Busy

Spent yesterday at Nottingham Trent University at PKDD2 -- a Philip K Dick day, where I had a thoroughly pleasant day in the presence of academics and PKD enthusiasts. And academics who are PKD enthusiastslike myself, of course. People seemed a little keener to see Dick as prophetic than I would personally allow, but it was pleasant. As an Eng Lit apostate it felt good to see displays of books and people talking with passion about books. Something new to me was the palmer Eldritch blog, and particularly the 'Which PKD story are we in today' bit. Intriguing.

In other news, my children sqeal with delight as we play through the Lego Indiana Jones, claiming that the Indy in the college sections looks just like Daddy. I am secretly pleased.

Like Indy I am now getting long in the tooth, however, and it must be that (and not the dodgy camera) that means that I plunge to my doom so often from platforms that I KNOW I shouldbe able to reach.

For Father's Day I got given a 'Let the Wookie Win' Lego Star Wars T-shirt, a set of Obi Wan Kenobi nesting dolls and a vague sense that I should grow up. God bless Hallmark holidays.

Am left pondering the relationship between Assassin's Creed and PKD, of all things, after my talk at NTU.

Wire Loop Games

Which is effectively what it is -- a wire loop game. Except instead of little buzzer it knocks a little health off. In the end I couldn't stop fidgiting with it, but now it is gone, done, finished, over. Funny how people keep saying they like the clouds... Maybe I should learn from that. Are they just being polite?

So the version labelled 5 should be in the BoxNet widget box, and also up at YoYo Games. I have a piece of academic writing about user generated content and game production through middleware that makes me think this is a positive use of my time.

Daedalus Done

So, that is that. Finished, I think. A nice little experiment to distract me while I played with a follow-the-mouse mechanic. A joy to play with, really, as the grammar and vocabulary of the game were already in existence.

Were I to imagine a 1990s box blurb:

Daedalus & Son is a platform game where soaring flight replaces stilted jumping, and keyboard bashing is replaced with graceful mouse movement. Control Icarus as he enters the Labyrinth of the Minotaur and try to keep his feathers from frying and his wax from melting as he is assaulted by unique enemies and caught in the traps and puzzles devised by his genius father.

- A new look at a familiar genre, where the platform is your enemy and not your friend.

- Enemies and hazards unique to the game, including the Medusa and the Roc.

- Autosave/Load.

- Hero or Mortal Difficulty, and ranking on completion.

- Novel and satisfying mouse flight control.

- 20+ Levels.

- Lean design -- no padding, no filler.

Development (including all the rough and ready pixel art) took 6 days of fiddling, in between teaching, writing, childcare, marking, and validating a new degree at a different university. Just as well they have plug sockets on trains so that I can make games on long journeys now rather than play them.

Daedalus & Son

Closer, by inches

Wow, all working bar a few sprites and depth issues.

Getting There -- If a little ugly

But perhaps not busy enough, yet.

Really playable now.

Triptych Alpha

Waiting for students to turn up I have got my latest little game into what I’ll call Alpha. The screenshot is of one game. Or of three games. Anyway, I have been wanting to make a triptych game for a while, and this is the first version I have which has all three simultaneous games working and (to some extent) interacting. The one on the left is a crate stacking game which I have also let out into the wild as solitary game (it should be all zipped up in the BoxNet widget to the right as Stack5). The one on the right is a very very very nostalgic lane swapping driving game. And that is something like Pong over the top. There is a gentle roll out, but the player eventually plays all three at the same time.

I might go into some detail about why I am interested in this some other time (I have a theoretical understanding about game space and play that this reflects), and I might go on and on about gamers and multitasking , which is something those younger than me keep telling me they are adept at.

Strange process, though. I knew I had to get some simple games together so that this would work. And in the process I cloned a few. I have a clone of Tower Bloxx that works (which I replaced with Stack5 after I realised just how uncomfortable I am cloning things) and a sort of clone of Desktop Tower Defence with a lot of variation that should be in the second iteration of Triptych. Screen of Tower Bloxx clone below.



Term is now in full swing, so I don’t know when it’ll be done enough to release, but yay, it works. Oh, and I know it isn’t a proper triptych.