided to try and make a Platdude game every single month, and so February's was Platdude in A Bit of A Do! which plays a little like Mr Do.

After that came Spiky Tower, which is your common-or-garden "bounce the ball up the maze, a platform at a time" type of thing, but with a SpikeDislike styled theme because I was too lazy to come up with anything new. As it is, it seems to work fairly well, and it makes a nice companion piece to the SpikeDislike world.

Disc Blaster came next, which is a redressing of Microbes, but a little more organised. Pretty much identical gameplay, except that the levels are a little better formatted, and swoosh in and out between rounds. It's almost as if I've finally found a nice way to present that game!

Then came my Flappy Bird clone, Every Good Bird Deserves Flappyness in which.. well.. um.. It's had over 2,500 plays on GameJolt, and over 300 downloads on OUYA. It's a good game, and well worth a play!

Last game of March was another Platdude game, Platdude in The Spirit Collector which is suitably GhostBusters themed, and full of running around and trapping ghosties!

Then we head into April, where things appear to have nudged up a notch. BoxSplodings saw me tackle the creation of 64 properly defined levels within the space of a week.. It's a nice little destruction based game that seems to have gained a little bit of fame in certain circles.

With Future Classics : 1986 Edition I once again tackled the world of Demakes, and created 7 little 8-bit-styled games based on current videogame titles. 7 games in just a week!? .. Actually I made all 7 within the space of only 48 hours, as I'd spent the rest of the week breaking my lovely framework so that it looked all retro and old-skool!!!

Needing a little bit of a rest, having tackled 7 games in a single weekend, I decided to make a new Blockman game, and spend a good 2 weeks making it nice and big. Blockman Worlds is the result, with over 3,000 levels, and .. um.. it only took a week!
So, after all that, I'm completely puffed out, and I'm enjoying a well earned break, this week.

*phew*

... then next week it's back to Platdude.. hmm..

[jayenkai]

This month, in a change from my usual Weekly Schedule, I've decided to create a nice Bomberman clone.
So far so good, but loads more to add to the thing, and a long long way to go.
The game currently looks a little bit like this...

.. but will obviously include less players at-a-time in the final game!
I'm currently jumping between making a fancy working menu system, and getting the AI players to play to a fairly decent ability.

Complicated stuff!

[eMTe]

Good that you're still active. In this or another way.

[jayenkai]

Finished JNKBombers, and folk seem to enjoy it.
The game is, of course, infinitely better when played with others, but there's a somewhat shabby AI in there if you're sad and lonely like me!

[jayenkai]

Got my first test running on Windows Mobile Phone Smartphone Compact 2014 8.1 Bing (or whatever it's called) today.
Seemed relatively painless, but needed a few tweaks to get everything running smoothly.
Will have to look into getting my apps up onto the store, next. I don't seem to be able to simply pop the games onto my site, with this one. Boooooo!!! No doubt, once they're online, I'll end up needing to change the URL in my archive every other smegging week, as Microsoft constantly change the marketplace's address in a desperate attempt to make it more popular...

I use Windows daily, and I love windows for all it's wonderful functionality, but someone at Microsoft seriously needs their head slapped for some of the moronic decisions that seem to go on, on a fairly regular basis.
Bunch of bloomin' idiots, the lot of them..