Nexus City Fridays, 26th Nov

Terry Nov 27, 2010 7 Comments

Didn’t expect to be posting another editor shot this week, but a cold left me out of action for a few days, so it’s pretty much all I got done. On Wednesday I probably should have moved on to finally mapping out Coal Mine Canyon, but I got a little carried away with editor coding (I miss Allegro!), and added a bunch of little things to make my life easier. Particularly happy with the mouse wheel controlled selector on the left of the screen!

Ok, ok; I should have something more interesting next Friday.

The Infinite Ocean Awaits

Terry Nov 20, 2010 9 Comments

I first played The Infinite Ocean in college, and loved it for its moody atmosphere and clever writing. Jonas Kyratzes originally released it way back in 2003 as a downloadable game – but just yesterday, he re-released it as a browser game, significantly reworked.

I’m collaborating with Jonas on Nexus City. If you’re not familiar with his games and wanna get a feel for his style, this is a good place to start!

Nexus City Fridays

Terry Nov 19, 2010 13 Comments

My main project right now is Nexus City, an RPG I’m working on with Jonas Kyratzes. Originally planned as a week long minirpg for an RPGDX contest, we’ve now been working on it on and off for months, and this week I started full production of it. My plan is to work on it five days a week, with weekends kept for other things (like this, this and this!).

For my own motivation, I’m gonna try posting new screenshots of it on a weekly basis! This week I’ve got a screenshot of the map editor, which is what I spent most of the week working on.

The game’s built in a little flash RPG engine I put together for a short abandoned RPG I worked on over the summer, and as a result isn’t anywhere nearly flexible enough for something as big as this game’s shaping up to be. So, this week I mostly worked on improving the engine, which isn’t work I particularly like doing, but had to be done. Lots of little things that I used to have to do manually are now handled for me by the engine – maps are named instead of numbered, and I can link them together in the editor. Scripts are now human readable instead of looking like assembly language. I don’t have to manually break up textboxes anymore.

Normally I try to do as little engine coding as I can get away with, but doing all this should hopefully make actually developing the game a lot faster (and more pleasant).

Self Destruct 2

Terry Nov 14, 2010 8 Comments

Way back at the start of the year, I made a blog post about some of the ideas I had for new games to work on this year. Originally I wanted to try releasing a game a month, but that didn’t really work out. The main thing I wanted to work on, though, the first thing I listed, was to make a more ambitious shooter:

There’s something about constructing a set of shooter mechanics that I really enjoy – it’s very different from the way I usually approach level design. I don’t feel like I’ve really explored this interest of mine very much at all, so this year I’ll probably make several shooters.

I love making shooters, but I’ve yet to spend more than a weekend or so making one. So, with Nexus City ramping up into a big serious project, I decided to take a week out and make something else first.

I don’t have an actual title yet, but since I’m sorta thinking of it as a spiritual successor to Self Destruct, I’ve been calling it Self Destruct 2.

(There’s also a bit of Bullet Time in there too)

What I’m trying to do with this, basically, is to take the ultra-fast, short-round thing I’ve done in the past and extend it over multiple levels. I’ve been working on it sporadically all week, so already I’ve put more work into it than any other shooter I’ve made, but it’s still far from done. My plan for further development is to make it my weekend project, with Nexus City being a Monday-Friday thing.

Saint’s Yarn

Terry Nov 9, 2010 83 Comments

Check out these socks!

Cool, huh? They were knitted by TIGSource poster Saint – he’s also knitted Aquaria socks, Fez socks, Hero Core socks, a Star Guard beanie – and he’s auctioning the whole lot off for the charity Child’s Play on ebay.

I think this is incredibly cool and generous, so I wanted to make some small contribution towards it. I’m offering a free, giftable copy of VVVVVV on steam to everyone who bids on the VVVVVV socks! Spread the word 🙂 (Here’s the VVVVVV sock auction.)

[21st Nov, Edit] The auction has ended, but unfortunately the winner bidder retracted his bid. The auction holder, Saint, is currently going through the list making eBay second chance offers. However, because they take an awful lot of time and effort to deal with, we’re only allowing so many before we rerun the auction.

I’m seeing a couple of comments here along the lines of “Oh, I made a bid and I would have totally paid!“. Needless to say I’m a bit sceptical, but if that’s true, feel free to contact Saint at the email address here, and tell him what your eBay username and bid amount was! If none of the top ten bidders pay up, then the socks will be offered to the person who makes the highest legitimate bid by email to Saint. Every bidder below the paying bidder will get a free copy of VVVVVV.

(if Saint doesn’t hear from anyone, then he’ll rerun the auction instead.)

Minigame Roundup

Terry Nov 4, 2010 8 Comments

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately! It’s been a busy month. Very soon I hope to post about how my main project Nexus City is progressing, and also about a small side thing I’ve been working on lately, but first I wanna catch up on a few minigames I made recently that I never got around to posting. (They’re all Klik of the Month games!)

First up: I’ve remade my June KOTM game “Going Forward” in flash. Check it out here.

I think this might be my favourite Klik of the Month game from this year so far. However, I think the original version was quite rough around the edges, having just been thrown together in two hours with a default Ren’Py script. So, I decided to take the basic choose-your-own-adventure framework I wrote last month and redo it in that. I’m much happier with this new version.

Next up; for the recent Halloween KOTM, I made a spooky game about phobias! You can play that one here. I guess it’s pretty flawed, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

Finally, in September I mashed up Tale of Tale’s The Graveyard with Dance Dance Revolution to create Graveyard Graveyard Revolution. (It’s largely inspired by this crazy video which was doing the rounds on a couple of Irish blogs a few months ago.)