I made a game for the Experimental Gameplay Project this month. The theme was "Night and Day".

Play it here!

It's a shmup where you fly along a gigantic cylinder (“the Axle of Heaven”) and fight enemies on the “dark” side while collecting ammo and powerups on the obstacle-filled “light” side. Compatible with Xbox 360 controllers (A to fire, X for special) or really any joystick.

There are a few bugs... occasionally enemies will spawn on top of each other and “push” the other one out into space, pretty amusing. Also, it’s very very rare but occasionally the light side will generate a wall of four obstacles which is impossible to dodge if you are in the center of the light side.

Undocumented control: press up to boost your speed... usually this isn’t a good idea though.

I'm interested in ways that the game could be improved. If I had more time I would have made music, improved the enemy/obstacle placement algorithms, and made it so bullets could curve over axis, and have bullets that curve over the cylinder to allow for non-vertical shots.

Would love some feeback on this.

Can play it at the website here: www.blue-galaxy.co.uk

Looks and feels awesome, like a simplified Diablo. I want to be able to dodge by merely right-clicking in the direction I want to dodge into.

I think the armor / health system works. Dungeon crawlers can get really frustrating when you're almost dead and can't really accomplish anything, but must hunt for potions in order to get out of the state, in a kind of catch-22.

The BIT.TRIP games probably fit the bill, too, even though there is practically zero story involved.

Got entities in, as well as being about to get them from chests! Also been spending way, way too long tweaking the UI animations to get it feeling smooth as butter.

Also getting back into doing art. I'm trying my hand at doing low-res stuff, although I think my colors and UV layouts could use some work. And C&C would be welcome.

Also put up a proper devlog, although I really should update it more often. Hopefully now I've got entities basically in I should be able to update it with interesting stuff more often. Give it a look at www.nick-london.com.

(Also yeah I know the 'Mail' text on the mailbox is flipped for some weird reason, I think my model exporter is flipping stuff accidentally)

Hey, looks pretty cool! I really like the point-sampled textures. I can only think of two things; firstly, the resolution of the textures on the sword seems a bit inconsistent. The blade has particularly chunky pixels but the hilt and handle have much smaller ones. Secondly, if you are going to more or less disable lighting on chests or things like chests, you might want to modify the texture of the inside of the chest to be darker, such that the lighting is "baked" in. I think it would make the chests look cooler, though the existing texture is pretty good looking already.

UI animations and slickness are important, it's true that it might bog things down to get them polished early in and not towards the end, but either way they are surprisingly important to making the game feel polished.

"Gamedesign-Quickies" sounds kinda dirty. 

Awesome news! Wish I could take part, but trans-atlantic plane tickets in summer aren't cheap.

Found a fun bug... On the intro level before tutorial 1, if you redirect green along with blue to the exit, and NOT red as well, it will transport you to Intermediate 9.

Also, I assume it's intentional since it's just a demonstration, but you can clear the level by doing nothing. If you want to redirect all three colors, you have to use the W/S controls to move the play grid, which the instructions have not mentioned. I am going to keep playing now to see for myself, but you might want to make sure that the W/S controls are explained before there is a puzzle that requires them.

]You also might want to mention the Z key (undo) early on, as soon as tutorial 2 or 3.] Oops, I see you already do that.

Intermediate 9 level title "Yello Magenta" => "Yellow Magenta"

This looks like a freaking awesome idea:

Artemis is a multiplayer game that lets you and your friends play as a starship bridge crew. One computer displays the main screen and runs the simulation server. the rest serve as bridge station consoles, like Helm, Comms, Weapons, Science, and Engineering.

One player plays as the captain, with a central chair but no workstation of his/her own.

Artemis was created by Thom Robertson, and will be downloadable at the website:
http://artemis.eochu.com/

I tried to do something vaguely like this with "Verteidiger", but at a much smaller scope and using only one computer. I'm surprised no one has thought of it before, the theme is a perfect fit with the control concepts.

Are you using a custom rendering engine (without hardware acceleration) or just a whole lot of little cubes rendered in OpenGL / DirectX / whatever?

More voxel goodness here:
http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm
http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap01.htm

Gomez should be able to upgrade to A bigger fez.

I expect 80 levels of hat-related progression at launch, including epic purple fezzes. If not I'm just going back to WoW.

I'm not sure how the accumulator plays into the game or how they are useful. Some of the levels that expect a sequence, as well as an earlier blue level where an accumulator exists, contain accumulators that aren't necessary to solve the puzzle; I simply positioned projectors in front of each emitter and ones aligned with the goal such that they would create a stream in the correct pattern. It seems like they can only contain one color type at a time, but it's not clear why that's useful. Aat the blue/magenta level where there is only one red and one blue emitter it is clear that they can be used in some way to "multiply" an emitter.

More importantly, though, you can't tell what direction a projector goes except at the time that you place it; in more complicated levels with cubes flying everywhere it can be hard to remember which way you placed your projectors. I would suggest you put a semi-transparent arrow texture or model on the projectors (or a model inside; whatever looks best) softly indicating the direction they project to. I would also suggest you make the narrow white block that appears when placing a projector show more clearly the direction it will point.

Also, when a level is restarted it would be nice if the help text re-appeared.

Hope this helps.

This is all I can show for now.

Awesome! Porting is often tedious and thankless, keep it up.

I made a video -

.

I'm thinking about starting a devlog for the final stretch of this.

Mind blown! Love the old fashioned briefings.

Castlevania: Suplex of Sorrow

Hopefully development on this hasn't fizzled out...

I am having the exact same errors that Nugsy is having. I can no longer seem to use any model exported from Wings3D. I noticed the misalignment issue on some earlier models but I don't really care as much now that I can't even load anything.

Here are the OBJ and wings files:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/253784/piece_fuselage_1.obj
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/253784/piece_fuselage_1.wings

This is precisely the sort of tool I would love to have, so I hope the import issues can get ironed out.

Surprised I didn't see this thread to know, and happy there are plenty of other "doppelganger" indies or whatever you want to call them.

I don't really do it any differently than anyone else here. It's a bit odd if you are working on a compo game to go to work, develop videogames, and then come home to develop more video games. My day job does a particularly good job of avoiding crunch so I don't find that to be a problem. My job officially takes precedence over my hobby, but there are many times during the day when I'd rather be working on my own game.

Developing on your own and developing on a team of 100+ are very different experiences, namely I have to be a good generalist on my own but a good specialist in a team, so they don't really feel like the same thing. Often it's a lot easier to quickly accomplish things in hobby development because the codebase is written by one person over a time period of a year or less, whereas at work I get to deal with code that might be 8 years old, has been through 5 maintainers, 3 of which no longer work there and the other 2 which had only fixed a few bugs. This huge difference is how I can keep things with my hobby games fresh and interesting pretty easily.

Sometimes I just want to waste a few days to a week playing games instead of making them, but I think that would happen anyways. Going to a place where 100+ are paid for making videogames really does reinforce the idea that I'm making something of value in my hobby. I remember before entering the industry that hobby games slowly started to feel more and more like something that I would never get anywhere with, that no one really cared about.

Looks really cool! I suggest you let players enter their seeds with alphanumeric characters, which are then converted to an integer and then used as the proper seed. It would make seeds easier to share and more memorable.

Good to see more people working on macro strategy games!

Haven't posted in awhile... I'd really like some more testers! Making everything work as intended takes a long time, and I haven't even really seriously tried polishing anything.

A recent screenshot:


I want to start working on the overgame but the basic tactical game is nowhere near finished. I need to at least get it pretty solid before moving on.

One of the more interesting pieces of code I've written is the one to make blazons. I plan to have them all be procedurally generated using real-life heraldry standards, with a few modern colors and fictional charges (symbols), so that empires, kingdoms, duchies, counties, baronies, and the dynasties that rule them will all have some strong symbols to go along with them. Currently I have a component that lets you hand-create blazons using colors you choose and a small set of ordinaires, charges, and patterns.

This is what it looks like, set up in the Unity editor but before you run the game:

And this is after you've started the game and the textures are generated:


My blog post about the script goes into some more detail, and provides a link to the full source that you can freely use in your own projects:
http://nihilocrat.tumblr.com/post/1089498306/textureutils

I could be a coder / sailing counselor but am kind of busy with work and Her Majesty's Royal Space Armada.

Furthermore, the sailboat size and design makes me think of this popular design:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunfish_%28dinghy%29

This is a similar boat in the same class:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimist_%28dinghy%29

And yet another one, which uses something closer to the traditional Bermuda rigging you see on most modern sailboats:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_%28dinghy%29

Just thought I would pass on a link of an article about video gaming prehistory:
http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Earth Commander something something? I am pretty sure I saw a devlog / feedback page for it around here somewhere...