There is more complexity in the gameplay than is conveyed in the trailer, though by design the game is pretty tight in mechanical scope. Thanks for the feedback! Also: a demo is now playable on the game's site!

The original Dragondot got a pretty favorable reception here, several years ago, and so I thought people might be interested to know that (after several goofy spinoff games) I have finally made a worthy successor to the original, in Unity. This is my first game using that engine, and the first time I'm actually selling a game to the public (rather than licensing to a sponsor or releasing for free). You can play the demo and get the game here, or check out an early prerelease trailer

.

Yes, I know I already have a topic for my weekly games, but I felt this was a major (and awesome) enough release to merit its own thread. Because seriously: Wavespark II!

...So yeah. As you may know, I make games based on titles that my site visitors provide. When I got this one, I was both excited and nervous at the prospect. Wavespark was one of my early big successes, and I wanted to create a worthy successor to it that captured what made it great without just being a rehash. So, you're still a little dot, controlled by a single button, able to launch yourself into the air at great speed through good timing and use of the environment - but instead of that environment being solid slopes, it's a liquid surface and glowing rainbowy stars suspended in the air.

And really, who doesn't love glowing rainbowy stars suspended in the air?

During the development process, I noticed that I would often run it to test some new feature, and get caught up in the game for 25 minutes just playing around with it. I decided to embrace that tendency rather than fight it, and so rather than the various timed and goal-oriented modes of the first game, I went with a "freestyle" approach: you can collect stars, race between checkpoints, try to perform high-scoring star bursts, or just relax and goof around - and moreover, you can switch freely between any of these as the mood strikes you just by playing differently, rather than having to break the flow of the game.

The math is wrong because it's in the process of counting upward. Deal with it.

Whenever the game-physics-tweaking got too tiring, I gave myself free rein to take a break by "add more shiny" - this kept me motivated and passionate about the overall design, and also resulted in my most visually spectacular game so far. Even if I did stay up all night and spend six hours straight getting the water reflection to look good while running at faster than 4 frames per second. (And, okay, maybe I have a bit of an obsession with rainbow color-cycling effects. Shut up, I'm a grown man and none of you get to tell me when I've had too many rainbows.)

Screenshot withheld. If you want to see the shiny water effect, play the game already.

All in all, I personally feel that this is one of my best games yet, and I'm quite interested to find out what the rest of you folks think about it. You can play the game on my website, or if your browser has issues with the web version download it for Windows, Mac, or Linux. Enjoy! 

Not one of my best, but pretty solid, if a bit unpolished. I find puzzle games a difficult genre to really innovate in, so I'm eager to find out what people think of this one.

How's this for a change of pace? Figured I ought to give some less-considered indie game genres some consideration... 

I've been in kind of an emotionally rough place lately. The strangeness of this game may or may not be related to that fact. The music has some brief allusions to songs from others of my games, mostly because I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention when I was making it.

Okay, this game is pretty much a straight ripoff of/love letter to the Zelda series, in a procedurally generated world, made out of rectangles. The title that I was given was "Circus Peanuts"; the theme that Ludum Dare gave me was "Discovery". It was in a playable but rather empty state by the submission deadline. I kept working on the version I posted on my website, improving and adding more music, implementing new attacks and enemies, and hiding a few secrets in the world-generation engine. It's  still not as finished as I'd like; I want to put in more bosses and terrain, and will probably release a "Director's Cut" at some point with those added. But for now, Enjoy!

[Game 40: Violent Antipathy]

Game 40: Violent Antipathy


You ever have one of those times when you have a dozen different ideas for a game, and depending on how you count it you either have enough parts for three games or enough of a design for half of a game? Yeah, this was kinda like that. The design of this game went through phases of "Bombliss ripoff", "Mr. Driller ripoff", "Ikaruga ripoff", "Ikaruga + Bombliss + Pong disaster", and finally settled down on something no more egregious than loosely borrowing a game mechanic from TUMIKI Fighters.

As to the music, I was experimenting with different sounds in Famitracker and ended up with something that sounded oddly like a scanner or printer's stepper motor.

  WALL OF GAMES!  

So I should probably get back into posting stuff here. Feedback here or at my site, and rating (on my blog posts) would be greatly appreciated.

After a slightly-longer-than-intended hiatus, I have made a triumphant return to my game-creating. And it's my first multiplayer game!

The game contains all of the following things!

• Dragondot!
• A beach!
• Volleyball!
• Female nudity!*
• Awesome music!
• 2-player simultaneous shared-keyboard action!
• Unconditional kobold love!
• Unlockable characters (at least one of whom is ON FIRE)!

Go check it out!
*Well, technically. Dragondot's female and she never wears anything, least of all a bikini. The less said about the hobgoblin, the better.

Posted to my own blog, but thought it might be relevant to TIGSource's interests.
So, I just got back from my day at PAX. There was all sorts of delightful stuff on display, fun things to do, and some very impressive demos in the expo hall. The one game that I was utterly blown away by, however, was not LittleBigPlanet 2 or Duke Nukem Forever or Final Fantasy XIV, but a student game in the PAX 10 called Solace. Something that's been on my mind lately is the fact that while games, as a medium, have certainly been explored as a vessel for expressive artistic statement, gameplay has not often been a part of that. If you take Braid and remove the text, you end up with a puzzle game involving time manipulation that is barely about anything other than puzzles involving time manipulation. On the other hand, if you took Solace, removed the text, and replaced all the beautiful graphics and superb sound design with rectangles and beeps, it would still be about the five stages of grief as represented through the gameplay of its levels - the message would not be conveyed nearly so brilliantly, but nor would it be lost.

Certainly, there have been games in the past that conveyed an artistic statement through their gameplay. Passage springs immediately to mind, for example. But the thing about Passage is that while it may or may not be effective as art, it isn't really effective as a game. It merits exploration, and provokes thoughts, certainly, but doesn't really engage the player on a visceral level. In contrast, Solace is fun, challenging, and engaging. The visuals, audio, and level design are all deliberately tuned to evoke within the player echoes of the emotion that they represent. Not just through sympathetic sensory associations, the way a painting or poem or piece of music would - though Solace uses these idioms as well - but through the nuances of the gameplay. The structure of the game expects, and at times effectively requires, the player to demonstrate an understanding of the level's relevant emotion in order to successfully proceed through the game - and indeed enables the player to do so, with nothing more nuanced than a directional control and a fire button.

Solace, in addition to being a marvelous work of art in its own right, is a lesson to all game designers of what games have the potential to be. In my own game designs, I have often run into a tension between making my game artistically meaningful and having good, solid, fun gameplay. Solace, by being excellent in both regards, has taught me that this is a false dichotomy. If Portal is worthy of a place on a course syllabus, I believe Solace can be similarly instructive, to students and designers alike.

I hereby grant blanket permission for the use of anything from my games for the purposes of Indie Brawl.

A lighthearted, casual game that has very little to do with Shakespeare. This is a personal milestone for me - the 25th weekly game I've made! Additionally, it's a submission for the EGP "Casual Addiction" theme, and also the third game I've made based on titles submitted by people who've donated to my site. Enjoy! 

This is something I've noticed in my own designs, and I'm wondering if any of the rest of you have experienced it as well. Basically, what it boils down to is this - if I try too hard to make games that are "different", I end up losing sight of what makes games fun and satisfying. I think my most recent two games illustrate this contrast well...
On the one hand, there's Fifty Stars: an immensely simple game, programmed in a few hours, but with a very satisfying elegance to it. It doesn't explore any new mechanics or ideas, it's just a simple synthesis of familiar, well-worn game atoms.
On the other hand, my latest game No more spheres!: I tried to make something more experimental, but it's an awkward mashing-together of elements that don't really seem to get along, and overall I'm very dissatisfied with how it turned out.

A similar analysis can be made of Dragondot in comparison with the sequel Dragondot's Sky. The former was really just an attempt to make a solid action-RPG/beat-em-up - just taking known design territory and polishing it to a satisfying shine. In contrast, Dragondot's Sky was aggressively experimental: the core elements of the gameplay were all largely untested ground, and while I managed to refine many of the components, the game as a whole was not quite coherent. Despite (or because of?) the fact that I put so much love and effort into it, I apparently just couldn't get it right. While the original Dragondot was widely praised, Dragondot's Sky got a viciously critical reception.

All this raises the question of where to strike the balance - how much of a game's design should be innovative, versus treading old familiar paths? It's very tempting to take a known formula that works and just make one tweak to it - and indeed, it seems my most popular games have been built along those lines. But surely, truly revolutionary games can't be built in such an incremental fashion? I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that Tetris, for example, wasn't "exactly like this other game but with X". Where do the genre-defying (or indeed genre-defining) games come from?

[at least]

So I've been slacking on my announcements lately.  Anyway, I've decided that for at least the month of July, people who donate to my site get to determine the titles of my upcoming games. I've just finished the first of these games. Granted, it's a bit depressingly short even for my usual weekly-game standards, but I had no idea what sort of game I wanted to make out of the title until the day before my deadline, and it turned out to be one of those pesky games that requires me to make and playtest levels. 

Anyway, next week's game is apparently going to be called "add additional instructions". Any suggestions for what sort of game I could possibly make out of that would be much appreciated... 

I was a little concerned this might be too "advertise-y" here, but I wasn't sure what a better section to post it would be (feel free to move it if it belongs elsewhere). Basically, in the interest of A) creative constraints and B) not being broke, I've decided to let people who donate to my site pick my game titles for a month (at minimum). I'll then do my best to make my weekly games fit those titles. Alternatively, nobody will donate and I'll end up making a game called Placeholder next week.  Anyway, my post about it is here.

Non-edit: as I was writing this post Paypal emailed me to let me know that someone had provided a donation! Sweet! :handmoneyR: And thus I am spared the indignity of making Placeholder (for a while, at least).

New guy picks this one

Save the galaxy from the evil mice empire. 8 levels full of mice, explosions and weapon powering tuna
Weapon of choice: BlitzMax

I've got my eye on that one as well. 

I got a late start to the competition, so it's only fitting that the game was finished too late for the deadline as well. But, since I made my game to fit the theme (and initial response has been surprisingly positive), I figured you folks might be interested in seeing it. Here is.
 

[!!]

With the latest revisions (v1.2), enemy movement is slow enough (if you're efficient) that saving kobolds with "!!"s is a worthwhile approach. I've completed a 100% game with a time of 16.4 by going to save kobolds after dying to the fourth boss once.

And thanks for the appreciation of the movement - the flight controls were the most experimental part of the design, and I'm very glad to hear that other people find it satisfying.

On an odd note, I'm finding that the most hastily-implemented enemies (the Drakelings and Dart Hawks) are actually some of the most fun to fight, because the best way to take them out involves a change of tactics from the other enemies.
In particular, I think Sky Lancers need a substantial amount of tweaking to be fun rather than just a pain. Mirrorbirds as well need a bit more polish (so to speak). Airmines are okay, but there's something about them that doesn't feel right just yet. Buzzards are the deliberately-vanilla enemies in the bunch, and as such I think they work fine.

It took long enough to implement the engine and enemies that I didn't have as much time to tune the difficulty as I'd have liked. I've tweaked it a bit already based on feedback I've gotten, and intend to continue doing so.


Tips and tricks:
There's no leveling up in this one (in its current form), so go after at least one of the bosses early - the lower-right one is the most straightforward.

Drakelings are armored, but there's one attack that can take them out in one hit.

Your dash ability will hurt enemies you run into.


Oh, and: If you like the music, it's available.

What's next in the Dragondot saga?

Worry not, I have Plans...