Monkey looks like it's aiming to fill a similar niche as Haxe. Nice game.

Yes, the advantage of haxe is, that it supports php/neko targets out of the box, so you can write a client/server browsergames in one language and use shared objects for both the back- and the frontend.

But I really like the simple rendering engine (mojo) of monkey.

Very interesting.

Tried this on Chrome/mac, it was a very satisfying play. However there were periodic distracting split-second pauses in the action and the audio/video sync was very poor.

Yes, I have this problem also from time to time. Will have a look at it and try to improve it. Thanks!

http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/ :-)

Hi Indies,

I just started playing around with monkey (a new language) and wrote a small asteroids clone in under 4 hours.

You can play it here:

http://www.intermediaware.com/blog/1141

I hope you like it, feedback is welcome :-)

I submitted my game as soon as I've heard about 8bitfunding. At first I really liked the idea, but then when I thought about it I changed my opinion. This is the reason why my project is listed there.

I also put  a project of mine on 8bitfunding. At first I liked the idea of a kickstarter-like portal for indiegame developers very much (because over here in Europe we can't start Kickstarter projects as far as I know). But when I thought about it a few days, I changed my opinion:

First of all, the portal looks a little bit amateurish to me. The people behind seems to often test and play around with their live system, which isn't a good idea. There are also some bugs for quite some time now and it doesn't look like they would fix it.

Second, why would an indie put his project on 8bitfunding. He can also try to get founders by putting a paypal button on his webpage (like Minecraft did). The only reason could be traffic and the right people finding it. But right now it doesn't look like they could generate enough buzz to drive huge amount of people to their website for such a project.

i like your idea, but you should improve the following things:

- the ball physics should be more realisticly
- the player should be able to move the paddle left/right with the mouse

Here you can listen and download music I've made for my games:

http://joemanaco.bandcamp.com/album/psychoballs-soundtrack
http://joemanaco.bandcamp.com/album/absolute-blue-offical-soundtrack

Ah ok, I see. Then I agree with you 

Yes, I agree with you, especially:

if I'm writing something which I expect to have a similar structure to something I've written before I'm pretty likely to go straight to production code using modules from the previous project.

I think your article is a bit more skewed to why prototyping is useful in software development more so than game development. Take your first bolded point for instance. "If you prototype early, you will write better, cleaner and more efficient code later." This in not the fundamental reason why prototyping is important in game development it is however for software and should therefore be mentioned later.

You don't think clean and efficient code is important in game development? Probably not so important if you are the only lonely indie game developer working on his dream game, but if a few coder are working on the same game project it will be important.

The purpose of a prototype is to develop quickly. The purpose of production code is to develop robustly.

Exactly.

My recommendation: Do game jams.

Yeah, that is a great advice. It also allowed me to explore the technical details of the game design; I noticed issues that I wouldn't have thought of ahead of time.

Yeah, it also often happened often to me in my full time job. The game designers comes up with a new feature and an exact carefully worked out document with many, many pages about it.  After implementing it, we found out that he didn't thought of a lot of cases, that could happen to the player.

So he had to adapt the game design (sometimes several times).

Hey guys,

I just wrote an article in my blog about prototyping, and why it's important, especially in game development.

I thought it could be of interest for you, and I'd like to hear your experiences and opinions:

Why Prototyping is so important in game development

http://www.twitter.com/joemanaco

they ripped it 1:1?  i can't believe what i'm reading.

Hey guys, I've been learning C++ and now I want to try using a graphics engine but I have no idea which one to choose. I want to make a 3d game in 3rd-person view with pixelated graphics. I would like it to be free to develop my game and available for commercial use even if a fee is required.

Vote for Ogre here, but I suggest to start with a few small 2d games first.

wow! fantastic!!!! can't wait to play it!

Hi,

I've just uploaded a new version of my brain teaser / realtime strategy game Psychoballs on my website. It is free and has 50 challenging levels build in (and you can download another 50 levels and an easy-to-use level editor from my website for it).

Changlog / Download here

I hope you like it!

sweet little game
i would try to port it to iphone or android. probably it won't sell (i think you need some more long-term-motiviation for that) but you could learn a lot of stuff.