I'm reading Tracy Fullerton's "Game Design Workshop" book. One idea she puts forth is don't worry about playtesters stealing your ideas, your game will be just about as hard for someone else to make as it will be for you, and you obviously have a head start...

Those economics don't quite apply to quick and dirty KotMK-able games, but I'm still a little nervous about sharing because A. i guess i'm "paranoid" about some stealing, but would that be such a bad thing? B. I'm worried I might disappoint people who see this list and what I'm NOT working on

So here is the list from my iPhone "glorious trainwrecks" memo, with explanations, roughly in reverse chronological order

• space war with rotational inertia - I heard Space War originally had rotational inertia, which is an element usually left out. I'd like to find out what it feels like
• space war boxing - thinking of the old 2600 boxing, overhead view, along w/ playing Little Big Planet. What would it feel like to swing big fists?
• like unfinished swan game demo, but 2d... use paint gun to see otherwise invisible area and monsters - most likely next Trainwreck - http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/30/the-unfinished-swan.html but in 3D. I'd almost like to try it KnP, but I'm not sure I know how it handles "invisible" objects. Also I'm total pants at KnP
• katmatari damacy using sprites - I did this a bit with cosmicarkatamari for the Pirate Kart, I think I would want it with more colorful sprites (maybe Atari?) and having the mass of cuaght things rotate a bit...
• like sperm game but you have to lure sperm into contact with something - Preggers was another Pirate Kart game... just my general love of simple smooth motion physics games
• javascript game library - just thinking about what a generalized javascript game library would look like...
• slingshot - I kind of this OLPC Physics Game Jam - which reminds me, I really should use the Java wrapper for Box2D stuff, one of the maintainers of that port was that the game jam, and it would probably be much more solid than my half-assed "engine"
• pick up the phonebooth and die 2600 - if I ever get around to using Batari BASIC, this would be my first game that about 8 people would find conceptually amusing
• atari basic simulator - Atari BASIC Programming is classically weird and wonky, but I admire the effort a few people have made to make playable games in it-- unfortunately i haven't been able to really see the games, because the emulator support is so-so for the keypads, and the keypads used such a weird ass way of entering commands. But an emulator that could let you type in the code might work...
• cellular automata system CAoleslaw - SpindlyQ would love love love to see this.
• life war, majority wins - maybe glider gunner? - a bit like Conway West, but more Life- centric. I was thinking the player could fight the ghost (or, heh, a 2 player network version... dreaming...) in painting life blobs. Normal life rules, but every live square has a team color, and for birth, the new cell gets the color if the majority of its 3 neighbors. It might turn out painting isn't a good enough game, so another variant would be firing off glider guns...
• atari rips..... - I think this is shorthand for "smash bros w/ atari characters", grabbing the sprites from the game... though the motion and attack forms would be tricky.
• heatseeker via repositioning? - heatseeker is this old C=64 game I might still do a Java processing or maybe even Batari Basic 2600 port of -- here I'm wondering if KnP could do it.
• game where firing is done when you collide with object, like a cannon - if/when I do a KnP game, this is a mechanic I might like to try. Typical "run from the monsters" but with cannons that are constantly rotating (or maybe not) and the player running into them fires... just exploring the indirection
• assemble little robots to do fighting for you -another study in indirection. I love the idea of having to craft an army... one idea I've had for a while, but w/o the right interface or gesture recognition, is rock paper scissors, where you draw circle, square, or x, and then fling what you draw at your opponent who is doing the same. Or the way ASCII bots has 1000 robots based on head, torso, feet, having to put together your minions to do your bidding might be an intereting game. Or snowmen from 3 diff sized snowballs? All of this might be tough to implement, but still, not my worst idea
  

UPDATE Half asleep, I had some more ideas for some of gamebuttons, games where the display and input is all a "normal" HTML pushbutton.

• "Birth control", target little ~o as they come swimming by
• Olympics - archery, hurdles
• slot machine
• Rock Scissors Paper
• some kind of hungry hungry hippo
• sideways lunar lander
• Some kind of RTS gaiden, where your the local commander of a base and just have to press a single button when told to to make a unit.
  

IT TOTALLY WORKS

OH MAN OH MAN OH YES

Eric is in bed now, but I can't wait to let him play with Alphaboogie.

It's going pretty smoothly, actually!

I wrote a little oscilloscope program in Python that interprets the raw pulse/space data from WinLirc (pasted into text files), then gathered the data for each of the buttons. Thankfully the encoding was easy to decipher (each bit has a short pulse to start, and then a short or long space indicating one or zero; a long pulse ends each batch of sixteen bits), so it's just a matter of looking at the picture and turning it into a code. I haven't really looked at how to write the configuration file properly quite yet, but I'm sure it won't be too hard after all.

Important findings for game designers:
- The codes are the same whether you roll the trackball up or down. :(
- The "release" code appears to be the same for all buttons, so there's no possibility of holding down multiple buttons simultaneously.

EDIT! For all the V.Smile Baby hackers out there, I've attached a text file detailing the codes associated with every button. If someone is ever crazy enough to try hacking the V.Smile console itself, knowing these codes could help you out.

So my infrared reciever has arrived! And I can totally read the raw IR coming out of the V.Smile. Unforunately, WinLIRC's learning function is retarded and completely refuses to learn my weird-ass device automagically. The raw IR data that I get from WinLIRC is very unfriendly state; it's not something I can just paste into a config file, or even a visualization program, for that matter.

Looks like there's lots more reverse engineering and learning about WinLIRC configuration files in my future! Yay?

So, the working name for my homebrew videogame system for infants is now InfraBaby. If anyone has any better suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Though I can't test it until my IR receiver arrives in the mail, I've built the core of the system. I've got a small Python program that reads data from LIRC, and, based on a configuration object, presses keys in Windows. Obviously I've still got some work to do to discover what codes the V.Smile emits, but I'm hoping that'll end up being relatively straightforward.

Now, if everyone was happy writing python code to configure their games, and starting up three programs whenever they wanted their baby to play a game, I'd be done. But no -- I'm coming to the realization that I've got a frontend to write, which lets you set up configurations for your games, and has one-click (or one-press-the-orange-circle) launching of games. I'm really, really itching to give the program a try, but at least a proper user interface will give me something to do while I wait for the damn sensor to come.

After successfully finishing Tek Demo, I've been thinking about other aspects of KnP that haven't been fully explored. I've never made use of active object internal flags. What does "spread a number" do to alterable values? The event editor has its own options panel? But one thing really hit me as being full of potential. Klik & Play had support for a very old animation format: FLC/FLI. No sound, palletized, somewhat dodegy playback speed, and very poor compression. That, and no modern video converters seem to support the format. But a while ago, I found this old DOS command-line converter called DTA. Running it under dosbox, I could convert a directory of tga or pcx files into a knp compatible flc video. And just now I've finished the conversion path, from shooting video, to jpg sequence, to tga sequence, to fli animation.

The filesizes are awful. What started out as an 882kb avi lasting maybe two seconds turns into a 4.5MB(!) fli animation with no sound. But I have the batch processing steps down now. And my planned idea won't take more than maybe 8 videos to do, each lasting about two seconds, at double the tested video dimensions, and half the framerate. I'm looking at about 64MB of fli video, plus whatever filesize the actual GAME part of this idea clocks in at. I think this could end up being very, very funny indeed.

My first step is going to be shooting video, of course. And dealing with the difficulty of convincing friends that they desperately want to be the stars of this overwhelmingly foolish idea.

KnP FMV, here we come!

So my son turned one year old yesterday! We got him a videogame console for babies.

Now I dare you to look at that thing and not immediately think "Baby Pop'n Music." It is obvious that the giggly Baby Einstein "smartridges" (Seriously! That's what they call them!) are only of limited interest. I'd originally thought that it might be interesting to write software directly for the unit, but it soon became clear that I would have to do a LOT of reverse engineering work -- something I don't have the time or experience to do properly before my son grows out of the thing.

Then I realized that the interesting thing is not the system itself, but the controller. The controller is a very simple IR transmitter, like a remote control. And you can pick up IR receivers for PCs for under $10 on eBay.

So if I pick one of these things up, and write a simple program to convert these IR signals to keystrokes, I could very well make videogames for my 1-year-old son in Klik & Play. For that matter, so could all of you! Kirk just DID!

You guys, you have no idea how exciting it is to think that you could make toys for your child that aren't obnoxious. Every toy on the market has a sound chip in it that talks to my son in a sing-song voice about how fun counting is, and about how fun the alphabet is, and about how fun opposites are, and about how fun manners are. They repeat themselves endlessly. They stunt the imagination. Some of them even tell my son they love him. I have inanimate objects in my house that tell my son they love him!

I can do better. This is my next project.

While watching the Spindler Splindey Spindley's raycasting demo, an idea popped to my mind.
Idea of Doom in KNP isn't new, yeah, but I reminded myself trying to implement very primitive Eye Of The Beholder-like "3d". I googled up in looking for full-length games using this and I've found an old friend, Death Mask.

As we can see, even with jerky scrolling/movement, gameplay is fluid and clear. It would be a sin to not try this!
So I dig up my old WIP-stuff notebooks and found the theory of algorithm for such an engine. Here we go.
Map is a matrix built from 32 cells, 16 x 16. Each cell is a fragment of map with a number. Player starts in cell 1,1, and moving forward changes the cell to 2,1, then turning right - 2,2 etc. Every cell has it's own "3d" picture. Some cells contains monster - which we can shoot out with a gun.
Algorithm has many fails flaws, like no open rooms, just maze and no backwarding.
Hope my engrish isn't too high and everyone can undestand this bullcrap without beer or two.

I will try to implement this once again.

Oh, and a screenshot. A little teaser. 4 different fonts on title pic! Face that, man

I drew this terrible sprite

and I haven't been able to stop laughing at it. A game needs to be made for this man with arched eyebrows, severely deformed leg and crabwalk.

I was thinking something along the lines of Castlevania 3, with visual nods to games from LJN, Software Creations, and Ultimate/Rare, but more specifically Ocean and their goddamn super white people sprites.

Okay, maybe that's not exactly what I'm going for. I will post later when I have a clearer idea.

So here it is. My first game trainwreck ever released. 2 player mayhem full of lasers, rockets, swords, Black Sabbath and sharks. Controls are bit shitty, so don't forget to read the txt. And that it's two player only.

Hope it's crappy enough to place it here.

Next one - Unnatural Brutality Ex - Human Slaying Mechanism!