52 WOGD: Lumberjack Sprite Sheet

Here's the entire sprite sheet for the lumberjack I did during lunch. It didn't take too long as it was mainly moving a few pieces around versus doing an entire sprite from scratch. I spent the rest of lunch looking at enchant.js, a game framework for HTML5.

It kind of confused me a little bit. I think I'm going to start with Construct 2 first. [cue nervous laughter]

52 WOGD: Lumberjack Sprite

I made an animated sprite during lunch today. My game this week is going to be a simple grid-based lumberjack game. I'm thinking whack-a-mole, but you have to use the keyboard to move the hammer. In this case, it's a lumberjack and chopping down different types of trees.

Mister Goh & The Storymatic - Blind Person / Horse Trainer || Thirst / Missing Child

I've had this Storymatic for a while and I haven't used it to its full potential. I decided it'd be a fun exercise to use it as a basis for comics.

In this example I had to take "blind person" and "horse trainer" as starting points and end with "thirst" and "missing child". Fun!


Look at the cards! Look at them!
Related Link: Mister Goh #344 - Blind Person / Horse Trainer || Thirst / Missing Child

52 WOGD Week 3: Decision Engine

Week 3 of 52 Weeks of Game Development has found me revisiting an older project I talked about in this post about a Decision Engine.

The basis of the Decision Engine is combining my love for comics and choose-your-own-adventure stories. So in this case it shows you a story panel and two decisions. When you make a decision, the decision becomes the new current story panel and two more decisions appear. I coded it so in addition to the two choices, one choice may become available as well (a story progression panel, not a decision panel).

Update 1/22/2012: I got the FTP setup and finally uploaded the game over at Shen Games. I was at the book store today and thought about expanding the engine a bit more into a site that would be able to run the code, upload your own images, specify your own screen size and so on. Then I realized that I don't know any PHP or backend stuff at all. I wonder if I'll be able to find the time to create a full-blown COYA story down the line.

This game isn't very interesting story wise, but was more of an engine exercise.

Play the Game: Decision Engine

agameaweek.com

This fine developer has been doing for three years what I've done for three weeks. I hope I can make it through the year!

In any case, this is worth checking out. It's always impressive and inspiring to know that there are folks out there who are also into the same things you are.

Related Link: agameaweek.com

52WOGD Week 2: Invisible Walk (Flash)

Language: Flash (AS3)

Thoughts: The second week of "52 Weeks of Game Development" is complete.  The game I created is called Invisible Walk.

Have you ever played a video game where you can pick up a powerup and it makes you invisible to the enemies? Sometimes the game's visuals make you invisible to you as well, but there's some kind of visual marking that makes it possible to still track where you are (shadow on the ground, your avatar flickering in and out, etc.). I remember playing this one DOS indie game called Marshmallow Duel a long time ago and one of the powerups you can pickup is the invisibility powerup. Since it's a 2-player game where both players share the same keyboard, they had to make your character disappear completely in order for it to be any use at all. It was sometimes frustrating simply because you didn't know where you were either and you may just fall off a platform to your death. Needless to say I didn't use that powerup too often.

I decided to take that idea and combine it with the simple maze game concept. The difference is that the maze itself was hopefully a cognitive map established in your own mind of where the start and goal spots were located. Some of the inspiration came from this one cognitive study that showed how storing a visual map (let's say of a map of a town with landmarks, trees, etc.) in your brain was actually storing that map in your brain. Specifically, if you were to trace one landmark to another in your mind, the time it took for you to respond to "locating" those landmarks was proportional to how far those two landmarks were on the actual, physical map. So the way the map is stored in the brain is very much the same as the actual map itself. The further those two landmarks, the longer it took you (perhaps by mere seconds) to locate and recall those landmarks.

Anyhow. Fun times. I think I'll be doing a physical game next week or a simple platformer with impactJS/HTML5.

Related Link: Invisible Walk

PAC-MAN & Blinky Pillow

This last Christmas my family decided to do Secret Santa. Out of all of the gifts bestowed upon other folks, I think I got one of the best ones and thought it appropriate to share. My cousin pulled my name from the hat and decided to make me this awesome PAC-MAN themed pillow.

That's how I know that she thinks I'm a pretty cool cousin: Blinky is actually white fleece, but the blood from her sewing mistakes made it that deep red.

Thanks, Jessica!

52WOGD Week 1: Chance Dice (Flash)

Language: Flash (AS3)

Thoughts: The first week of "52 Weeks of Game Development" is complete. The game I created is called Chance Dice. I recently purchased this book called Dice Games Properly Explained because I've always had this affinity toward dice based games. I like the mix of luck and strategy because sometimes that "lucky roll" is equally as rewarding as it is frustrating.

I based this game off of the ruleset for the game "Evens and Odds". The game essentially has you rolling five dice, subtracting the odds sum from the evens sum. The original game has you pulling tokens from a central pot for any positive score (12 - 5 = 7 tokens from the pot to you, for example) and putting tokens back to the central pot for a negative score (8 - 10 = -2 tokens, for example).

I switched it up a little by adding the ability to hold dice at the cost of a roll. This way you can mitigate a terrible roll (let's say all odds) by holding on to the lowest one of the batch. This also allows you to balance whether or not it would be a good idea to sacrifice a roll (or more) to simply hold some good dice (like a pair of 6's).

I also formatted the game to be 480x320 so it would run on an iPhone. It's up for approval now and will be free to download. I'll let you know when it's officially launched.

Source: AS3 CS5 (~500kb)

Related Link: Chance Dice on ShenGames.com

52 Weeks of Game Development = 52 Playables for 2012

I made a New Year's resolution earlier this week that I wanted to release a game very week of the year. Josie shunned the idea as she's a bigger fan of my games that are larger and more in-depth. I personally, due to time constraints and whatnot, am more interested in the exercise of fast prototyping and producing many works.

I've decided to combine a little from the two columns to see if I can keep this going. The rules for myself are as follows:

• A new playable game is to be released by the Saturday of every week, 11:59pm PST.
• The game can be made in any language.
• I may revisit an old game released earlier in the year if changes to the actual gameplay are made. For example: I make a simple dice game one week and decide to add a new mode and computer opponents another week. That's allowed. Simply changing some graphics? That's not allowed.
• The game has to be made from that Sunday, 12:00am PST to the Saturday, 11:59pm PST.
• In the spirit of Ludum Dare compos, the source will be downloadable.

If you'd like to participate, I'd love to see your works too! Follow me on Twitter or message me your creation!

Let's use #52wogd as a Twitter hashtag.

Dumb Puppet Sonic

By Richard DaLuz

I've seen a few of these and enjoy them thoroughly, but this one takes the cake thus far.

Source: Dumb Running Sonic Tumblr