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.

The “Big” idea is way way way too big for me, artistically. I mean, it’s a really really huge idea!
Plus it’d need levels.
Really big levels!

It’s a very big idea!

I’d probably be better off sitting down and doing a nice new annual simple JNKPlat game, instead.
Scrap the 3D, keep it in 2D, and see what lovely new tiles I can come up with.

I’d probably want to make it a more progress-based game, this time around, but I’m not 100% sure how well that’ll work.
See, the thing with JNKPlat is..

It’s fun to make levels.
Levels are great!

And, if I make things 100% progressive, then I have to do all sorts of silly lock-outs within the editor.
I’ve never been entirely certain how to do that sort of thing.

The game should give you a need to complete things, but it should also let you play around with the editor.

Always awkward.

The best implementation so far has been DS08. With each different pack having a “Play through or die” limitation, you could make a level pack of 5 or 10 levels, and the player would have to go through 1 to 10 to play them all.
JNKPlat 07 also has that, but if you died, you could hop right back to where you were.
I think DS08 played it a little better than that.

3 Lives, do or die..

So, JNKPlat10 checklist
More movement
Probably doing the scrolling from 07
Neat Lighting effects from the start
More tiles
New moves
Multiple Tilesets/Worlds
Timer?

Any other thoughts?

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!!!

—

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

—
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

Print
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!

Read Post$
The clue’s in the topic number
I don’t think anyone got the reference..
http://socoder.net/?topic=1901

BBC catches up
Proper games are going down the crapper, and “indie”
is leading the way forward. Why? Because “indie”
games aren’t all FPS!
http://socoder.net/?topic=1902

The big Portal thing..
1. Valve update portal.
2. Odd things are hidden ingame.
3. Big mysteries afoot.
http://socoder.net/?topic=1905

Accidental clickage
Windows 7 shoves a great big “Turn it off” button
in your face!
What do you do?!
http://socoder.net/?topic=1910

Quality?
Afr0 wants to know, what exactly is needed in order
to get your games published on Steam?
http://socoder.net/?topic=1912

Repeat : Until GameOver
A whole bunch of new games, every single week!!

Socoder Games

Jump (Pio)
A simple little rope hopping game. Not amazing,
but does show off how small FreeBasic can get things
down, filesize wise. The Linux and Windows exe’s
both fit inside this tiny little 135kb zip file.
http://socoder.net/?showcase=22295

Ted Bob in a Mario Costume (Jayenkai)
Whereas this one’s a wee bit bigger, and has to have
two different downloads for Windows and Linux!
eek.
Hop on the hens to score big combo points.
http://socoder.net/?showcase=22299

Scramble (Longarm)
A neat little word finder game. Not a lot of people
seem to like word games, but I love ‘em. They can
really soak up the hours!
http://socoder.net/?showcase=22342

Moshboy’s “Missed” Games

SlumLord27/Moshboy’s been busy this week!!!

Gotta Play ‘em All!

#9 – Mysterious Floating Something
UFO Abduction game!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsQEFSuDis0

#10 – Between Heaven and Hell
Very Flashback like!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfmdx5T8rGU

#11 – Tripline
Simple but complex puzzle game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JC5Q5SLo2E

#12 – One More Time
Single screen platformer, a bit like Timeslip!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rmyLMEZsCQ

#13 – Yum Yum
Slowpaced shooter with little ants, or something!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uXMJ_pqWPE

#14 – Mujeo
One of those “Click things in a certain order” type
of games, where doing things in the right way will
earn you more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaWKYYe1fiM

#15 – The Yore
An isometric adventure game! Oooh!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFDOIdYh1Gw

#16 – Outrage
A classic side-scrolling beat-em-up!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmjyySFUts

Pixel Prospector’s Games

Authentic Kaizen digs for more freeware gold.

http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/

Xeno Fighters ex-r
Fantastically arcadey shooter.
http://bit.ly/PPGames_XenoFighter

Proun Beta
I can’t describe how neat this game looks!
GfxProun!
http://bit.ly/PPGames_ProunBeta

Drone
A Tower Defence type of thing, but without the
stationary towers!
http://bit.ly/PPGames_Drone

Choke on my Groundhog, you Bastard Robots!
More Timeslippery, this time in Shooter form.
http://bit.ly/PPGames_BastardRobot

Sword of Legends
An RPG Platformer.
http://bit.ly/PPGames_ArghMenus

Goto Links
Pokemon remade in Garry’s Mod (HoboBen)
Much funnier than I expected it to be.
Sometimes the sillier things are just better!
http://socoder.net/?link=22271

Browsing
Noel has decided that he wants to make a Browser for his
Android phone..
He’s starting with a nice thumbnail based tab system,
and is currently implimenting that first.

The Design
http://socoder.net/?blogs=22333

The Test
http://socoder.net/?blogs=22348

Good luck!

Compos!
DBF’s “Liquid” Compo
April 10th is coming quickly. That’s only 4 WW’s or
AGameAWeek weeks away! Yikes! Better hurry up and
get your Liquid Demoes in to DBF if you want to win!
http://bit.ly/DBF_4642

PlaySushi’s “Adventure” Compo
There might not be anything new to write here, but
notice how I at least bothered to try!
Stupid lazy GameDev newsletter.
http://www.playsushi.com/Contest.ps

Rant
Is my stupid ranting a weekly feature now?
FFS…

OK, lets complain about stupid filesizes, then!

Last night, Longarm tried to post his Scramble game, but
it alarmingly shot up to 20+Mb because he was trying to
shove a bunch of MP3s into the zip file.
Don’t do that!
Mods are neat, they’re small, and they repeat to create
the illusion of much longer music.

You don’t need full symphonies!

In this day and age, folk would be much happier to click
a link and play a browser game, so we all have to keep
things nice and small.
No silly installers.
No big downloads.
Just a nice little zip with a game in it.
People are happier if they can download it quick, unzip
it, play it briefly and then throw it away into the
recycle bin once they’re done.

And don’t get me started on “Death from Above”
http://bit.ly/DeathFromAFilesize

The author of the 26Mb game included a 15Mb wmv file,
the sole purpose of which was to generate a nice
backdrop for the title screen.

Yikes!!

Lovely game, mind.. Gotta love Jetstrike!

Be The Rant
Want to vent off to the two or three people who bother
to read the newsletters each week?

PM or Email me your rants, and I’ll start popping them
into futurenewsletters!

Let them feel your rage!!

Random Youtubeyness
Rant #2
I rarely listen to modern music anymore, but even I’m
sick of this bloody song..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRMwdmFYWg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NcMsDtyNKw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4npUdfEmbQ

End of
——————-
Load, Next List

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

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!

—

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

We’re about to enter MAR10, here in the UK, so I might as well show off a screenshot for Tuesday.

Yeay!

First game in MAR10 will be “Ted Bob in a Mario Costume”
Ted Bob, of course, being the character in the 12 Games of Christmas’s “Three French Hens”

You can play the original version here.
The new one will have some powerups, and probably some different end-game rules.

To be honest, I keep playing it, and as such haven’t yet even begun to code half the gameplay!
Aw well, at least it’s fun!

Tuesday : Mario Costume #1!

*Very ranty, and quite wordy!*

There’s a whole crapload of spam showing up in my inbox lately.
Stupid rubbish uninteresting “Newsletters” that I probably did sign up for, expecting something good, but that I usually end up getting pissed off at, due to the lack of interesting.. anything!

Aria is an example of how to do things well.
Aria.co.uk sell nice cheap stuff, and they have daily bargains. Their daily newsletter is like a little catalogue of bargains every day. Always good to read, and pick up the odd £50 1tb harddrive!

But there are bad ones out there.
There are REALLY bad ones out there.

One of the worst pieces of weekly trash in my inbox is the GameDev “Newsletter”
This is an unwritten, unchecked, automated spambot of crap.

The spambot flicks through the site, blindly copy+pasting whatever content it can find, shovels it into a weekly email, then passes it off as something amazing.

When I join up for a “Newsletter”, I do not want your website in my inbox.
I want you..
I want you writing things, I want you bothering, and I don’t want some god damned copy+pasted list of sodding links.

eg..

====================
2. GameDev NewsBytes
====================

Uhuh..
So, what about it?

Where’s the content in this newsletter?

What’s going on?
Tell me stuff.

WRITE SOMETHING!!

FFS.. ANYTHING WOULD DO!!!

USE A GOD DAMNED KEYBOARD, NOT JUST THE MOUSE!!!

Lazy assed Newsletters are all the rage lately, and I’m getting sick to death of the bloody things.

1. B3ta – Content hand picked by the author, nicely written up.
2. SoCoder – Content hand picked by the author, nicely written up. (albeit by me!)
3. Aria – Well, it’s a bargain isn’t it!!

Other than that, the rest can piss off..

Today I’ll be mostly clicking “Unsubscribe” links.