December 21, 2009

Now we have a Forum

In a burst of random energy I made a forum for madeoftree. Well okay I just made an awesome style for the awesome phpBB - the forum itself was up and running in say 10min and the rest of the latest days has been all about customizing. Now it's finally kinda complete so here it is!

Making it was the easy bit - now we need to generate some content! Where is the almighty sundb00m when we're in a desperate need for spam?!

December 16, 2009

Pushing toward Git

The time has come; it's time for me to move my source out in the open for the first time.
I present to you the source of the upcoming game (which has no name yet):

Available on Github

It's nothing special really, if you want take a look at the code and help me improve it.

December 14, 2009

Breaking the rule of three

It's pretty darn stressful making a game in a week, especially when you have this big great vision on how your game should be (which is always grand). For me making Balls, Black and White and Jonas IceCream Stand where truly stressful, MenuCity and Bugger not so much but still.

This is why I'm giving me an early Christmas gift: I won't make the December game in a week. In fact I haven't even logged the hours, I just work on it a little here and a little there and boy it's nice not having to do something all the time.

But there are downsides of course. I'm breaking my rules which is... bad and I don't have that productivity boost I always get when under a deadline so now I'm pretty far behind.

December 9, 2009

The Arty Timeline

While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty cool so here they are:

And now I'm off with New World Order and (for once) I've got a really really good idea!

December 4, 2009

December Theme: New World Order

The The Experimental Gameplay Project drives on with the Art Game theme which will last the rest of this year but that's something we can't accept! I've done my game and I didn't force myself out from the Haskell world just to do nuthin so here's a new little theme for me :)

What does the U.S one dollar bill, the French Revolution and Zion have in common? It's the conspiracy New World Order of course!

The paranoid can find it anything so this shouldn't be a problem?
Right?!

December 1, 2009

Postmortem: Jonas IceCream Stand

Ah my latest game Jonas IceCream Stand is finished and up and running and I'm really proud of it! And thanks for the feedback guys, it's always welcome.

I spent almost exactly fifty hours on this game and that's by far the most I've spent on a 7day project. To be honest it's probably more but I'm not really good at logging all the hours...

A Race

This game was a race against time from start to finish. I understood right from the beginning this wouldn't be easy. Creating a whole GUI from scratch, composing animation and a focus on graphics(!). I've never done a GUI, it would be really easy with a decent framework for it... But I don't have one for it so all the GUI code is really messy and hard to maintain.

I guess I'm learning the coding lessons the hard way. Keeping it structured and maintainable even, no, especially under pressure is extremely important. It's a good thing I have a fast iteration cycle repeating itself for every new game I'm making.

Art

I keep saying it again and again but I'm not a graphics designer but I should stop saying that! Although not wonderful I think my games are looking good and this game is no exception. It's certainly the most complex graphical wise.

The fading effect on the sky was pretty cool, but it's kinda crude and it doesn't fit the overall theme very well. The theme has a few distinct colors with a little "childish" feel to them. I feel the fading adds a bit too many colors to it. But I do think the end points (in the middle of the night with all the stars and when it's as light as possible) looks pretty good. And I'm not sure it was a very good idea to include a MenuCity silhouette in the background.

A beautiful night sky.

Gameplay

Sadly I don't think the gameplay was one of my best. Sure the first five maybe ten minutes are a blast, they almost awoke my slumbering tycoon feelings. But the game is so badly balanced, it's far too easy when you've passed a point in the game. The problem is that I balanced the game the last handful of hours on the very last day and that doesn't work, not at all. A great gameplay needs to evolve, it can't be created just there on the stop. Well that's my experience at least.

Conclusion

I think the game is really great. Sadly it gets boring far too fast but it does have great potential. It's almost worth given a remake as a "real" game.