Tobias makes Games

At the end of every January, people all around the world gather to make awesome games in an absurdly short time. Developing a game in 48 hours is nothing short of insane, and I don’t think it comes to anyones surprise that this appeals a lot to me. And here I proudly present our result this year:

Super Snake Wheel

“We can’t stop here! This is bat country!”
Well, Mr. Snake might have been a bit drunk when he and his companion Mr. Gecko ignored all the warnings and set out to their adventure. Being one of the few snakes who can form a tire out of himself, he’s now rolling down the hill while Mr. Gecko defends him from birds, barely keeping his balance! Take control of this duo of odd heroes in this quirky adventure for one casual and one hardcore player!

Play the updated version online at Kongregate!

Check out the original GGJ build!

And of course credit where credit is due, and these amazing guys deserve a lot:

• Game Design: Matthias Niebergall
• Art: Kirill Krysov
• Programming: Dominik Hübner and myself
• Music taken from the wonderful Kevin MacLeod
• A big thanks to all the guys organizing the jam, globally and locally here in Berlin. You’ve done a great job!

By the way, we even satisfied a diversifier (an achievement for the developers) this year: “Collaborative Casual/Hardcore (Two players: one casual, one hardcore): Collaborative play for two, but one player has more to do than the other (or the difficulty level is different between them).” I am sure you will agree after you’ve tried both the casual Mr. Snake and the slightly more hardcore Mr. Gecko: The former just has to jump and duck, while the later has to balance on the snake, jump at the right times and use the mouse to shoot at birds!

Lessons learned

Even though this is not my first jam, it seems that every single one has some valuable lessons to teach. These are mine this time:

• Even though it’s an a very small timeframe, make a rough project plan with milestones so you won’t lose focus.
• Every milestone should be playable (player interaction and a goal), especially the first one – which should ideally be ready when you go to sleep the first time. It does wonders to your motivation!
• Programmers, make a task list. It keeps you focused.
• You cannot say if something is fun until you can test it. Halfway through the project I felt like giving up because nothing seemed to be coming together, and 12 hours later we had this amazingly fun prototype! So even if it seems like the game won’t be any good, at least implement the first playable prototype.
• If your code is based on a pixel oriented framework like Flashpunk, don’t mix in vector based stuff like MovieClips. It just leads to a whole load of implementation overhead.
• If you want to pull an all-nighter, at least sleep the first night. Otherwise you might fall asleep the second night which will surely lead to you missing the deadline.

This year the GGJ was certainly not easy and at times tedious and exhausting, but the result totally makes up for that. I daresay that it is one of my best prototypes so far! I am very happy that I have participated, and I’d like to thank everybody who made the weekend as amazing as it was!

Another month, another Berlin Mini Game Jam. This time the topics were “adaptation” and “conflicting goals”. I took the former one, and made a stealth game:

You are the circle, trying to blend in with your environment as much as possible by changing your grey value. Perfect white or black heals you if you have the same color. Stay alive as long as possible!

The game began as local multiplayer at the jam, and over the next days I added a singleplayer mode, Kongregate scores, more polish, and of course sound and music which are made by Moritz Ufer.

The core gameplay was actually finished and the prototype playable after 5 hours, so I had 3 hours for polishing – nice. Best prototype I made at a jam all alone so far!

Play the game here:

• Full version at Kongregate
• 8h Jam Version (missing the heal and some other stuff)
  

This month’s EGP theme was ASCII, so to no one’s surprise: Here’s a game about words! More specifically about forming words out of letters which just happen to lie about.

The basic principle is as follows:

You are currently at the bigger “R”. Some letters have a black background – you previously wandered over these. Others are forming words, but you have yet to walk over them: these are green. You can drag and drop letters to form words. Red letters aren’t dragable, but as you can see above, can be used to form words: The N, E and D were red letters before. Minimum length for a word is 4 letters.

There are two modes: One in which you try to get as much points as possible until you run out of space or time, and another one in which you aim for a target. Everything else can be found out in the game by pointing at the [?] in the upper right corner of every playscreen – or by just playing it.

Apropos “playing it”: Click here for the current version! (This more complete version was edited after the EGP deadline. For the old egp version, click here.)

Please post some of your highscores here! Oh, and comments too! Which configuration(s) do you like best? Any criticism, feedback, suggestions?

edit:
Due to illness I didn’t have enough time to add sound effects and to fix some bugs. I’ve left the EGP version intact (see the link in brackets above), but also wanted to adress what I listed before, so I uploaded the new version – which is, of course, a) slightly over 7 days and b) touched in March too.

Oh, and: Hello game-damashi.com!

As some of you might know, I’m studying International Media and Computing, which includes a course called “Media Programming” – and for all I know, it might also be named “Game Programming”, because that’s what  did there. I like my study more and more!
This monday was the presentation of the games over the last two months. Ours is a Beat’em up. It’s rather generic because of our time constraints (after all this isn’t my and our only project) and the absense of a game designer, but I learned a lot about 3d programming and XNA while developing, and it’s fun to play anyway!

You should easily figure out the buttons on the gamepad.

Keyboard layout for player 1:

• Left/Right: Move
• Up: Jump
• Down: Drop through plattform
• J: Punch
• K: Kick
• L: Block
• Backspace: Back
• Space: Start

And for Player 2:

• D/G: Move
• R: Jump
• F: Drop through plattform
• Q: Punch
• W: Kick
• E: Block

Download BashZone!

You’ll need a Shader 2.0 compatible graphics card and the XNA Framework 3.1 to play it. XBOX 360 Gamepads are fully optional, but it plays way better with than without!

Since I’m showing my game around on the TIGForums, I thought I might as well leave a post here!

Catcher is a game about (surprise!) catching things! Especially geometric forms. (In SPACE!) With two spaceships, here depicted as circles. These two spaceships are connected by an energy line, which you will use to border your enemies and open a dimension rift by closing it – and thereby defeating anything inside! It features over two dozen unique enemies on more than 30 levels.

Among the various things yet to be done, the most notably one is the tutorial. I hope you can get it together alone with a description of the keys and the menu entry “Demo“:

• X and C makes your spaceships (the blue circles) flying nearer or farther to each other
• The mouse wheel, if you have one, does the same as X and C
• Pointing the mouse makes your spaceships turn
• Clicking the mouse (left or right) makes your spaceships move

The energy line breaks when
a) one of your spaceships touches an enemy or
b) the energy line crosses another part of the energy line (remember: DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS!)
If the line broke, you can restore it by holding X (so that the spaceships touch each other).

Enough babbling, more playing:

(It is Java Web Start, so no installation or unzipping needed )

While all and every feedback is appreciated, I especially want to know:

• How do you think could the controls be improved?
• What didn’t make sense to you? What wasn’t clear? What needs to be definitly in the tutorial?
• And bonus question: Do you have any ideas regarding new enemies? (This is a bonus question because I don’t know if I will include any new enemies right now, but this will be good to know for the next version )
• Ultra-special bonus question: Anyone has an idea for a better name for the game? I’m not sure I’m content with “Catcher”, it seems kind of too general.

Still missing so far:

• Sounds/Music
• Tutorial
• Random Mode and Endless Mode need besser formulas
• General polishing

This month I was working on my first contest entry ever – and finally I am done! It is an entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project during this month (the theme is: “100 Things“).

My game is about a juggler who runs against his arch-enemy, the evil clown, in a juggling duel to… well, till one has 100 balls. The development took 65 hours including some part of the game design process, learning SDL.NET and the graphic creation. The music is by Deniz Akbulut.

The game written in C#, I will post a link to the source code here later on.

While I am not content with everything (the development streched over 14 days, not 7, the music is not by me, I kind of took the easy route route with the theme, just using the “100″ as an arbitrary number, and as Matthew Elvey Price says in the comments, it’s rather DDR-like), overall I am actually quite happy with the outcome. This is my first project with SDL.NET, my first project with my own graphics and my second complete (mini) game in total – and considering this, it turned out quite well! I would even go as far as say that it might actually be fun to play! (Go, try it!)

Screenshots – well, okay, just one:

Download: Juggler v1.0 (Windows)
You might need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

I would love to read a comment about how you liked (or didn’t like) the game! The Comment Section is just below.

…and for the next Experimental Gameplay Project I will be faster and the game will be more inventive. Promise!