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[jonbro]

ooh, I really like this fade out game! hidden information + a direct cost to revealing that information. Very well done!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

So. It finally happened. I failed. I started making a game and I couldn't make it work before running out of time. 

I thought that I could make "ball bouncing precisely off of drawn line" work, but after implementing the drawing of the line and the ball moving around, I researched how to do the bouncing, and I failed at making it work. So no game number 16 today.

You can play the broken version in your browser here though: http://bit.ly/1aNtgxm
Use WASD and arrow keys to move the two line ends. It's kind of cool moving around with he line, so I might try some other day to make a different kind of game with the line. The number in the corner is the current horizontal speed of the ball.

I'll be back tomorrow with a game that hopefully works! Oh, and that description for yesterday's game will have to wait another day as well.

ooh, I really like this fade out game! hidden information + a direct cost to revealing that information. Very well done!

Thank you so much, jonbro! How far did you get?

Also, thank you for taking the time to try the games and leave a comment, it really means a lot to me!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

Another one bites the dust. "The dust" meaning "complete" and "bites" meaning "is".

DL number 16.5 (counting yesterday's as a half) here: http://bit.ly/175xCDx
Browser version (doesn't work in Firefox!): http://bit.ly/15MGRW7

This one is about betting, but also about shielding blue balls (ha) from red balls.





This one is hard, unfair, but exciting if you're a ludomaniac, I think.
I swear, I have very little time these days, so forgive me if I am late on my promises of descriptions and things like that (if any of the 3 people who play the games actually care).

At least I completed another one today, I'm back on track!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

ALRIGHT, I'M BACK. My games are now allowed to vote.

Download number 18 here: http://bit.ly/1gSzUaw
Browser version: http://bit.ly/16VQDGq
It should work in ALL BROWSERS!!!

This one is about building a fortress around a Heart, in order to protect it from evil balls.



And, umm... it's... IT'S FREAKING AWESOME  

Sorry about that, I'm just really happy with this game, which also means that I spent much longer time making it than the others. The fortress building/fortress deteriorating is so cool, and works just like I wanted it to (well, almost. It has some very small bugs, and everything can always be polished more). I've been thinking about the block placing mechanic for a while now, but I couldn't figure out how to make it simple enough for these games before today (and I obviously failed today, since I used way too much time).

I feel like it's a bit too easy, but that probably means that it's the right level of difficulty, since every time I feel I hit a sweet spot, other people think it's way too hard. If you do find it too easy in the beginning, you should know that the real challenge starts when there are 4 spawners. My high score is 6122, so try to beat that if you still think it's too easy.

I always feel better about the games when I have just finished making them, so I might hate this tomorrow, but right now I think it's the best game I've made this month. So really, give this one a try, it might change your life. Okay probably not, but it will hopefully make you tell me what you think?

And yeah, I didn't call this number 17.5, I called it number 18, because I'm a rebel and I don't trust the system, even if it's my own system  

[ZeppelinCaptain]

WELCOME TO DOUBLE SUNDAY   

Because I skipped yesterday, I made two games today! BOOM, suddenly 20 games.

Download 19 here: http://bit.ly/1c7cFdg
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1axYNlK

Download 20 here: http://bit.ly/1cKocw0
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1axYTtx

19 is about rotating the Stick and thereby guiding green ones to the green circle, while making sure the greens don't touch the reds.


20 is the inverse of that. Control the pink ones and move them to the pink circle, while avoiding the Stick and the blues.


With both of them, level 1-7 are mostly there to function as a kind of tutorial, and then the real challenges start in level 8. That's not to say that 1-7 can't be challenging though, just that the games change quite a lot once you reach level 8. I actually like the way this works, because you get to know the base mechanics and then something pretty small is changed (okay, not that small in game 20), and it suddenly changes the game a lot. Very interesting to play around with.

Because I was making two in one day, I wanted to try to connect them in some way. At first, I was thinking of making it so that you had to complete something in one game to be able to succeed in the second, and vice versa (I think this is a bit like how At A Distance works? Not sure, haven't played it.), but I couldn't figure out a simple way to do that, so I dropped the idea.
Instead, I wanted to make two opposite games, something like one game being about water and the other about fire. While thinking about that I decided that I'd rather focus on the mechanics (just like the rest of the games this month), so I tried to make something where you got to know one system, and then switched the roles around in the second. And from that, these two games were born.

I put as much work into each of these as I put into making any of the other games, so it really is two games, not just one full game and then a hurried clone or something. I did make a copy of the source code of 19 though, and then modified and built upon that to make game 20, in order to make work quicker. This means that number 20 is not actually made entirely from scratch as all the other games are, but I think that's okay 

Please play, enjoy, and tell me why you think they are worse than horse poop, or why you think they are better than sliced cheese.

Btw, level 1-7 of game 20 reminds me of a bad version of this awesome Ludum Dare game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=15833

[ZeppelinCaptain]

My games now hit the legal drinking age in the US. To celebrate that, I've made a drinking game!  

Just kidding, it's another game about balls flying around  

Download number 21 here: http://bit.ly/1h1bSKA
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1755A8X

It's about changing your own form in a flexible way. There's a how-to screen in this game, and the game doesn't translate well to images.



This one turned out to be A LOT more complicated to make than I thought it would be. Balancing the changing-between-forms to just be any kind of fair while still making it work was very hard. In the end I think I managed to achieve what I aimed for: to make an action game where you switch between 3 characters with a possibility for relatively advanced play.

Those "switch between 3 characters"-games (like Trine) seem to often be puzzle-platformers, but I really don't think that the switching-character mechanic works for puzzle games. It often just results in "I'll try with guy1, then guy2, then guy3, and then I will have beaten the puzzle." I think that the mechanic fits reflex games far better, because you have to be quick about choosing your character.

The interactions between different objects in this game were far too complicated to just make discoverable, so a crowded HowTo-screen ended up being necessary, which just took up more time.

While taking the screenshot I noticed that I forgot to reset the score at death, and so I had to re-export everything  

[ZeppelinCaptain]

Does this game create a catch-22 situation? Find out by playing.

Get game number 22 here: http://bit.ly/18HAG71
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1cccBJm

It's about directing green balls towards red balls with arrow blocks.


I originally wanted to make a puzzle game out of this mechanic, but it's much easier for me to think of action games, so that's where I ended up. I think this mechanic is much better suited for a puzzle game, and the action game did not even turn out as I wanted. The best strategy often turns out to be to just take one arrow block out at a time, and I wanted to make it so that you had to use as many as possible in a clever system.

I used way too much time making the arrows, rotating them, making them work and so on, which is part of the reason that I didn't spend more time trying to make the game work as I wanted it to. I'm not even sure if it's a very original mechanic, since I think that I've seen it before.

The coolest thing about this is the crumbling of the blocks. I like that. It's the kind of stuff that I would add TONS of if I used more time on these games. Related: Vlambeer are probably the coolest indie game developers: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/10/21/interview-jan-willem-nijman-on-nuclear-thrones-feel/

[migrafael]

Crazy stuff! A game a day? Gonna leave this tab open so I can play a few tomorrow.

Don't give up, still 7 games to go? 

[ZeppelinCaptain]

Crazy stuff! A game a day? Gonna leave this tab open so I can play a few tomorrow.

Don't give up, still 7 games to go? 

I hope you have a good time with the games then! I don't really get your math though? There are 9 games left!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

23 is a very ugly number. This game is BEAUTIFUL. Kind of.

Download number 23 here: http://bit.ly/1djiVhT
Browser version: http://bit.ly/18LdBQG

It's about turning sticks in order to bounce balls into the correctly colored part of the floor and ceiling.


It started out in my head as being about growing a tree, one branch at a time, but because I realized I didn't know how to make the sticks appear at the end of each others, I made it like this instead...

I'm like the base mechanic of placing the sticks and then moving them all at the same time, but I'm not completely happy with the rest. The collisions don't work very well, and I think there is just something off about the whole bouncing thing, but I couldn't think of anything better.

It was hard to think of a goal for this game. I got the mechanic down pretty quickly, but it a way to make the game beatable eluded me. My main ideas were about bouncing the balls into goals or into boxes, but I knew that they would be way too easy (the goals, since you could just leave the sticks in a fixed position) or hard (the bouncing is too imprecise to hit boxes) until I realized that I could make the bars at the top and bottom move, which fixed the problem, and seems to work well.

[CowMainia]

Sweet you're almost there!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

The 24th! Merry Christmas, your present is another game! YAY  

Download number 24 here: http://bit.ly/1aaou0F
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1c0ZOFn

It's about spreading JOY with a CIRCLE OF JOY in order to change the direction of balls, and thereby saving them from the horrible fate of being x'ed.



As most of the other days, I started out by finding the core mechanic, and that was the circle sending out colorful "rays". This time though, before figuring out the actual goal of the game, I implemented the mechanic, and then figured out what to do with the rest afterwards (the direction changing, the x'es and so on).

I had a lot of trouble with making sure that the balls were the right color at all different times, since I kept getting confused as to whether blue or green were supposed to go left. It helped a lot when I finally made the arrows in the middle of the screen, so those are as much for me as they are for the player...

I'm pretty happy with this, although I would have rather have the colored rays do something more interesting than change the direction of the balls. I was thinking about changing the size, number or direction of the balls, and it ended up being the one that was the easiest to implement.

I've found that my idea process is very much like this: I'll go into my room, turn on the computer, and then set my brain to "idea mode". Idea mode is where I kind of let my imagination run wild, and imagine all kinds of crazy stuff. I then solidify some of that (this time: huge circles spinning and sending out rays) into a mechanic (the core of this game). I might then scrap that if I can quickly feel that it's too complicated, or if it's too hard to make into an actual game and not just a mechanic.
Second main stage of the process is thinking of different possibilities for a goal for the core mechanic, preferably goals that highlight the different aspects of the core. These goals often involves balls, since they are easy to fit into many different categories, and they are easy to manipulate in many different ways.

The second part is often just as or more difficult than the first, mainly because there are often SO MANY possibilities for a goal, but they are almost all "broken" so that they make the game too easy/impossible/uninteresting.

Sweet you're almost there!

Yeah, it's awesome seeing the percentage bar and number of games steadily rise

[ZeppelinCaptain]

My games are now celebrating their silver anniversary. You should congratulate them!

Download number 25 here: http://bit.ly/HkGf1l
Browser version: http://bit.ly/Hhm58c

It's about switching between mind-controlling different hosts in order to survive the balls of doom.


My first game to feature an extremely basic AI!

My goal with this game was to make it so that when you switched host, you would be confused as to where you were, and would have to spend some time recalibrating. But I also wanted some frantic gameplay to go with this mechanic. I don't think those two mix very well, since when things are frantic, you want minimum confusion to avoid frustration, so the first one got down-prioritized.

Beat my best time of 2157!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

I have now completed games from A-Z (26 letters). Coming up: Æ, Ø and Å.

Download number 26 here: http://bit.ly/1auhZUX
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1aui4b1

It's about spinning and thereby destroying oranges into blues that you absorb with your green to get more reds so that you can destroy more oranges. In short: COLORS


This is actually a very old idea that I thought of some years ago. Back then, I tried to make it in Flash/AS3, but I wasn't very good at it back then, so I never finished it. I even had a whole story thought out for it, but in this game I only wanted to implement the actual mechanic. And I succeeded! I did change some things from the original idea, but the changes were all improvements.

It was kind of weird working with an old idea. I turned out to not be as exciting to make as the other games, because it wasn't as much about exploring a mechanic as it was about just implementing it, if that makes sense. I also liked it a lot in my head, because I 've been thinking about it a lot, but when I then implemented it, it wasn't nearly as good as I imagined it. Very few of the ideas are as good when I've made the game as they are in my head, but this was more disappointing, since it was a treasured idea. But at least it's nice to finally have it out of my head.

I used a long time trying to make the reds appear in the right places around the blue circle, and some of them are still a bit off, which is aesthetically frustrating, but doesn't really change anything 

[ZeppelinCaptain]

I went back and made a working game out of number 16, so that I don't have to feel bad about lying about how many games I've actually made this month, because now I'm not lying!

Download number 16 here: http://bit.ly/HnVRQX
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1hiNPaj

This time it's about leading two square friends to their homes, while keeping the bond between them uncut.


Great success! The unfinishedness of the game resulted in me thinking about it every time I uploaded a new game, which I think resulted in me getting a better idea than the original. The way the game works now has a great risk-reward feel to it, and controlling two at the same time is just the right amount of mind-bending (at least for me). Good feelings all around. TRY IT.

[ZeppelinCaptain]

NUMBER 27 IS ALL OVER YOUR FACE. AND YOUR FRIEND'S FACE.

Download number 27 here: http://bit.ly/Hn5Uqh
Browser version: http://bit.ly/16E1gKi

Play against the computer or a friend in a frantic battle of destroying your opponent's wall with dangerous colored balls. Will Pink or Blue be victorious?


This one actually started out as being only single-player, but I felt like it would be better as a two player game, and I think that was right. The single-player game still works though, and is challenging and worth a play, but the game is probably more fun with two players.*

This was also another one where I implemented the base mechanic, before figuring out the goal, and it worked out pretty well I think. The wall destroying thing is very visual and doesn't feel as abstract as scoring points.
Generally speaking, the less numbers there are, the more enjoyable a game is. I find most RPGs boring because of all the number management. If the numbers were presented visually instead (e.g. more strength = bigger muscles) I actually think it would be more fun to play.

*As pretty much any other game. Making a game multiplayer is a quick way to create entertainment, since the entertainment mostly comes from the people playing it. On the other hand, it's very hard to get people to play local multiplayer games, since people usually just sit alone and play games

[ZeppelinCaptain]

28 is done, only THREE left (I am making two tomorrow, since I couldn't get home to make a game yesterday because of a storm!)

Download number 28 here: http://bit.ly/1coRPq1
Browser version: http://bit.ly/196l5Ox

Today's game is a minimalist strategy game about dividing and conquering. It features a PROTIP, which I have now spoiled.


Today's idea process was reverse! I started by figuring out the "goal" (the areas expanding towards the middle) and then figured out the interaction mechanic afterwards (moving and shooting, wow how original  It doesn't matter though, you have to think about what you shoot!).

I think this is a very interesting game. It emulates interesting things in interesting ways. It's interesting. And challenging! Interesting.

[ZeppelinCaptain]

All in all you're just another game in the wall. But the wall only has really good games!

Download number 29 here: http://bit.ly/16KIk1H
Browser version: http://bit.ly/1cqKENW

This one is about AUTUMN. Also about moving two feet.


After I had implemented the walking mechanic, and tested it a little, I found out that it was really hard to figure out what way you were going to go, which foot would move when you pushed a button, and it made the game frustrating. I tried fiddling with some values, switching the colors of the feet, and some other small stuff, but it ended up changing nothing. So I went for (in hindsight, this was the most obvious thing to do...) putting some letters on the feet, and putting an arrow on the middle of the line. Not as elegant as I wanted it, but it works remarkably well.

In the beginning, the feet were at a fixed distance from each other. This limited the possibilities for play quite a lot, and making it so that the distance could increase and decrease, opens up for so much more interesting play. It really just came from the feeling that there were more possibilities for the core mechanic than I had used

Game 30 coming today or tomorrow. Game 31 coming tomorrow. Judgement day coming the day after tomorrow.

 

[mrscience00]

You're gonna make it!

[ZeppelinCaptain]

30! Almost there!

Browser version: http://bit.ly/HqtpP0

It's about being a magical blue box, making both blue and red round things grow.


Reflections from 7 days later: Sometimes, a few days after making the game, I punch myself because of a bad design decision in a game. For this game: I should have made the box move quicker, I should have made the box move quicker. I get really annoyed by the slowness of the box, probably because I quite like the game apart from that. It's one of those that I go back to playing myself. The fact that you sometimes are forced to do things that are bad for yourself (growing the red balls) is very cool.

You're gonna make it!

It seems like it, yes! IT FEELS AWESOME :D