This week, Munky in a Mario Costume.
Next week, possibly Blockman in a Mario Costume.
Third week, I should probably do Greenie in a Mario Costume, but that’s more ‘cos he’d look funny, than for any gameplay reasons!

That brings us to April, and with my head spinning with ideas about “The BIG JNKPlat game”, I’m not sure if I really want to attempt that.

continue reading "Three Steps Ahead.."

Ever since I came up with this whole MAR10 Costume idea, I’ve had three games in mind.

1. Ted Bob was a great game, and needed an update. By making it More Mario, I could easily add extra bits into the mix.
Job done, turned out nicely.

2. “Monsters Upside Your Head” played bizarrely, but nicely! Redoing that in DK style seemed obvious, but didn’t quite turn out exactly as expected.
Job attempted, didn’t turn out so great.

3. Munky running around with a Mario Costume on..
I’ll be honest, this is just a silly image, but the idea of taking the Bowser-Castle levels from the original SMB, and replacing mario with a space munky!? Hey, that’s good gaming, right there!!
Not sure entirely how this game’s going to turn out, but I’ll try my best.

Today, I draw a munky…

The next couple of weeks, though, are a bit of a blank.
I have 2 more Tuesdays to go, a whole batch of characters to play with, but I’m already running short on obvious ideas.
I’d love to see Greenie in a Mario Costume, but what would that play like?
And what about Blockman? Trying to mesh together Pacman and Mario almost makes no sense at all.
Hmm..

Thoughts?

Oh, and Platdude already had a Mario costume in JNKPlat 07..

Result : Platdude in a Mario Costume feels very very wrong, given Platdude’s control method!
And, I just spent about 20 minutes playing that, so.. Go have a play!

Download Ace Paceman here.

Week two of our fantastic little MAR10 quest sees an old obscure character, from This game, whose name was quickly thought up by Spinal, over at Socoder. (He’s the guy that made DSision, for the DS!)
Thanks Spinal!!

From this…

To this…

A nice little tweak, methinks.
Although, if I’m honest, this game could’ve been better.
It’s another case of “Ran out of steam”, whereby the idea seemed more fun than the actual game.
Oh well, never mind.

The game’s still great to play.

You can download the game from The Jayenkai Archive, where it’s available for both Windows and Linux.
And don’t forget your DVD case!!!

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AGAW Scoring : 28 weeks, 35 games, still more to go and thankfully I’m still ahead!

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Framework Updates

1. Bitch mode is now included.
2. Linux Fullscreen should work!!
3. Many forgotten tweaks!

A bit of a chore, this week, to be honest.
I started on a game, expecting it to be nice and fun, but it’s not really been all that great.
Instead it’s been one of those “By the numbers” type things, and there’s not really anything special about it, at all..

Aww well, not to worry, it’s still a game!

Tuesday : Ace Paceman vs fireballs and spikes in a nice simple DK-inspired runaround.

Moving from DS to iPod Touch has been a decent improvement, but.. boy, do I miss having buttons!!
There’s also a fair few other little bits and pieces that aren’t quite right.
WordJong, for starters, is only about 1/10th of the game it was on the DS, And, what’s up with the audio, it’s like something keeps messing with the sounds on the thing.
I dunno..
It’s odd.

But there’s one thing that I miss most of all. And that’s ZooKeeper.
Sure, the iPod has Bejeweled, but it’s just not the same.
ZooKeeper had that wonderful frantic nature, where you could shuffle two pieces, then shuffle two more, then more, and more, and keep the combo-chain going for AGES, whilst the game whittled away in the background trying to keep up.
I LOVED that.
Massive chains created by you, not by the somewhat random nature of falling blocks.

Then there were the challenges, too.
Trying to beat all those silly little rules, like catching 10 tigers without any other animals, and things like that.
They kept the game playable.

I much preferred ZooKeeper.
It was so much better.

I don’t usually repost this here, but. What the hey!

Sign up, it’s fun, and weekly, and written!!

Socoder Newsletter

“Best viewed in Peiplum”
#045 – 5th March 2010

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Hello all

The worst thing about writing AGameAWeek is that
horrible lack of feedback.
If you spend 6 months writing a game, and get only
one bit of feedback, that’s enough to depress you.
If you write a game a week, you also get very little
feedback, except the lack of feedback happens every
single week!
You write a game, nobody cares, rinse repeat.
If I wasn’t already nuts, this’d quite easily send
me over the edge!

Currently Listening To…
Old Amiga Mods!

In the Workshop
Your last remaining life..
http://socoder.net/index.php?topic=1908

In the Shoutbox..
Onions, Castles and Days of David.

In the Mudchat
Fixing
Testing
Drawing
Listening
and not bothering..

Join in, it’s occasionally fun!

continue reading "Socoder Newsletter #045"

Oh dear, I’m WAY behind, this week.
I spent most of yesterday doing odd little bits of behind-the-scene Socoder stuff, so I’m a wee bit behind.
Then, today, something that should’ve been a 10 minute job ended up taking AGES to do!
I hate things like that!
Not to worry, though. Our main character is drawn, and he now has a fantastic Mario costume to wear.

He’s even been given the name “Ace Paceman”, by Spinal, over at Socoder. Because, for one reason or another, he never really had one before.
It’s a nice name, and it’ll do for the job.

Tuesday : “Ace Paceman in a Mario Costume”

wootsocks!

Disclaimer : I know that Ace Paceman isn’t that recognisable as one of my main characters, (he didn’t even have a name until yesterday!) but this time I’m going for “style of gameplay” over “silly chr in a Mario costume”. In my head this is quite a playable little fun repeatable game, and hopefully it turns out to play just as nicely.

And so it begins…. A whole month of MAR10 games, featuring your favourite (or not) Jayenkai characters, all dressed up like Mario! Hurray!

Ted Bob in a Mario Costume

Taking the character, and the gameplay, straight from Three French Hens, I’ve upped the stakes, upped the hens, and even added….
!!!!OMG!!!!

TWO PLAYER MODE!!!!

but you’ll need a friend for that!

Both control sets are in the Tab-Options, Down doesn’t do anything (but was needed for the menu!) and Jump and Up will do the same thing, so feel free to take up either side of the keyboard so you can play against each other nicely…

Of course, it’s entirely playable on your own, too. There are 3 difficulties, changing the number of available jumps, and the number of hens, although it does get pretty tricky in hard mode!

There’s pickups, too! Yeay!
I’ll let you figure out what those do.. They’re not too hard to figure out.

Downloads are available in the Archive

You can grab the Windows version, the Linux version, or even the DVD Case!

Oh, and although I did turn off the “Debug info” thing for future games, I appear to have forgotten to do it here! Tap F12 and it turns off all the nasty numbers!

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AGAW Scoring : 27 weeks, 34 games. Still up, but my lead’s getting shorter!