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TIGSource ForumsCommunityTownhallAGameAWeek 2016 - Part One
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Jayenkai
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« on: July 12, 2016, 03:06:16 AM »

We're now past the halfway point of 2016, so I thought it probably a good idea to catch you guys up on the ins and outs of my general insanity.

History
Back in the days of CodersWorkshop.com (no longer around) I set up a silly "Wednesday Workshop", where every week I would set a challenge (Use only X number of sprites, Make a game about Ducks, Only use Y number of colours, that sort of thing) and folk would join in making silly projects within the space of a week.
After a few years of doing it, it ended up being the case where I was the only one taking part anymore.
As such, I scrapped the Wednesday Workshop, and instead took up my own challenge of AGameAWeek, where I would continue on this strange weekly task, and try to make something worthwhile out of the whole endeavour.
I bought the domain name (AGameAWeek.com) and set about creating all manner of strange and curious "minigames".

Now, many many years later, I'm still going.  But rather than making just silly Minigames, I've found that I can now manage quite a significant project within just the space of a week.
Practice might not make me perfect, but it does at least make me marginally better at doing this sort of thing.

2016
After last year's "Year Off", I'm now fully back into the swing of things.
I've learned a number of lessons over the years, such as "If the game is too big, don't rush it, and make it a two week project" and "If you're tired.. Rest..."
Rest is important!!

As such, not every week is AGameAWeek.  But I've managed pretty well, thus far.

The theme of this year appears to be "A Bit of a Clone", whereby I recreate some of my favourite classic games, but add a few tweaks here and there.  There are some VERY blatent rip-offs, this year!  More so than I usually create.

What follows is a very approximate writeup of each game that I've created during the first half of this year.

If you'd like to follow my progress, you can do so at AGameAWeek.com, but otherwise you won't see much of me around here.  Mostly because if I come here every single week, posting about yet another game, I tend to end up looking like a terrible kind of spambot!
I'll, therefore, stick to this type of post.  It's less spammy, that way!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy a few of my games.

-=-=-=-

January



01 - Harpoons and Balls
My first game of the year was a simple Pang-clone.
Fight against the bouncing balls, shooting them down with your harpoon gun.

03 - Penguin Parade
Start of the year, and I already miss a week!
Truth be told, I was desperately trying to get this game to be "Awesome!!" but in the end it's ..  A bit Meh.
A Lemming-like game, where you must guide the parade of Penguins towards their goal.
It's a simple enough task, but the way I designed the game made it ludicrously difficult to test the game.
Lesson Learned : Don't make your levels interact with each other!

04 - Space Station A6-100
A fairly large maze game, where you battle against hoards of alien attackers using a variety of weapons, whilst searching the space station for the "Save Disk" to complete each level.
I'm really quite proud that I managed to get as much done in just a week that I did.  True, I copy+pasted the player and enemy sprites from a decade-old project, but otherwise everything else was done in a week.  Excellent :D

-=-=-=-

February



05 - Poperly
As the second month hits, I decided it was finally time to try and get my WordList functions up and running again.
Poperly was a test game.  A simple little word game, where you find and "pop" words from the grid, to earn points.
With just a short amount of time on the clock, it's a bit of a rush.
I'm quite happy that this game works well, since it means I can now use my WordList functions to make all kinds of other word games.
.. I just haven't got around to that, yet!

06 - Dice and Spikes
Move along the grid, without hitting any spikes.   A roll of the dice determines how many moves you can make.
I planned this game out using a real-world deck of cards.  Blacks vs Reds for Empty spaces or Spikes, and a dice to move.
People have complained that this game is "too random", but in fact, the game gives you a very short glimpse at the layout, as it's laying the cards down.
*shrugs*
I think it's a neat enough game, but as with most "board game" types, it's actually more fun to play it IRL than on a computer.

07 - Deconstructed Horizons
A simple horizontal space blaster.  Shoot at the enemy, but also watch for their weapons.
Your spare lives literally follow behind you.  Catch enemy bullets using your light trail, to ensure they don't destroy you, and your lives.
It's an interesting mechanic, and I've made a fair number of "Horizontal Shooter" games in the past.
This is merely a recreation of previous versions.

08 - Army of Flags
The enemy troops have stolen your flags.
Gather your squad, and fight your way through the field to gather them all back up.
A lovely little game with a slight Cannon Fodder vibe to it.
I'd like to revisit this in the future, but probably not in a week!

09 - Panic Squares
A simple enough little Bejewelled clone, but extremely fast paced.
You can freely move the squares around, so be sure to try to set up nice big clusters that you can collect all in one go.

-=-=-=-

March



10 - Spikes Have Rage
Most of the characters I draw have silly spindly limbs, which aren't very good for combat.  Half the time you need the two characters to be practically stood on each other, before their limbs would meet!
As such, I'm never bothered to make a Beat-em-up before.
This is my first attempt.  It isn't anything magical, but it's a silly little fun game to play.

After that, I took a couple of weeks off.
So far, 2016 had been a fairly productive year, and I was busy with side-projects and other things.
AGameAWeek would have to take a back seat for a while.

13 - Fan of Bugs
I returned with a fun little maze game.
Guide your bug-friends to the exit, through a maze of fans.
This game was made all the more amusing by the added sound effects.
It isn't very often that I dare record the sound of my own voice, but on this occasion, it seemed warranted.

-=-=-=-

April



14 - Springy Grid
Another maze game, where you had to traverse a grid, to reach the other side.
The tricky part is trying to keep both characters alive at the same time, since the Red and Blue springs are controlled simultaneously.
The first couple of levels make things look barren and empty, but it soon ramps up after that.

15 - PlatCross
I took a dab at the Picture Crossword game, using some of the Daily Platdude Pixelart images that I'd been creating since 2015.
As such, there's over 200 levels available in this PiCross clone.
Not bad for a free game!!

16 - 8-Bit Boulders
The blatent rip-offs continued, as I created a good old-fashioned BoulderDash clone.
There are four rock-types in this game, each one falls in a different direction, which makes things all the more difficult.

17 - Geartography
If you've ever played GearWorks, you'll be right at home, here.
A puzzle game involving the placement of cogs within a grid.
To help create the (over 200!) levels, I asked people online to draw a series of monochrome icon-sized pictures, and then got the game to work out the cog placements itself.

-=-=-=-

May



18 - No Plumbing Required
Another example of me coding an effect in advance of trying to make a game that could use it!
In this game, the level skews left and right as you try to keep it balanced.
Other than that, it's a fairly obvious Mario Bros Arcade clone, (hence the name!) except it's in a giant endless tower.

19 - Mr Henry and his Magical Hat
An endless scrolling game, with a mystical path.
I've added both random and pre-determined path layouts to this game, so that you can decide which is better.
What does the magical hat do?  Brings the coins magically towards Mr Henry, of course!!

20 - Jumble Blocks
I've wanted to do a Tetris clone for a long time, but .. well.. They'd C&D it in an instant!!
I think this one's quite neat, though, and it's certainly different enough to get a pass.
Instead of making lines, you need to collect together clusters of coloured tiles.
3x3 or more will disappear.

21 - Extreme Space Debris Insanity
In this game, you simply have to float from one side of the screen to the other, and collect the flags on either side.
There's asteroids to blast, and floating "whatever those are" to avoid along the way.
A nice and gentle little game, with a slower pace than my usual games.

-=-=-=-

June



23 - The Final Warriorfish
A few years ago, I made a silly "joke" game called The Final Warrior.
This is the sequel, and it's just as daft!
Battle against the final warriorfish for as long as your little fishy can take it.

24 - Popcorn Bucket
In the same year as The Final Warrior, I created a game called Space Popcorn, which became curiously popular on the OUYA.
Around that time I made a promise to make a multiplayer version called Popcorn Bucket.
The idea was forgotten about until this month when OUYA would be closing it's doors to new game submissions.
I decided it was finally time to make a multiplayer Popcorn game, and that's exactly what this is.
For full multiplayer mayhem, this game is best on an OUYA!  .. But works fine as a single player game, too.

25 - Run Dash Dash
A small but repetitive little platform game.  Run along the tiles to "collect" them.
Score over 50 tiles to open up the next level.
This game took a surprising amount of time to get working correctly, as the various floors needed certain rules to be properly playable.

26 - Letter Lattice
I decided to round off 2016-PartOne with another wordsearch game.
This time, instead of a freeform game like Poperly, I decided to make it much more like a pen and pencil wordsearch.
It's exceedingly complicated at times, however, as I opted to make the entire grid out of nothing but letters from the word you're searching for.
Nothing is locked.  Everything is open and ready to play.
If you've got a few minutes to spare, and nothing better to do, this can easily kill a couple of hours.

-=-=-=-

And there it is.
January to June 2016.  26 weeks, 22 games
Over the coming 6 months, I'm hoping to keep up that rate, and hopefully try to make the game quality just as good, if not better.
I'm also going to have to start working on my Xmas Advent Calendar, too, which typically means I cut down on the usual AGameAWeek stuff towards October and November.
But hopefully I can come up with a neat enough way to get both things done together.
.. Maybe!
We'll have to wait and see.

For now, I hope you enjoy the above selection of games, and can perhaps stop by at AGameAWeek.com every so often, to keep up to date with my recent insanity.
Thanks for reading.  Comments/Thoughts/Complaints are welcome.

Jayenkai : AGameAWeek : @Jayenkai
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texsuo132
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« Reply #1 on: July 12, 2016, 03:38:22 AM »

Its great to see how well you've kept this up, and the quality you manage to get in such little time!

What tools do you use to make these games?
And how many hours do you usually spend on each game?
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Jayenkai
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« Reply #2 on: July 12, 2016, 03:55:37 AM »

Tools
Code
Coding is done with Monkey-X (.com) which allows easy cross platform game creation.  It's a very oldskool "type to get things happening" language, but I find that's much better suited to the style I grew up with.   I tend not to get along with Unity or anything else that requires mouse interaction!  I type with keys, not mouse buttons.

Art
My graphics are half done on iPad using the SpriteSomething tool, and half done on PC using PaintShop Pro.
Together, these two tools can perform just about anything I need them to.

Music
Since its release in 2014, I've been using KORG Gadget on iOS to do ALL of my music.  It's a well crafted tool, and is great for being musical whilst lying in bed!

Sounds
Most of my audio comes from sfxr, because that's the sort of audio that matches my games' style!
Occasionally I'll use KORG Gadget for jingles and other melodical sounds.
I tend to use an old, outdated edition of CoolEdit to do any audio editing.

Time
Typically I'll spend about 3 or 4 hours a day, over the course of just a few days.  For some of the more substantial games, however, it can end up taking most hours in a day, for the full week.   It depends entirely on how well the first day goes Wink
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