Tag: AIR/Flash

“Wickie und die starken Männer Teil 2: Wiedersehen in Flake” for the iPhone

The second game in the series “Games I Made For Companies, But Never Posted Here” was for Exozet a few years ago – a port of the Nintendo DS Game “Wickie und die starken Männer – Teil 2: Wiedersehen in Flake” to the iPhone using Adobe AIR.

The port had an interesting set of challenges. The game should use the original levels and everything including player movement and enemies should be exactly like it was on the DS. Obviously I couldn’t use any of the original code directly, but it was still useful to be certain about some enemy behaviours. The level files had to be exported, converted into a proper format for the AIR game and then read back.

For that game, I worked together with another programmer. My part was almost all the in-game gameplay, i.e. level loading, platforming and implementing the player character, the enemies, the various other hazards and the pick-ups in the game world.

Here is a trailer – in German, but the gameplay is still easily understandable:

Wickie und die starken Männer Teil 2 - iPhone Launch Trailer (German)

 

Retcon: A Multi-Round Game Which Records & Replays Your Moves

Over two years ago, a theme in university was action recording/replaying, and instead of doing a boring text editing app to demonstrate this, I made a game. Introducing:

Each round your previous actions are replayed,
but your and your enemy’s actions will change the
outcomes of previous moves by placing new tokens.

You can play the game in your browser or download the Android APK.

Retcon: A Multi-Round Game Which Records & Replays Your Moves

I think the concept is quite intriguing, but the current execution is flawed. Currently, the tokens of the current starting player start first which leads to fluctuating patterns. Also, no matter how experienced you are in the game, you still cannot beat new players who grasp the concept by a significant score and even you pull of a cool move that should get you in the lead, it often doesn’t really matter much.

What I really like though is being the starting player in a round can both be an advantage and a disadvantage: You will move first and can force the second player to defend a certain position, but in certain situations you might need to defend an important position before the other player moves to attack there – and then the other player obviously will place somewhere else.

Anyway, long story short: I might make another game based on the recording/replaying multi-round concept in the future and I sure hope that one will be a lot more fun. More years of experience have to be good for something, right?

Retcon was made by me, with assets by:

 

Burglary: An Action/Stealth game made for Ludum Dare 25

Ludum Dare 25 is over and I cannot wait to go to bed, but first I wanted to publish my game here too!

Burglary

Explore the premises. Evade the guards. Pick locks.
Steal the treasures! And then escape with them.

Burglary, an action/stealth game about stealing from
the rich and giving to those in need: Yourself.

Burglary: Ludum Dare 25 Build

Play the game on Kongregate!

Visit the Official Ludum Dare Submission!

Made completely in 48h – well, according to the Ludum Dare competition rules. I obviously used some base code and publicly available libraries. Apart from that, everything (but the preloading graphics and a very small generic shadow tiles bitmap) was made by yours truly in the 48 hours: Music, sound, graphics and code.

Used libraries/tools:

 

Winter Sports: Ice Skating

Here’s an old one I never posted, and it’s about time – it’s really cool! So now without further ado, enjoy “Winter Sports: Ice Skating”, a heart-warming minimalistic game made for the TIGS Advent Calendar 2011 in about 16h.

Winter Sports: Ice Skating

You are ice skating and try to relax,
but these rude other people are making so much noise.
You are fed up, don your ice slicing skates,
and do the only reasonable thing:

You let them fall into holes in the ice.

Make holes by crossing the line you’ve sliced in the ice before.
The holes freeze again over time, but until then, try not to fall in yourself…

Winter Sports: Ice Skating Gameplay

Play the game now directly in your browser!

Music by Kevin MacLeod
Sounds by petenice and malexmedia.

 

Defend your villages and people in: Trap 3

The October Mini Game Jam was a lot of fun – 17 attending people in total! Whoo! Out of the available themes, I picked “Trap”. After some brainstorming, I combined it with a Match 3 concept, and finally arrived at:

Trap 3

Obviously I didn’t work with an artist this time.

It draws lots of inspiration from Triple Town: You get a tile, you place it somewhere, you get the next. When 3 of them match a so-called “recipe”, they merge into something stronger:

3 adjacent “person” become “people”, and 3 adjacent “people” become a “crowd”. They bring points per turn.

And then I added monsters. Monsters come in from the side every few turns, walk a step towards their next prey every time you place something, and later in the games, the monsters get stronger. Monsters have recipes too, for example:

If a spider and a person are adjacent to each other, they “merge” into a spider. So basically: it eats them. Same with spider and people.

Now if monsters could only eat people and cost you points, there wouldn’t be much of a point in that. And here comes the trapping mechanic, which is also a recipe:

Put two green blocks down, and if a spider walks next to it, the spider and the trap transform into nothing and give you points in the process. Same with snakes, only that you first need to make the stronger snake-catching blocks and have two of those adjacent. So this here is essentially a spider trap:

If you want to see the complete list of recipes I had, you can click here or on the screenshot at the top.

So much for that. Unfortunately, I somewhere along the process I got lost and everything took a lot longer than anticipated. Most of what I described above works, but there are no points and no goal, you can’t even lose. If you feel adventurous, you can try the prototype anyway by clicking here. I’ll probably not finish it, but I think there’s something cool hidden in there, and I might make a new prototype once I find out what it is!

 

Fight for your life in Guardian of the Void Children

Another month, another Berlin Mini Jam. This time, two of the topics were “Guardian” and “Void”, so I teamed up with Michael Kessler and did this:

Guardian of the Void Children

The Void is a harsh place to bring up children.
Our particular mother here is just about to find out how harsh exactly,
now that a swarm of drones located her nest…

How long can you survive their relentless assault?
Defend your nest, your children and your life in this
Tower Defense/Top-down Shooter crossover!

 

Play it here, directly in your browser:

 

The Great Hunt: A Massively Multiplayer Offline game prototype for up to 10 players

June Berlin Mini Game Jam. The theme is “hunting”. My secret theme is “Massively Multiplayer Offline Game”. One man, one mission, 8 hours to go!

8 hours (plus 3 hours bugfixing) later I’ve got this:

The Great Hunt

Enough with the monsters killing off the villagers!
You are a brave hunter, and you’re getting paid to deal with these pests!

Well, you’re not the only one hired though. And only the best will get paid.

Be the last man standing, or at least finish first with 60 points!

Play here, as always directly in your browser!

 

While the game is playable and actually features up to 10 players (on 4 keyboards, no less), it fails in many other ways.

The basic idea behind the game was “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”: You need other players help to take down monsters, but the more players participate the less points you get. So when you’re standing in front of a monster with others players beside you, you’d be like “Dude, back off, if you stay here we won’t get much points anyway!”, or maybe you’d switch last second to another monster.

So much for the theory. In reality everything goes down so fast (and is so chaotic) that there isn’t much communciation or tactics. Fights also take too long and are not balanced, and there are not much real choices.

I have to admit that I’m not sure how I’d fix the game without introducing more complexity like power-ups. Anyways: It was a fun experiment, and lessons were learned. (The main lesson being that 10+ people games are possible in 8h. I guess I’ll never learn, haha. Looking forward to next jam!)

 

Alchemist’s Duel: An arcadey puzzle game for 2 two-people teams

“Alchemy” was the theme for the May Mini Game Jam, so I made a game about alchemists trying to reproduce a certain formula and their faithful henchman collecting ingredients for them:

Alchemist’s Duel

You are right before finishing your Magnus Opus!
Only one recipe left… Same goes for your rival though.
Send out your collector to get you the ingredients you need,
and be the first to finish your glorious work!

Play here, directly in your browser!

 

To finish, you have to fill your goal field with the right elements:

The three light blue, the yellow and the green elements are at the right place. The dark blue shouldn’t be there in the red goal field. Three fields are still unfilled. Push the blue element out, and fill all the goal fields with the right colors to win!

 

Noise: A split-screen game for 2 players about stealing sweet stuff in the dark

For our March Berlin Mini Game Jam, the themes were amongst others “Thievery” and “Noise” – and that’s what my friend Dominik and me combined into an ultrasonic burglary simulation:

Noise

A dark room, full of jewels – and stuff to run into.
Luckily you have your ultrasonic locator to “see” in the dark.
A few moments later, you realize you’re not alone.
You ready your bludgeon…

Play here, directly in your browser!

 

This game employs a Hidden Information Split Screen™ (which can optionally be simulated by having two monitors):

 

Do you feel the Force? Well, those balls do.

Hey folks, it’s history time! I have some old (and fairly new) prototypes and mini-games that I never published – so far, that is. So here’s our first installment in the series!

Force

I did this for the 2nd Blitzkast, ignoring the optional topic. There are balls, and you can draw lines to affect them. It might become something like a shooter and/or a tower defense game if I ever decide to get back to it.

Here are the different versions, as always directly playable in your browser: