Space Duel was one of my favorite games of the early 80’s. Note the similarity between the title screen of Space Duel, and the title font for my Global Game Jam game ASCIIboros. This is, in fact, an homage. It happened that there was a free font called Baby Blocks that had just the right look, and conveyed the look that I had in mind for the bit registers in the game. A really serendipitous find.
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I’m at the very end:
Another Space Invaders HTML5 update. The only thing I did with this build was fix the speed increase. It dawned on my after watching video of the original that the speed increase was gradual, not that it picked up at specific numbers of Invaders remaining. Reading about it on Wikipedia, I learned that the original Invaders were actually constrained in speed by the hardware, and that as you destroyed more of them, the CPU had fewer things to do so took care of updating the remaining ones in the phalanx faster and faster.
I still have yet to implement the bunkers; it’s not straightforward to do destructible sprites, and I haven’t yet looked into methods for accomplishing it yet, but apart from fixing the high score glitch that’s all that’s left.
Oh, I suppose I could give extra lives after a certain number of points scored, if you insist.
I’ve uploaded an update for the Space Invaders HTML5 demo. This version is almost complete.
Both issues were caused because Game Maker HTML5 games do not work with user-defined Triggers when a game is built as an HTML5 application. I worked around this by re-implementing the Trigger code in the Step event instead.
Still working on the High Score screen. It is not working correctly; the list only stores the top 1 score, not the top 10. It’s also not as pretty as it could be.
The “theme” for Global Game Jam this year was the Ouroboros, the mythical snake that eats its own tail in an infinite, recursive cycle of death and rebirth.
What a freakin’ cool theme that is. Seriously.
I ended up working solo on an idea that I had. My first thought was to make a platformer where you loop through a single level infinitely as you are chased by the “snake head” that eats the level behind you. Each time through the level, things you do in the last pass through cause some change so that the level, while still recognizable as itself, has gotten more difficult. Next, I thought that rather than make the level more difficult, it could be a puzzle that you’re stuck in until you do the right thing to escape, much like the later castle levels in the original Super Mario Bros.
I had never made a platformer before, but had enough experience in Game Maker that I felt confident I could pull something off. To facilitate rapid solo development, I embraced lo-fi graphics. They’re cheaper and easier to make, and without a team behind me I wouldn’t have much time to do more. My friend Steve Felix from the Cleveland Game Developers meetup stepped in and helped me by producing the run and jump animations, based on my original stick figure. Everything else in the game is all me.
The lo-fi look is a nice homage to the 8-bit era, and lends itself to thinking about low-level computing. You feel closer to the metal when you have fewer bits to make reality out of. This led me to my idea for the core mechanic of the game.
Added some sound effects, fixed the “invaders touch ground > game over” bug.
Too tired to write full blog post. This shall suffice for now.
I finally got my hands on Game Maker HTML5 beta, and whipped up a quick HTML5 Space Invaders demo. It’s decent, but has a number of bugs that are not present in the Windows .exe build.
You can play it here:
https://csanyk.com/cs/releases/games/HTML5/SInvaders/
What’s broken in HTML5: The game over function, and the level reset function. That’s basically it.
Still unimplemented: sound effects, high score board, the mothership, invader speedup.
I cheated a bit and made the invader movement be smooth instead of stutter-stepping. If I go through the trouble of improving this all the way, I’ll take care of that at some point.
Look for a post on my thoughts about Game Maker HTML5 sometime after Global Game Jam weekend.
In the meantime, play the Space Invaders demo and let me know how it works. I’m curious how it performs in different browsers, so definitely drop me a comment if you try it out, and let me know how it is on your browser.
Notacon is an annual technology conference held in Cleveland, Ohio that I have been going to for the last few years. This year’s conference, Notacon 9 runs from April 12-15, 2012.
I spoke last year at Notacon 8, and enjoyed it so much that this year I’m putting together another presentation, a crash course in Game Maker, AND organizing an event for the weekend, called A Game, Any Game. A Game, Any Game will be a 72 hour sprint to develop a working video game.
I took a little inspiration from Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam, and a little from the fact that too many of the people I’ve met through the Cleveland Game Developers meetup still have not built a finished game. I want to give everyone who participates the opportunity to get past that milestone in a weekend, and feel that sense of accomplishment that makes you feel so good.
As its name implies, A Game, Any Game is intended to be very open-ended. We’re aiming to provide a venue and encouragement, and just enough structure to give participants the traction they need to create a game in under 72-hours. It is not a competition; the idea is simply to make a game, any game, and get it completed in the 72 hours we have during the conference. Participants are encouraged to use any and all tools that they have at their disposal to make their game, and if they have never done anything like it before, they’re invited to attend my talk, Game Maker Crash Course. People can choose to work on whatever ideas they feel like working on, but if they need some help brainstorming, I’m going to come up with something to help seed the clouds.
For me, it’s going to be really interesting to see how many participants we can attract, and how many finished games we can produce. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve tried to organize something like this, and I think the key to it being successful will be promoting the event effectively to get people interested in doing it, and then making their experience great.
I think I have more ideas on how to make the experience (hopefully) great than I do on how to promote. Aside from blogging about it here, tweeting my fingers off, and telling everyone I know, what else can I do? I’m asking anyone who’s reading this to spread the word. Tell anyone you know who might be interested about Notacon and the A Game, Any Game event. If you use Twitter, the hash tag #n9agame will be used for any business related to A Game, Any Game. You can follow my tweets as well @csanyk.
The weekend of January 27-29, 2012, Cleveland Videogame Developers are participating in Global Game Jam 2012 (twitter hashtag #GGj12). This event will be hosted at Lean Dog Software.
Cleveland Game Devs on Meetup.com
Event page on Meetup.com for GGJ12-Cle
Registration for GGJ12-Cle
Hot on the heels of 0.24, I’ve released Boobie Teeth 0.25. In this release, I’ve gotten the mini-map function implemented the way I want it. The mini-map is now transparent, and (if you care about Game Maker internals) is now based on draw commands rather than a View. The code that draws the mini-map is based off of an example I found on the Game Maker Community forums, by a developer who goes by the handle Supertramp.
Download from the Releases page, and play it!