1GAM April: Other Space

This month's One Game a Month submission was created during the Ludum Dare jam, and I teamed up with Paul again who whipped up some fantastic graphics. Other Space was created in 72 hours.

At first, we struggled to match the game idea we had to the theme ("Minimalism"), but thanks to a huge lightbulb moment, we had our game on track by the end of day one.

I'll post a timelapse of the Jam here once I have one.



 

 I'm not going to give away too much about the game, check out the video and screenshots. It's a short but (in my opinion) beautiful experience that I'm extremely proud of.

 

 

I have to say, I'm loving taking part in game jams. I'm not too sure I could do a solo one, but the two of us working together on something as awesome as Other Space and having fun while doing it is something I'm sure I'll be doing more of in future.

 

Tools Used

• Monogame / XNA
• Visual Studio 2012
• Photoshop CS6
• Fireworks CS6
• Audition CS6
• Spine
• Texture Packer

Clockwatching

72 hours. And it seemed way shorter than that!

Special Thanks

• James and Matt for coming round to support us for a couple of hours.
• Everyone that tweeted, 'booked, and joined us in Twitch chat.

Downloads

Windows. If it doesn't run, you may need to install OpenAL.

• Other Space - Windows .zip

And Linux. This has been tested on Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon), you may need to install libSDL-mixer (sudo apt install libsdl-mixer1.2). If still no joy, run from a terminal (mono OtherSpace.exe) and copy/paste the output into a comment below.

• Other Space - Linux .tar.gz

1GAM March: Super Turbo Racer '89

March has come and gone, and with it - a new game!

This month's One Game a Month submission took me way out of my comfort zone and into three dimensions. It's not often I make 3D games as I don't really have a head for maths, but I forced myself to give it a go and I'm really glad I did.

The idea to make a "Pseudo-3D" racing game started a year or more ago when I was linked to Lou's Pseudo 3d Page. As a childhood fan of racers like Outrun and Lotus Turbo Challenge, I really fancied the idea of making a game in the same style.

However, the one game I really wanted to emulate above all was Power Drift, my favourite of all the not-quite-3D racing games. I intend to write a blog post that goes into detail on the engine I came up with, but the gist of it is that I ended up ditching the idea of emulating the sprite-based pseudo-3D in favour of an actual 3D engine that emulated the look of pseudo-3D (which was trying to emulate real 3D).

 

 

 

 

The gameplay took a bit of a backseat this month. I'm not particularly happy with the handling of the car or the AI of the rival cars, they're functional rather than fun. This month it was all about challenging myself to work in 3D, and making an attempt to emulate the graphical style of Power Drift.

 

 

I'm really happy with the way it turned out, and I feel more confident that I could use stylized 3D graphics in future games.

 

Next month, I'm hoping to finally release Dreamland as my 1GAM submission. There's also Ludum Dare on the last weekend of April, and I'm due to take part in the 72-hour Jam contest. The product of the jam will most likely be the basis for May's 1GAM submission.

 

Tools Used

• Monogame / XNA
• Visual Studio 2012
• Photoshop CS6
• Audition CS6
• Blender

Clockwatching

Super Turbo Racer '89 was created in six weeks, beginning with a prototype on the 13th February (during development of GravWalker). I took it easy for the middle two weeks of March, though. I'd estimate there's around 70 hours' work here.

Special Thanks

• Ken Snyder for letting me licence a few of his great demoscene-style tracker tunes.

Downloads

Windows version is ready. If it doesn't run, you may need to install OpenAL.

• Super Turbo Racer '89 - Windows .zip

And Linux. This has been tested on Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon), you may need to install libSDL-mixer (sudo apt install libsdl-mixer1.2). If still no joy, run from a terminal (mono SuperTurboRacer89.exe) and copy/paste the output into a comment below.

• Super Turbo Racer '89 - Linux .tar.gz

1GAM February: GravWalker

I'm powering into February with GravWalker, a gravity-defying shoot-em-up that takes inspiration from the Amiga game Walker. It was one of my favourite games on my favourite platform and I think I've done well by it.

I've also used the idea of a 360-degree rotating tilemap to create what I believe is a pretty fun and unique game. Download and play or just watch the video and I think you'll agree!

 

 

 

For this month's game I've pushed myself to do as much of the graphics as possible by myself. I want to get better at creating 2D art and although I realise I will never be as good as I need to be, I at least want to get to a level slightly above "programmer art". For GravWalker, I drew and animated the majority of the game sprites myself. I made judicious use of particles to add to the eye candy - and to mask some of the flaws in my art!

 

 

You may notice that I'm releasing this in the middle of February. Why am I releasing now instead of using the remaining week-and-a-bit to add more to the game? Well firstly, GravWalker is a complete one-level prototype that has a beginning, a middle and an end. To create more levels and expand the ideas into a full game would take me well beyond the end of February. 

 

Secondly, I wanted to get ahead of time in the One Game a Month challenge because my March game is taking me outside of my 2D comfort zone and into the realm of 3D. Keep an eye on my Twitter to see more of that over the coming weeks. Now I have a whole six weeks for the next project which gives me a good safety buffer.

 

Tools Used

• Monogame / XNA
• Visual Studio 2012
• Photoshop CS6
• Audition CS6
• Tiled
• Spriter

Clockwatching

GravWalker was created in 30 days, beginning with an exploratory prototype on the 17th January. I would say an average of 20 hours per week was dedicated to the game once the initial prototype was running.

Special Thanks

• Paul Yendley for the awesome game background
• deviantArt user ~gregah for the helicopter sprite that I used for inspiration for drawing the other vehicles.

Downloads

As always, the Windows version is ready to go. If it doesn't run, you may need to install OpenAL.

• GravWalker - Windows .zip

And a test Linux download.

• GravWalker - Linux .tar.gz

Disclaimer: I am not a Linux user. I have cobbled together a package that runs on a FRESH Linux Mint 14 without installing any other dependencies. YMMV. Use the .sh script to run the game. If it doesn't work, try it from a terminal: "mono GravWalker.Mono.Linux.exe". Running from a terminal will give you a an error dump that you can copy and paste into a comment below.

Please send me a tweet @garethiw if you manage to run the Linux version successfully!

1GAM January: You are the Villain / HeroBash

My first offering for the One Game a Month challenge started out as a 48-hour game jam that happened over New Year's weekend. Myself and artist partner-in-crime Paul had been chatting about doing a game jam for a while, but unfortunately missed the last Ludum Dare. To make up for it, we used the last Ludum theme - "You are the Villain" - and got together for a weekend. It was the first time either of us had participated in a jam.

 

The outcome was our game, unimaginatively entitled "You are the Villain", which is a platformer tower-defense(ish) game. Rather than playing as the hero navigating the levels, the hero is AI controlled and your job (as the Villain) is to place Minions in the level as the hero traverses and attempts to reach the Princess at the end. The result was actually a pretty addictive little game, excellent for playing in short bursts. We continued working on the game well into January adding an overworld screen, more maps, a leveling up mechanic for the hero and more. We even came up with a better name - "HeroBash".

 

 

 

 

 

The intention is to eventually release HeroBash as a full game on as many platforms as possible. It works pretty well as a tablet game, so that'll be the start point. For the purposes of One Game a Month, I'm making available a Windows build of the original 48-hour jam version as well as the latest version of HeroBash actual. I hope to add Linux and Mac downloads for HeroBash as soon as I figure out how to package up a MonoGame game sensibly for either of those platforms.
 

 

Tools Used

• Monogame / XNA
• Visual Studio 2012
• Photoshop CS6
• Tiled

Downloads

• You are the Villain (48-hour jam) - Windows
• HeroBash (latest build) - Windows

New Year, New Things

It may be a little late for a new year blog entry, but with good reason - I've been busy experimenting!

I've spoken before about how the adage "the last ten percent takes ninety percent of the time" in the context of games development is entirely true. I've realised that most of the last four years that I've been reviving Team Mango have been spent stuck in the "last ten percent" doldrums. The part where you finished all of the gameplay features long ago, and you're stuck in some kind of hell where you're polishing UI, adding platform-specific features, writing tutorials, intros and outros, and scouring stock sites for sound effects that might come close to what you hear in your head.

I've decided it's time to change.

While I do fully intend on finishing Dreamland at some point (there's maybe two-to-three percent of actual work left to do for a Windows Phone release), I'm no longer going to let my creativity be held captive by the project that's been hanging over me for two years and three months now. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to actually make a game.

So in September last year, I started experimenting with Monogame. This came after the stark realisation that Microsoft isn't going to be around in its current form forever and I need to become platform-agnostic pretty damn quickly. That said, I still love .NET and C# and I don't want to move to Unity as I still prefer to work in pure 2D, and I still like to get my hands dirty with engine code. XNA is still the best platform for me, and Monogame is the perfect next step.

In the few months that I've been dabbling with Monogame, I've ported Dreamland to Windows 8 (as marketplace app), used it to make a collaborative game project cross-platform, and participated in a 48-hour game jam. All using Monogame alongside XNA.

It also means that in the same space of time, I've taken three game projects from concept to prototype. And I've not felt that usual sense of guilt when I've moved on to a new project instead of finishing a game to the point of release. And in 2013, I'm going to attempt to continue along these lines by participating in the One Game a Month project.

Now, I probably won't end up releasing every game I make in a playable form each month, but rather will post screenshots and video along with a blog post for each project. Then, around the holidays I'll decide which of the prototypes I want to take forward to release on multiple platforms in 2014 and I'll make the others available as both source and executable.

It's quite an ambitious idea, so we'll see how it pans out. As I've only just decided to participate, I'm going to cheat and use the game that I developed during the 48-hour jam as January's game, as I did continue to work on it at the start of this month.

Have a great 2013, whatever you get up to!

All-in with Microsoft: The first few hours

It has begun. My Windows 8 experience begun in earnest with an install to a brand new 256GB SSD. I'm currently dual-booting with Windows 7, but plan to ditch the old OS as soon as I've pulled across everything I need.

For this first update, I'm just going to list some of the niggles and surprises I came across in my first few hours exploring Windows 8 as a replacement for my Windows 7 desktop.

• Starting off with a positive, I absolutely love the multi-monitor support in Windows 8. I run three displays as extended desktops, and have always used Ultramon on Windows 7 to provide taskbar and wallpaper functionality for the second and third displays. Windows 8 takes care of that out of the box, and does so quite elegantly.

• For some reason, I was under the impression that Metro was locked to your primary display. This is not the case. Every desktop has the same corner zones for Start, Charms and task switching. When you click to open the Start screen on a display other than your primary, the Metro experience opens up on that display. It also resizes to the display's resolution (I have three different-sized displays).

• Furthermore, if you open a Metro app from the Start screen on any display, the app will remain open on that display while you carry on working on the desktop on other displays...

• ...which would be awesome if there were any Metro apps worth using. I haven't yet dived into the store for third-party apps, but the standard apps are barely functional at best, and downright buggy at worst. I'm going to dedicate a whole post to railing on them very soon. What I will suggest is making sure to update the apps from the Store before you start using them, as that will at least take care of some of the initial bugs... 

• ...like the hour that I spent trying to figure out how to connect to my Outlook.com account from the Mail app. Once the mail app was updated, the Outlook.com account showed up automatically (which I expected from the outset as it's tied to the Microsoft account that I use with Windows 8). All I needed to do then was to go to the account settings in Mail and check the option to sync Email from that account.

• The new desktop stuff is all great. The new file explorer, the file copy dialogue and new Task Manager are fantastic. Once the newness of Metro wears off and I largely ignore it (save from the odd decent Metro app, video playback and the Start screen), I can honestly see Windows 8 being a joy to use.

I'm still waiting for my Surface to be dispatched.

I'm going all in with Microsoft

It's been a long time since I've blogged anything. So long, in fact, that Blogger appears to have an entirely new back-end interface. I took a long hiatus from games development over the summer, only recently getting back into it. I'll save that for another post entirely apart from mentioning that Dreamland is not dead, and will be finished at some point.

This is the first in what will more than likely be a series of blogs where I lay out my decision to go "all-in" with Microsoft this year and beyond, and write about my experiences within the Microsoft ecosystem.

What does "all-in" mean, exactly?

I will be adopting and using the following hardware, software and cloud services in my personal life on a day-to-day basis:

• Windows 8 Pro on my main home PC
• Surface RT
• Windows Phone 8 (More than likely a Nokia Lumia 920)
• Xbox 360
• Microsoft cloud services, to include:
• Outlook.com for email, calendar and contacts
• Skydrive
• Xbox Music
• Internet Explorer 10 as my primary browser (while having Chrome on standby for comparison)
• Visual Studio 2012
• Office 2010 now, 2013 when available

What I've been using recently

I've always been a "Microsoft guy", since moving from the Amiga back in 1999. My primary reason initially was because I'm also a gamer, and Windows was the only real way to game (outside of consoles) for the longest time.

More recently, I've stuck with the Microsoft ecosystem because I believe that Microsoft have, hands down, the best software development stack with the combined power of Visual Studio, C# and .NET. I work with Microsoft CRM and .NET in my day job, and I develop games with XNA as a hobby.

So what does my current technology usage look like, compared with the above list?

• Windows 7 Ultimate on my main home PC
• No tablet
• Windows Phone 7 (Nokia Lumia 800)
• Xbox 360
• Cloud services:
• Gmail for email
• Google calendar
• Live.com for contacts
• Skydrive
• Zune for music (with a Zune pass)
• Chrome as my primary browser
• Visual Studio 2010
• Office 2010

Not exactly a world apart, right? Main differences will be Windows 8, IE as primary browser, and Outlook.com for email. I'll also have a tablet. I'm not even sure where a tablet fits in to my "digital life" - the Surface will mostly be used for development.

Initial trepidations

I have a lot of hangups regarding Windows 8. I've tweeted about them a fair bit, but Twitter really isn't the place for constructive ranting, thus the blogging. I'll go into more detail in subsequent posts, but making the leap from 7 is far and away the most daunting part of this silly experiment.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the Surface, and more importantly Windows RT. I'm absolutely of the opinion that the Desktop mode shouldn't be in RT, but I guess it had to be as Office won't be fully Metro-ised for a couple of years (if ever). That's really my only thought about RT as it stands - everything else will come down to daily usage and app availability.

Sidenote: I will be using the "Metro" moniker throughout. I don't care that it's not a thing, it was a great name and MS should have stuck with it, consequences be damned.

Using IE10 as my primary browser is a bit of a question mark. I've not been as vehemently against IE as almost everyone else seems to be, but I stopped using it in favour of Chrome a couple of years back. I don't know how this is going to go. I hope bookmark syncing is in there somewhere.

Why not Apple?

I get it. Apple make incredibly sexy hardware and couple it with software that just works. They have a quickly-maturing cloud ecosystem, and iOS has all the apps.

But at the end of the day, I'm a .NET developer and a gamer. Windows is the home for both of those things.

And besides, I like to support the underdog.

First Steps

I've put in my Surface pre-order. I have an SSD on the way to do a fresh install of Windows 8 (by the way, I've never used an SSD before). I'll have to wait to get my hands on a Lumia 920 as it sounds like they have an exclusive with Everything Everywhere and my contract with Three isn't up until April. I've started using Outlook.com and have forwarded all my current email addresses to it.

Here goes!

Dreamland Dream Build Play 2012 Teaser

To celebrate completion of the six "dungeon" areas of Dreamland, we've released a short teaser trailer! This is a major milestone, and we're well on our way to having a completed game to enter into the Windows Phone category of DBP 2012. Enjoy!

 

New Dreamland Screenshots

Work is progressing nicely on Dreamland, an RPG for Windows Phone 7 which will be an entry in this year's Dream Build Play competition. We're hard at work on the Windows Phone version of the game, which we're targeting for a June release! Without further ado, here's a selection of new screenshots from the current alpha test of the game:

And here's a bonus video of timelapsed development running up to the current beta:

Target: Dream Build Play 2012

First post of 2012!

The news that there will be a Windows Phone category in the Dream Build Play competition this year has given me a solid target for Dreamland's completion. While no actual submission dates have been announced yet, I'm fairly confident in my assumption that we'll be looking at a June date for final entries.

Six months is plenty enough time to finish Dreamland and give it all the polish it deserves. Leon, Team Mango's resident graphics artist has been hard at work producing the last of the assets and storyline required to complete work and I'm following up with getting the last of the game mechanics coded.

To give me some extra motivation - and taking a cue from some of the Ludum Dare participants - I've started live streaming of my development sessions. Using a rather neat app called XSplit, I can screencast and show the game running on my Lumia 800 via webcam all on the same stream. I can stream to the Team Mango UStream channel and record to disk at the same time. The recordings allow me to make neat timelapse videos like this one:



My plan is to record and stream most of my Dreamland development sessions between now and DBP and make a huge timelapse video at the end of it all.

I'll be livestreaming at weekends and on weekday evenings (GMT), though not to any fixed schedule. I'll always announce on Twitter before I begin. It's development, so I can't promise too much excitement but I will sometimes have the microphone on and commentate my work.

Here's to a productive new year!