Well, it’s not an official entry, since it’s way too late. You can see what I was trying to achieve here and here. Essentially, I was attempting to entertain myself in the boring parts of a plane flight from Rome to Melbourne, via Hong Kong, by making my Ludum Dare entry. Various problems, mainly to do with finding working laptop power, prevented me from submitting it by the deadline.
This is the product of about two laptop battery charges (~2.5 hours), and one hour to polish, fix the odd bug and package .. so in total it’s about a ~6 hour game. It’s based on the garbage compactor scene from a particular space opera that had it’s heyday in the late 70’s and early 80’s. You could imagine it was one of the ideas that was considered, then discarded, before the early arcade developers went “Nah, we should do a 3D X-Wing game with vector graphics. That would be much cooler”.
You are the (inexplicably) green hero. You play with the arrow keys. You move bits of junk (grey) such that you can jam the compactor before it crushes you. Some bits of junk (white), are too large to move. There is only one level and no sound.
Play it here (Java applet, requires the Java plugin that you most likely already have installed).
Here’s a new game I’ve been developing on-and-off for a few months now. I’ve become pretty busy at “The Day Job” recently, and due to commuting time I haven’t found time to add all the features I’d like. I thought rather than sit on this game for many more months, I’d just release it as is. It’s polished enough to play … but you’ll need a friend (if you live in Melbourne … I’m happy to drop round and play it with you 
).
Phobocore is a two-player hotseat game, where the aim is to capture all the planets onscreen by shooting them. It’s sort of a cross between Asteroids and Risk/Galcon, with a respectful nod to open field overhead shooters like Robotron, Bezerk or Gauntlet.
The experience of creating this game has been quite enlightening so far. It really got me thinking about aspects of game design I hadn’t thought deeply about. I threw around lots of ideas relating to ‘resources’ and ‘defenses’, particularly thinking about how RTSs like Starcraft require balance in play style between defense building, offensive maneuvers and resource gathering. Good players must multitask and proiritize to get the upperhand on their opponents. Key questions like “Should captured/neutral/enemy planets be solid objects or unhindering ?” occupied more than one dinner time conversation, bearing out all the ways these would changed the game. I had great fun testing the effect of different game rules, and how these changed the dynamics of the gameplay (with huge thanks to my long-suffering girlfriend for playtesting. The next best thing to writing an AI player ). If you are keen to fiddle with these game rules yourself, you can throw various flags in the phobocore.py sourcecode to test how these variations change the play style required to win.
I also spent considerable time tweaking things like fire rates and the “planets-held to ammo recharge rate” ratio to try and make the game somewhat fun. It works pretty well for players that are equally matched, but much like Galcon, once one player gets an edge, it can be hard to recover and things are over pretty quickly.
Big features I’d love to add in the future: an AI compurer player for single player mode, and maybe network play. I need to work on the collision detection, improve the graphics, add background music, and add a help screen / tutorial screen and slap on a license (probably GPL for code and Creative Commons for audiovisual assests).
Have fun & feedback is, as always, welcome !
I made a Towlr. It’s a puzzle. It comes to you without instruction and without explanation. Discover their secret for a delicious reward. It is possible. You may become frustrated. You may even have a minor hissy fit. This is quite normal.
(Thanks to Mike Kasprzak of Sykhronics Entertainment for hosting this monstrosity. Respect to the other Fathers and Mothers of Towlr’s)
Internode is running a Chumby competition for developers: create an Australian localised Chumby widget. The creator of the highest rated widget wins a chumby, a copy of Adobe Flash CS4 Professional and an $800 credit towards Internode services …. and lots of glory. I probably won’t have time to participate, but any keen Aussie Flash developers should really give it a shot. I reckon some sort of backyard cricket game would go down well.
photo credit: yoppy
Entries close January 9th, 2009, so get crackin’ .
Badass Frog postmortem – the ‘meh’ factor
After my LD #11 ‘Minimalist’ entry was voted “most innovative” game, I’ve been trying to pride myself as “that guy that makes innovative games”. So I thought long and hard about the theme for LD #13, “Roads”, trying to come up with something innovative. But the creative juices just weren’t flowing, and it didn’t happen (I’d also just bought Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip for Wii, which was taking time away from ‘designing time’). After 12 hours, with no good ideas for a game I was actually enthused about making, I decided to make a simple Frogger clone – at least this way I could hone my Processing skills, and learn the ins-and-outs of Mobile Processing.
Some thoughts about developing for mobile devices
Turns out there is a whole “other world” of mobile development that I just hadn’t really thought all that hard about. Read the rest of this entry »
