So we took the train to Winnipeg and back this Christmas, so that we could walk around with the baby and his ears wouldn't pop and because apparently sleeper class on Amtrak costs the same as flying only you get a bed and free steak dinners. The thing about train travel is that you have a lot of spare time while you wait to get to your destination (36 hours in my case). On the way there, I made some serious progress on a SECRET PROJECT which maybe will be revealed soon. On the way back, I made TRAIN QUEST IV: THE QUEST FOR TRAINS.

It's about hobos, mainly, but I think there are some interesting mechanics that turned out pretty well. I may go back and add music at some point.

After the success* of "Penguins Are Attacking Your Dude!" I thought I would get back into MMF "programming" again.

After a while, I got off my arse and started doing something.

An hour or two after that, Grand Theft Shmup v0.01 was born!

The gist of it is that you are the dot, and you have to kill bad guys. You can steal enemy ships by bumping into them, and then use those ships against the enemy! Like in that popular car-jacking murder sim everyone loves. ;)

The controls are:
Arrow Keys - Move
Shift - Dash (while in dot mode) or Shoot (while in Ship mode)
Control - Overload Ship (Destroys ship to fire many bullets)

As a prototype, it exists to create the outline for a project. The prototype should show that the finished game will fill in all the requirements. As I am mainly making the game as a hobby for myself as well as maybe a talking point for any interviews and stuff, the goals are:

- Game should be at least vaguely in the Shmup genre.
- Game should be enjoyible and complelling from the first go.
- Game should be pick up and play. To be more specific, the player should be able to play the game is short bursts.
- Game should use the ship stealing mechanic to good effect, using it to give the player many options in gameplay.
- Game should be deterministic. If the player enters the same input 5 times, she should get the same result 5 times.
- Game should have a high amount of polish, and should be bug free (note that the prototype will not have this point. It's only like a really small demo to show what the finished product will be like)

Download is HERE

Please tell me what you think of it!

*=I finished it, about 5 people played it, and no one has sued me or burned down my house yet, so it was a success!

I intend to start working on another game this week. It's looking like it will be a sequel to Freestyle Box 2007 but if I change my mind it will most likely be a two player racing game like Dashin' Desperados if anyone remembers that. And you can pretty much count on it using the neo 8-bit visual style I've adopted for all my games. I'll blog it this time since I am pretty much through disguising blog posts as regular topics.

EVERYTHING COUNTS IN LARGE AMOUNTS. GLORIOUS NEW BLOODSPORT FROM LAND OF MILK AND FLYBALL, BATM@STER

honestly i don't know what the christ is going on here

Well while I totally fluffed up this month's KoTM, I still have a chance to provide the whole bleedin' lot of you with a gift for klikmas. Although probably not one as delightful as Pizzatime's gore-behind-every-door Advent Calen-dong.

Production has begun and is on a need-to-know basis. I can reveal three rhinoceros words for you today, however:

Accurate Snow Physics.

Dance of the sugardum fairies... for the Klikth Day of Klikmas or whatever that KotM is...
you'll think you're getting mad at frustrated at the idiot fairy, but really you're getting mad at the idiot programmer and his bad excuse for a physics engine!

drag gifts to help the fairy jump and get to the christmas star.

So you've got to punch them in their faces. Right?

This was made for the KotM club Dec 2007. It feels good to make a game again. I'll have to crack open the MMF again. I kinda like some of the ideas in this, I may revisit some of the mechanics later.

At least the first final release is, anyway. Many of the bugs that were plaguing the game (A galaxian/galaga/space invaders-style shootemup) I've been able to fix, but there are still a couple issues to be ironed out.

Hope to have a final release build ready for christmas or the new year!

For no particular reason other than a bit of annoyance at the difficulty of this game
(actually I got through, because I think for some reason my home computer was playing it a bit below speed) and because I actually like "flap" mechanics (see: Joust, and Balloon Flight), I made a parody mashup of Flywrench and my own Atari 2600 JoustPong in the thrill-a-minute world of: flywrenchpong
(You can also play it online).

It also features a homemade electronic soundtrack! (Made by slowing down and "wa-wa'ing" an Atari 2600 Supercharger .wav)

I think if I died tomorrow, the # of people who "get" the joke because of familiarity with both indy game flywrench and atari homebrew joustpong would go down by about 33%.

And yes, I made this exact same post nearly on TGQ and indygamer.blogspot.com.

So anyway after seeing insert credit's forums rise from the dead again, I checked out the 'Development Forum' and after a post about The Games Factory, Rerorero pointed me here. As soon as I get the hang of posting stuff, maybe I'll upload my space invaders/galaga/galaxian clone, at the moment simply titled 'invaders'. (I'll probably decide on a name once it's ready for release, but at the moment Invaders would be... y'know I don't know if it'd be considered a 'tentative title' or a 'working title' anyway that's what I'm calling it.

Hopefully I'll be able to check out some of your guys' stuff, so see you around!

DT