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.

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

Retro Gaming Stuff: 1989 Topps Nintendo Cards

I found this pretty awesome card the other day from the 1989 Topps Nintendo trading card set. I'm surprised I still kept it somewhere.

When Topps was commissioned to do these cards, they made some pretty neat scratch-and-win Zelda themed cards. You basically had to just try to scratch off the right areas in a certain order to obtain the highest score possible. It was like playing a game where you only had one life... or a child's version of Lottery scratchers.

Either way, it was great.

Related Link: Topps Nintendo Cards

The closest I'll get to Super Potato for a while.

SUPER POTATO from studiodonbe on Vimeo.

When I go to Japan one day, I will sleep here.

Professor Layton - London Life - Central London Map

I decided to make a map of Central London for the London Life game inside of Professor Layton and the Last Specter. I realized that once you level up past the standard trash picker (I picked trash three times), you'll then be able to drive a taxi. Driving the taxi requires you to know where passengers want to go. I wasn't able to drive off the screen, or at least in my single attempt, so I ended up only creating the one map for Central London. Hopefully this helps you guys familiarize yourself with Central London before you know it like the back of your hand. I added Formality requirements for kicks. Also, I have ??? in some spots because I don't know who lives there yet (haven't met them, I guess).

Enjoy!

Related Link: Professor Layton and the Last Specter for Nintendo DS

Mister Goh - War of the North

Picked up Lord of the Rings: War in the North. You should play it so I'm not playing alone. The review snippet they used from IGN.com is simply "...addictive...".

I am curious as to what appeared before and after those elipses. Perhaps it said something like, "This game is the least addictive game I've played in years." Anyway, neat game. Certainly one of the better LOTR ones out there.

I also feel that you could replace the game title in this comic strip to any of the following and still have it be appropriately fitted for me: Professor Layton and the ANYTHING, Animal Crossing, Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect. Such a range of gaming!

Related Link: Mister Goh #313 - War of the North

Work in Progress: Fight Night Flyer

The folks at The MADE, essentially the Bay Area's museum for video games, asked me to do a flyer for them for their weekly retro fighting game nights. I haven't done illustrative work in this capacity in a while and it was fun to get to it again. They only asked me to do a black and white version, but thought it'd be wasteful to not color it in.

Anyhow, if you're in the area and you see this flyer up in a window, you can say you know the chap who did it.

I also like The MADE because I'm a donor. I think it's a good cause and believe we require a place to share the importance of video game history.

Related Link: The MADE (official website)

Sure, why not?