Delivery scheduled for christmas day.

Or perhaps morning or night depending where you reside. Of course, I'm rather bad at keeping to schedules this month, so who knows? In the meantime, here's a new screenshot.

More screenshots

Sorry about the ridiculous size of the images, but they do look kinda cool. I should probably add colour at some point.

Cool game screenshot!

It turns out I was too busy to do much on the game... but I finally got back to it, and this is the result of about 4 days work. Not much to look at, but hopefully it will be interesting

EGP - December

Well, I am actually working on something here, amazingly. The theme this month is "Art game", which in my interpretation means you have to be pretentious about it. If you don't think you can actually make something with artistic merit, you probably won't even try. So assume you can, if you're lucky...

And this is an early version of one of the characters. Or it should make an appearance somewhere, anyway.

Project Generic

Screenshots never turned up, but instead... here's the game!. It uses the 2DBoy rapid prototyping framework and the box2d physics engine.

Fairly simple to use, extract it and read the readme.

Development has started on the version using ogre3d for graphics, which means it will potentially look much nicer.

My current project

Is codenamed Project Generic.

In actual fact, it's a student project along the lines of the old 2D worms games, with physics based gameplay using Box2D and robotic characters that tend to die of extreme flatness as opposed to fatal exposure to explosions. We'll be handing in the final version for university on friday the 13th, at which point I'll probably post some screenshots here.

Hopefully we'll keep working on that after the semester, possibly with a new engine (the 2DBoy framework is fine for rapid prototyping but not great for polished games). Either way what we have going on is pretty cool, if rather rough at the moment.

Living up to the name

As you may have noticed, the game never materialised. Apparently "break week" translates to "No classes so you can get your assignments done".

Anyway, the october theme is "Numbers", which doesn't really inspire much interest out of me. Numbers are interesting to me, but rarely in ways that would translate well to a game. I mean... if someone really wanted to do maths, they'd be doing it already and I don't have time to make a game that makes them want to.

So moving away from games about doing maths, I decided the internet really doesn't need a game version of the ever present question "How many 5 year olds could you take on?" so I decided it was a good idea. Then I decided I once again don't have time, because it's nearing the end of semester.

Development begins!

Time to begin!

So, as I said earlier this months game is something like Braid in a strange sense. Except where Braid was an evolution of Mario, this is an evolution of Sonic. Except hacked together in a week.

And then I'll try to find a new blog theme, because this one is rather boring.

September's theme!

As posted here, the theme for September is "Failure". Setting up low expectations in advance is quite prudent, so I approve.

Anyway, I had a few ideas.

1. A game where the main hard drive carrying the game you were developing gets corrupted, and you have to find the backups before they fail too, as bad luck (or static electricity) seems to follow you today. Then when you finally find a backup, you accidentally release a super-virus on the internet and fail to survive by escape to Mars.
2. Fail for the purposes of insurance fraud/ripping off investors. (Burnout and Stair/Truck Dismount kinda do this.)
3. You're in a class they you're going to fail... but if the rest of the class fails too, they'll scale everyone's marks up! Cause havoc and distract your classmates without getting caught.
4. Bridge builder extreme reverse! Build bridges that fail in as many ways as possible!
5. Nethack + extra cruelty and no win condition.
   

The current idea that I'm likely to do has some similarities to Braid, but could be interesting enough to stand on its own.

Success!

Download TheRedSwitch.zip, 4.03MB

Notes:
Spinning the front wheel powers the helicopter rotor.
You may require the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2008 redistributables, or the SP1 distributables.
Thanks to Daniel for hosting, a couple of Andrews for testing, 2DBoy for the framework and Erin Catto for the Box2D physics engine.

EDIT: I forgot that you need the d3dx9_38.dll, if you have an error mentioning this DLL, you can either update your directX version here or download the DLL directly and stick it in the game folder, I reccomend the former option although I really should've included the DLL in the zip >.<

Zoom

Well, the game is finished. While I find some hosting for it, here's a brief set of instructions:

Click: Fires rocket
Spacebar: Fires rocket
A: Fires rocket
B:Fires rocket
...

You get the idea.
Also, Escape accesses the menu, Enter and the F keys (F1, F2 etc.) are used in the hacky little menu.

Current list of achievements (Not programmed in, be honest).
Free flying: Hit the goal in the slide level without firing the rocket after hitting the slide
Rocket-car-helicopter-submarine-hovercraft: hover for at least 60 seconds without touching a wall.
Shattered!: Destroy the Red-switch-mobile with a single collision (Not against an exploding wall! [I don't even know if this is possible without editing the levels :P])
Do not disturb: Get to the goal in the maze without knocking down the boulders
Lame, no mushroom: Hit the goal in the slide from the bottom.
Crash landing: Smash the Red-switch-mobile on the goal in any level.

More progress... kinda?

No screenshots today, but then you can probably wait a day for the game anyway.

I added things like a menu and a timer which are quite useful, only real thing left to do is make some levels.

Anyway, it occurs to me (after someone pointed it out...) that this game is quite similar in many respects to moon lander games: You have quite unwieldy controls and have to make precise movements. In this games case it's because you're in a maze rather than a major danger of dying, but it's true nonetheless.

Another update!

I think only 3 people have seen this blog, so the comment about more updates than readers is coming along nicely.

As is the game, funnily enough! You can now die, and more importantly, restart after you die. Even better, there's actually a goal, giving you a reason to restart. Well, kinda. Here's a couple of screenshots:An achievement is to get to this point without knocking down the 3 boulders. I probably won't program it in, but it's about the achievement, not the popup message that tells you, right?

Progress!

Having based this on the 2D Boy rapid prototyping framework and the Box2d physics engine which I had begun combining already for another project, it's not too bad really. Here's a look at the rocket-batmobile-heliglider-whatever itself.

A little more explanation.

Haha, real funny. Pressing enter on the title bar publishes the post, even when it's empty. Great feature there.

The experimental gameplay project in question is this: http://experimentalgameplay.com/blog/2009/08/and-the-theme-of-august-is/
For those too busy to check the link, I'll be making a game in 7 days with the theme of "Bare Minimum". In this case, bare minimum controls and most likely sound.

Any button you press will activate the red switch on the rocket-car-helicopter-submarine dashboard and with it the rocket. When you let go of the button, the rocket turns off again. Unless you press Escape, or Alt-F4, which I don't recommend. As your front wheel turns, it powers the helicopter mechanism and you begin to fly.

Past that point, it's a physics based puzzle game.

This blog was set up entirely so I could post about a game with a rocket-car-helicopter-submarine.

And that says it all, bye!

Well, I'm making a game for the experimental gameplay project, started on Tuesday at 6pm, got 5 more days. Expect more updates than readers to appear ;)