Game Jam

I made a game last weekend!  It's stupidly hard (and just plain stupid) but I'm a certain fashion of proud of it.

It began with an email I skimmed and ignored last week.  Itch (an indie-friendly gaming site and distribution platform, think Steam but with no real entry barriers) frequently hosts game jams, which are week- or weekend-long (and other durations I'm sure) events where a genre is chosen and game makers are encouraged to quickly build a new game, optionally around some given theme(s).  One-mechanic games were on the docket this time.  I generally don't have time to participate in these jams, so I paid it no mind.

Then a work buddy of mine had a case of beer on which the word "Escape" was written, split by the seam in the cardboard.  He jokingly said we needed to make a game about an ape escaping.  We had some fun chatting about that.  There could be fruits or something to collect, but you would be scolded for doing so.  "Why would you waste time collecting stuff when you should have been escaping?"  Each level could just be the displayed image, with a corresponding bit map of which pixels are grab-able.  With the one-mechanic idea freshly ignored in my brain, the ape could constantly swing his arms, and you could swap which hand he was gripping with using one key or button.  ...This could almost work out.

It's Kim's busy season (beginning of the year, accounting) so she was going to be working Saturday.  That left me plenty of time, should I choose to spend it not sleeping.

Well that was that.  Surely I'm a quick enough programmer to make a one-button game about Esc the Ape escaping!  The event kicked off, and the themes announced were "water", "capitalism", and "man versus machine".  ...Well, that was fine, those themes are optional anyway.

Kim to the rescue, as usual.  I talked to her about this ridiculous plan, and without even knowing the themes, she had a suggestion. "The ape could be collecting anything, even coins.  What does an ape need with a gold coin?"  And there it was.  I could even slap a mild capitalism theme onto this thing.

Anyway, I had already developed some rudimentary code to help turn my scribbles into animations and games.  So I made some scribbles...

...and, with a day-plus of programming, turned them into this game!  Enjoy!


https://itch.io/jam/omgjam3/rate/223986


[ afterward... ]
I got some great feedback.  Fellow indie developers are a great audience, and willing to find good nuggets even in rushed, sloppy work like this.  :^)

[ even more afterward... ]
The people who ran the game jam streamed themselves playing all of the entries.  Couldn't make it past my first level, but I have to credit them for trying.  :^)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/228848222?t=00h51m03s

KBtris

Some day, I will stop thinking of ways to ruin Tetris. But it is not this day.

A little while ago my brain finally realized that two very familiar sets of numbers match up.  Ten main keys on a computer keyboard's homerow, four main rows of ten keys each.  Ten columns in a Tetris playing field, four orientations for Tetris pieces.  And that was that.  From that moment, I had no choice.

A version of Tetris requiring most of the keyboard had to exist.  If it already did, I couldn't find it.  So now the world has one more Tetris clone.

http://kbtris.penduin.net

KBtris has a steep learning curve, which is something I would normally shy away from in a game.  But the idea is too compelling.  Traditionally, when a Tetris piece appears, even if you are a master player you still have to get your fingers or thumbs to input something like:

left-left-left-left-rotate-drop

Now, you can do the same thing with:

q

One keystroke will both rotate your piece to the desired orientation and move it to the desired column.  This of course means you need to _have_ a desired orientation and column, and then hit the correct key out of forty.  It's efficient, but you need all your fingers and your wits about you to get started.  From there, it's not completely unlike learning the piano.

I've played a lot of Tetris in my life; I consider it one of the purest gaming experiences imaginable.  My first goal now that KBtris exists is to get as good and as fast as I can at it.  I'm curious whether I'll be able to keep up with friends who are faster typists.

Beyond that, I want to see someone get really good.  Way beyond my abilities.  I want to see a KBtris Olympian and be shamed.

Maybe _then_ I'll stop thinking up ways to ruin Tetris.

Another silly device, another silly game

The other day, a friend tipped me off to an in-development smartphone with a round display. Circular. I've used a computer mouse that shape before, and wasn't super-impressed, but until/unless I see one in person I won't make jokes.

But it got me thinking, what sort of game or toy might I create for something with a round display?  My first ideas were tilt-based, like those old BB-in-a-maze toys.  But for whatever reason, I was compelled to quickly throw this together:

http://turn-n-seek.penduin.net

It's really dumb.  You have a little view of the goal pattern (which you can scoot around to see more, but never much at once), and you turn the dials around to try to match it.  Get everything lined up within +/-5 degrees, and you win.  Then it resets, and picks a new random number of dials, segments, and colors.

As it turns out, it's a kinda fun little time-waster on a normal slab-shaped phone or tablet too.  (Note: Android's stock browser is terrible; use Firefox or Chrome instead.)

I have a running in-joke (so in, it's basically just with myself).  The more effort I put into a game or app, the less people will care about it.  For example, according to the stats on the Firefox app marketplace...
https://marketplace.firefox.com/search?author=penduinbits
My most popular app by far is a stupid QR scanner I wrote in an hour.
In distant second is Halloween Artist, which I did put some effort into.
Dead last is Picross, which was by far the most work of the few apps I have listed here.

So, by this logic, since it took no time to throw together, my new "turn & seek" game will soon have hundreds of thousands of people playing!  ;^)

Bub Bub Bubbin' Along

Not a lot to show yet, but here's a side-by-side glimpse into the past and future of my silly Bub game:

I'm rebuilding the game with full animation support (rather than building on the table-based code I whipped up for the prototype), so there's still a lot to do as far as gameplay.  Right now, there is only walking left and right, and no logic for slurping up bubbles, bonking into walls, or really doing anything other than seeing my scribbles begin to come alive.

If you have a decent browser (Firefox, Chrome, probably Safari, maybe newest IE) you can always try the latest checked-in version here:
http://smogheap.github.io/bub/html5/
...and of course I'll post to this blog when there's something worth posting.

The current controls highlight just how much is yet to be done:

• mouse click: test a random screen transition
• left/right key: walk

...and that is all.  :^)

Bub

The short version:

Try out a prototype of "Bub" (a game I'm developing) in your browser:

http://smogheap.gitlab.io/bub/prototype.html

The long version:

Decades ago, I started scribbling alien critters, and this little guy(?) became one of my favorites.

Over a year ago, a scribble turned out like this...

...and I mused that this incarnation might need to star in a game at some point.

Months ago, I saw a crowdfunding campaign for this wild little thing.

Called Gamebuino, it's a tiny homebrew portable gaming console powered by cheap, ubiquitous, open technology all the way down.  I needed to pitch in, and I needed to write a game for it.

The screen is small, low-resolution, and black-and-white; my game had to use simple imagery.  There are very few buttons; the controls had to be simple too.  Ork is a simple shape, so I began prototyping a low-resolution game where he could walk around.

Completely-irrelevant tangent:  I say "he", but I'm pretty sure Ork and the other inhabitants of planet Snork (gimme a break, I was 8 :^) are hermaphroditic.  I'm not sure how biology works there, but no two critters look alike or have gender by Earth standards.

Anyway!  Ork needed some actions.  Traditionally he would blow bubbles, so I thought about how he might use those to get around.  Letting him blow bubbles just anywhere just got in his way since I hadn't coded any way to jump yet.  Blowing them beneath himself and climbing up, though, that was promising.

A long list of quick experiments flew by.  Different blocks, the idea of an inventory and slurping up bubbles before blowing them, bit by bit a prototype came together.  I've shared it with a few developer friends to get their feedback (and a few level ideas!) and now I think it's time to share it with anybody who will try it.  :^)

It's still a prototype.  There's no animation, there's no nice level select menu or custom controls, there's not even any music I'm willing to have on by default.  But you can experiment, play your way through the even-numbered levels and their odd-numbered evil twin versions, and once you've got the hang of it, you can build your own levels and share them by email or twitter.

Someday, I'll have a full, animated, polished version.  I also hope to publish it on Nintendo Wii U.  In the meantime, I hope you have fun with Ork in his new game, Bub.

 

Have a Gamebuino?  Grab the .HEX and play on Bub's inspirational console!
Have a computer/tablet/phone?  Play it in your web browser!
Have an interest in tinkering beyond making levels?  Poke around in its GPL3 code!

Picross

Shameless plug ahead...

I've made a Picross game for webOS devices. (TouchPad, Pre, Pixi, Veer...) It also runs happily in a modern web browser, including those on iBerry and BlackDroid and AnPhone and whatnot.
web demo:
http://penduin.net/bits/picross/
webOS app:
https://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=net.penduin.picross

The idea behind the game is that the process of solving a puzzle, using numerical clues, creates a pixel-art picture. I didn't invent Picross; someone much more clever did. But, I turned the idea into an HTML5 toy, and spent many insomniac hours thinking up 8x8 pictures, then testing and re-testing them to guess at their difficulty and make sure the clues weren't ambiguous. I recruited some help too; my wife contributed a handful of puzzles, as did a coworker and an enthusiastic early adopter.

Like all my little pet projects, it's open (GPL3) and you're encouraged to peek inside and learn from or build on it. I do sell the 99-cent webOS app with all of the (384, but who's counting) puzzles and the builder tool enabled, but when I say it's open I mean it - it's not hard to enable that stuff anyway if you're broke/cheap/webOS-less. :^) For BlackBerry PlayBook users, I'll probably release the game and demo in the BlackBerry store too at some point, but for now the web version runs very nicely.

Happy Puzzling!

Gee Wiz

A while ago (a year? I don't know) I bought a GP2X Wiz. It's a little Gameboy-like device which, unlike most others, is designed to be open for all developers. My first reaction to reading about it was, "hey, I could get TONG to run on that!"

...If that was gibberish to you, TONG is a game I wrote ages ago in which you are tasked with playing Tetris and Pong on the same screen at the same time. It's very hard, and I apologize to anyone who has gone insane while playing it.

Anyway, so I bought a Wiz, with the primary purpose of porting TONG to it. But I got busy, and it became a lower priority, and then it just kind of sat there neglected and forgotten for a long while.

A week or so ago I came upon it and decided to charge it up again, and load it with some games from the internet. Time to see what people who hadn't forgotten about it had accomplished. As I was browsing and downloading various free games, what did I find but TONG! Some crazy person out there had found my game, played it, enjoyed it (at least enough to want a portable version), then dug into the source code and data, made some modifications, cross-compiled it for the device, then shared the resulting package with the Wiz community. That blew my mind a bit.


Anyway I'm very pleased. It's a bit of a quick and dirty port, using a slightly older version of TONG and the music was missing, but it runs great! I'm distributing a version of it myself now, with some new features, all the music intact and using the latest code.

Has anyone seen TONG spring up anywhere else? I was hoping to get it running on the Wii at some point, has somebody done that already? :^)

Wii!

As of 8:05 yesterday, I'm a proud owner of a shiny new Nintendo Wii.

Along with two friends (and some 40+ strangers) I actually camped in a line outside a local Target to get my hands on this thing. Even as a gamer, I've never camped out for high-demand stuff before. It's a completely insane thing to do, but my justification for it was this:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I've always been a sucker for Zelda games, and this one may well be the best yet. I've played enough already to have myself convinced that waiting out in the cold all night was worth it. The controls are both natural and precise, the story's progression is surprisingly powerful, and the art direction is like nothing I've ever seen before. But I didn't expect that I would also be playing a lot of this:The included-for-free Wii Sports, tennis in this case. Turns out, my wife can't get enough of this game. And there are good reasons. It's ridiculously simple to play - just use the Wii remote as you would a tennis racket. We got to create and play as little caricature versions of ourselves, which are pretty amusing even when they're not doing anything. So when an instant replay flashes in showing a little plastic me (Mii, actually) jumping and swinging wildly at the ball only to land hard on its exaggerated face, and my wife's avatar stepping in to save the day with a scoring lob, laughter ensues. Very simple elements, but very rewarding gameplay.

I'm not posting to make any point really. I just had to shout out, "Wiiii!" :^)

My Tetrises bring all the girls to the yard

Nintendo made magic happen with the DS. Not the 3D graphics, not the wireless networking, and not the 10-hour battery life. After lunch, my work buddies and I can whip out these little shiny devices and get all competitive, spouting off enough random banter to occasionally make my eyes water.

Today was less of a Tetris contest than a competition of who could say the most random and off-the-wall things during play.
"I just did something totally retarded"
"I'm offended by the word 'retarded'"
"I'm offended by the word 'water'"
"My ancestors came here across water"
"Mine didn't, my ancestors hovered"
"They must have had very advanced technology"
"My ancestors were from the future"

This has been a test of the emergency blog posting system. Had it been an actual emergency, this nearly-inactive blog would be the last place any reasonable person would expect to find warning.

I lost? I lost!

Mario Kart DS is probably the ideal lunch break distraction. We usually straight-up Versus mode until someone (me) breaks 100, or sometimes 200, or sometimes until we get to race on Tick Tock Clock. There's no better way to begin the digestive process.

Today didn't go quite as usual. When I broke 100, Proby broke it further. He explained that he'd been practicing all weekend, but the "why" does not concern me. I lost. Me! Mario Kart! Lost! Entropy is leaking into the universe, my friends.