AGameAWeek : Year 3

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jayenkai
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

Juggling is hard!

AGameAWeek, iPhone game enhancements, Site development and that thing called life, too!

The last two weeks have had more of this Cassette 50 malarky.
Evasive Action is a snake game where your tail just stays put..
Image

and Inferno is a game of gentle floating, as you try to zap enemies with your rubbish little zapper.
Image

Neither of those are entirely awesome..
..
If I'm honest, these aren't really turning out well at all.
I might scrap the Cassette 50 project, and leave it only for when I'm really out of ideas!!
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

jayenkai wrote: Royal Rescue
I'm not entirely sure how universal "Cassette 50" was, but if you know it, BE AFRAID!

I've decided to remake a whole bunch of these truly awful games, and this is the first.
Image
woot!
I think this game is pretty good. It doesn't have a special twist, but it is good old retro fun. But is there any difference in the difficulty levels? Easy and hard seemed to be the exactly same for me.
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

Sorry about the difficulty. I've been adding little tutorial levels, lately.

EEEUUUWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!

After the first level, you should find X*More killer splodges per difficulty level.


Week Sixteen
This week a slight detour. The guy that created PlayMyCode.com wanted some nice gamey examples for his site, and turned to me.
As such, no downloadable this week, but instead I made three nice little browser games.

Image
A weird gravity swooshy swirly thing.

Image
A remake of a big monster shooter.

Image
and a remake of Space Clusters from a few weeks ago.

You can play them all in your browser by clicking them, but only if you're using a decent browser, since they're all HTML5.
Jay suggests using Google Chrome!
Oh, and there's no audio, yet. He's not worked that bit out!
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

All three games work just very slow on my computer. And when I play "Space Clusters" my spaceship is either on the very right, the very left or the exact middle of the scrren and I'm not able to shoot? Do I need more ressources to play these browser games (I have 512 MB Ram) or is there anything wrong.

Oh, and I use Firefox 3.6.13.
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

That's ok, those are "Slow PC, Not Chrome" issues.
As much as they are issues, they're also not something that can easily be fixed without switching to Flash.
The site's meant as a HTML5 showcase piece, so even though it would be great if it ran on everything, it's all still new-ish tech, the not-chrome browsers aren't anywhere near ready, and it's all still a bit messy.
Give it time.
In about 10 years, you'll be able to play it full speed!

Anyhoo, worry not.
I'm not switching!
I was just helping the site's developer out, as he needed more games to show off.
I'll stick with our ordinary AGameAWeek from here on ;)
(albeit with a few quick trips, for the fun of it!)

.. Nice to know my games are running on your system, normally, though :D
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

Yes, your normal games run without any problems :).

But it still seems the time for me to buy a new computer or some major upgrades is getting closer... :roll:
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

I wouldn't worry just yet. Give it a couple of years (assuming the PC holds up.. mine's not having a happy time, atm!) and the browser stuff will be ready to go. If you get your new PC then, you'll be in line with it all.
HTML5s a fantastic thing, but at the minute it's all test engines, tech demos, and things like that.
PlayMyCode's come along on the cusp of it, and with all the other engines slowly building up, there's going to be some fun stuff in the future.
But again, it's not quite here yet.
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by StudioFortress »

Pater Alf wrote:Oh, and I use Firefox 3.6.13.
This is actually the problem. FF is still shockingly slow at both JavaScript and HTML5 canvas, which makes for a very bad combination. : (

Fortunately FF 4 is _MUCH_ faster in both departments and is (hopefully) out next month. : )

This has very little to actually do with PC resources. Jay's games all run fine on my laptop when run in Chrome. It has a 1.6ghz Pentium M with 512mb ram and a really bad Intel integrated card (can't even do Aero and scores just 1.0 on the Windows Experience Index).
[url=http://www.StudioFortress.com]StudioFortress.com[/url] - OpenGL games in your browser, [url=http://www.StudioFortress.com/blog]Blog.[/url]
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

Then I really hope that FF 4 will solve the problem when it comes out. I could of course change to Chrome, but this isn't an option as I don't like Google (I don't use it as a search engine as well) and some things they do.
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

Some days you go "Wooot!!!"
Other days you go "These games have all been a bit pants.."

So I'm officially scrapping the Cassette 50 project, and heading back to the good old "Random games without much thought" method.
This week (coming Tuesday!) is a horizontal shoot-em-up! yeay!
Image

That's more like it!


Tuesday : Better!
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

Nice!

I liked "H~S: Horizontal Shooter" a lot (one of your best games) and I hope this will be as good.
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

It's going to be significantly different.. More an actual Horizontal Shooter, as opposed to.. ... you know... scrolling stars and rounds of baddies!
Proper waves!!!

Trying to figure out the rest of the rules, atm. It should be at least half decent ;)
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by eMTe »

You should think of making small nice friendly product placement game for our fifth anniversary... Shoot'em up with our logo as final boss or a platformer featuring main guy running & jumping in CWF T-shirt... You would rock!

:D
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

Happy birthday, jayenkai!!! :Birthday: :Cheers:
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

ARGH! CRAZY WEEK!!

Thanks for the Birthday wishes! Right back atcha!

I probably should've done something more, but I decided to try the old "subtle advertising" approach for this.
(to be fair, that's kinda backfired, and I don't think anyone noticed it. .. d'oh!)

Week 19 I think..
Horizontal Shooter -=Gen4=-
Captain Wants Freedom.

Download page here where you'll spot a little "Captain Wants Freedom" link which takes you to CWF's homepage.
I also added a bit.ly link address in the sidebar of the game. Click "About", and you'll see it in amongst the instructions.
That one takes you straight to the birthday page.

..
Unfortunately, although 8 people have (so far) clicked on the first link, only one person's (so far) bothered to do the ingame one.
I'll try harder next time...
Bah!

Gamewise, there's not a lot to the game.
It's just lots of random baddies, a bit of a random floor, and that's about it.
But having spent most of this year doing horrible C50 remakes, I really needed to just make something fun.
That's what this is.
Swooshy flashy neon kapowee fun!

yeay!
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Chroelle »

Happy Birthday Jay. I went and wrote a little comment on the site. :)
Currently testing Life version 2.9 (With added second child)
(Beta testing in progress)

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jayenkai
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

Aw, man, was that only a week ago?!
*blink*

Stupid busy week..

Next game!

Week Twenty
Mr Swing

Image
This one's a bit like Fred the Parachuting Flea, only it's a little more oddly random, and not quite as playable.
I tried, but I couldn't quite get it there..
Click to download!

Still, a random thought, an odd idea, something worth trying!

Z and X, or Left and Right.. Hold to throw/grapple/swing, then let go to fly!
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Pater Alf
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Pater Alf »

jayenkai wrote: Week 19 I think..
Horizontal Shooter -=Gen4=-
Captain Wants Freedom.

Gamewise, there's not a lot to the game.
It's just lots of random baddies, a bit of a random floor, and that's about it.
But having spent most of this year doing horrible C50 remakes, I really needed to just make something fun.
That's what this is.
Swooshy flashy neon kapowee fun!

yeay!
I like the game. Maybe not as much as "H~S: Horizontal Shooter", but it is good clean retro fun.

Only problem is that it crashes quite often on my computer. Not when I'm playing, but when I want to start a new game on a different difficulty level or sometimes after I wrote my name to the highscore table. The game returns to the desktop then and I get a little box that says: "Exception_Access_Violation".
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by jayenkai »

Oh dear.. That's a bit worrying.
.. hmm....

No time to stop and worry, crazy mental week, keep moving!! (I'll have a look once things are a bit more settled!)

This Week
The Short Version

Asteroids with a little Jay-twist.
You can shoot'em, but they don't blow up!

Download TinyAss here!


The Waffley Version
In the past two weeks, v1.3 and 1.35 of SpikeDislike have appeared on iPhings, along with all the coding that those required.
I've done TinyAss, which was meant to be a quicky game, but ended up taking up much more playtime than originally intended!
I've started to learn how to add GameCenter into SpikeDislike (along with getting about 1/2 of it done)
And then, just when you've already got loads going on at once, Mark Sibly, the creator of BlitzMax (the language I use) decided to release a brand new language.

ugh!
I downloaded the demo, gave it a whirl, whinged a bit, then started to grasp it's concepts.

It's a nice new language, but with a whole lot of little caveats.

Using Monkey, I can write AGameAWeek and have it run on Windows, Linux and Mac, natively, like I currently do. *woot* I can also run it in your browser, in HTML5, assuming you're using a good browser+system combo. I can also get it to compile into Flash, so slower browsers can run it slightly better. AND, I can run it on an iPhing, Android phone, and even on an Xbox!
*phew*

That's assuming it all runs nicely.
There's kinks.
There's a LOT of kinks.
It's going to take some time to get into it, but I've decided to plow ahead and give it a whirl.
Still using only the demo (too cheap!) I'll be building a test game this Tuesday, and seeing how well things go.

I'll let you know!

... so, yeah.. busy week!
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Re: AGameAWeek : Year 3

Post by Chroelle »

The new language sounds amazing. Hope that you can get a grasp of it... How much is it?
Currently testing Life version 2.9 (With added second child)
(Beta testing in progress)

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