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[dustin]

OK so I spent some time last week working on an engine of sorts in as3.  My goal was to try and let me make games as quickly as possible.  Then I saw farbs ticky tacky posts about him trying to do stuff in an hour and I thought that sounded fun. So to put my engine to the test I decided to try and write a game in 1 hour this morning.  It was fun times.

Here's how the hour went down approximately...
7:45-8:00 draw the background and the player
8:00-8:15 get the player on screen jumping and crouching and knifes moving towards him
8:15-8:30 collision detection working and get the knifes to spawn
8:30-8:45 output score and level, add a reset button after you die, let you submit your score, instructions, draw a little more

Here is the result...

http://www.kongregate.com/games/nitsud/the-ninja-box

Anyway let me know what you think remember it was done in just an hour so some things I'm well aware of such as it's pretty simple and there isn't much polish.  I think I'm going to try to do another one of these in a few days and we'll see how that goes.  After I get a few of these I might try to compile them all together into some bigger package but I don't really have a good plan for that yet.



Game1

http://www.kongregate.com/games/nitsud/the-ninja-box

[Gorgoo]

That's pretty cool. And since I've been working on figuring out how to put together an AS3 game engine, I think it's really neat to see that, with a good one, it's possible to put together a game like that in an hour.

I'm actually pretty interested to see how the future one-hour games'll turn out, if you decide to make them.

[Farbs]

Whoa - you did all that in one hour? I need to lift my game!

[dustin]

That's pretty cool. And since I've been working on figuring out how to put together an AS3 game engine, I think it's really neat to see that, with a good one, it's possible to put together a game like that in an hour.

I'm actually pretty interested to see how the future one-hour games'll turn out, if you decide to make them.

Thanks, I'm not sure I would call it a good engine... I'm pretty sure some of my teachers would not be happy with the "style" of the code if that kind of thing bothers you.

Whoa - you did all that in one hour?

Yep.  Well obviously I didn't write any of the engine stuff in that hour and I also didn't upload it to kongregate or write this post in that time.  I also didn't think of the game idea during the 1 hour.  I didn't do any code planning or any type of formal design document beforehand though.

For who ever is interested the engine uses a kinda weird partly object oriented style.  Basically I have actors and all the moving things are actors and I just set their images/update functions to be whatever I want them to be (because in flash functions are objects so it works).  Because the actor class is dynamic this also means I can add whatever variables to them I want.  Anyway it gets pretty strange.

I have the idea for the next one I'm going to try to do it's just a matter of when I will have the time to do it.  Maybe tomorrow morning?  Thanks for the kind words guys!

[Farbs]

You should check in to tigIRC - I think there's a new POPOVKAST about to begin.

[dustin]

yeah that looks cool, I'll have to check it out sometime

So this morning from 10:15 to 11:15 I finished another game.  Breakdown went like this
10:15-10:30 do the graphics
10:30-10:45 player follows mouse, enemies get loaded in and move
10:45-11:00 enemies fire, collision detection works, bounces work
11:00-11:15 edit the way things are removed in my engine, draw the last few things, add a lose screen and a win screen

Things I wanted to do...
more levels (i have a level loading mechanism that loads the first and only level)
different bullet types (sin waves?)
different bad guys

So here it is...

http://www.kongregate.com/games/nitsud/pong-invaders

Let me know what you guys think. 

[TheCube]

That's nifty, I like it.  I suck at pong though, so I lost without even finishing the level.

[dustin]

That's nifty, I like it.  I suck at pong though, so I lost without even finishing the level. Sad

Glad you liked it, I'm hoping to do more on that game sometime.


So after writing a level type thing for the last game and not using it to much I decided to write a game that would definitely use it.  I tried to make the mechanics simple so I would have time for levels.

0-15:  Do the art
15-30: Get the screen up, shooting, collision detection so bassically 1 level
30-45: Get a game over screen running a continue to next level screen up
45-60: Make levels 1-5 or so
60-75 CHEATING: make levels 5-10

So yes I did not do the whole thing in under an hour, it took an extra 15 minutes to make the last 5 levels.  I did however have to do the whole thing in two chunks as I got interrupted in the middle (had to study for a midterm ) which probably did slow me down a bit.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/nitsud/save-the-planet

[dustin]

So I'm trying to think of a way to string a bunch of these kind of things together into one game.  Here are my thoughts so far...

Setting/Style:
Not really to sure I have trouble drawing so this is difficult for me

Play Style:
I figured you would go through screens and each screen would have a different gameplay mechanic which was in fact a 1 hour game.  When you completed your task you could move on.

Twist:
I was thinking maybe that in addition to playing through each scene normally you could have a variety of different effects put on you such as...
screen shrunk
screen upside down
screen x inverted
time slowed down
time sped up
scene blurry


Anyway I would like to get some opinions on this and suggestions for theme/style or if anyone has a different idea.