Rogue's Redemption

Rogue's Redemption has been a long time coming and has not enjoyed the easiest birth into this world. After months of juggling various ideas around, a general plan has been decided and some code has actually appeared on the screen.

The game will broadly comply with the Berlin Interpretation of what a Roguelike is, with the probably exception of randomly generated levels. This has been the biggest hurdle thus far and has halted work on a number of occasions. For now, I'll be using hand-crafted levels with randomly generated enemies, items etc. Everything else will be recognisable to any Roguelike player: turn-based hack 'n' slash actions, grid-based levels, item management, permadeath and so on.

The game is currently at a very early stage and consists of a test level with a few items and monsters scattered around it. The player can move around and the monsters will give chase if they spot you.

Combat is yet to be implemented as are a host of other things : inventory management, use of items - 90% of the game, in fact is still to do.

A very early test level with various items dotted around.

Couple o' releases

Psychon 2 has been released in a reasonably complete form. Honestly, I got fed up with it toward the end - the levels were taking many hours to complete so there are now 5 full levels instead of the planned 8. Nonetheless, there's plenty for the player to explore and shoot at.

I've also released a single level demo of Rocket Run. This may be picked up again in the future if inspiration strikes. I like the game but need some ideas on how to deepen the playing experience and add real variety to the levels.

Both releases are available on my main website : OneSevenOne Games

Rocket Run

Some of us older guys remember Thrust and Thrust II from the 8-bit era. The player's aim was to manoeuvre a spaceship by rotating and thrusting, as it flies over a two-dimensional landscape and through caverns. It's roots can be traced back to Atari's Gravitar and Asteroids.

Rocket Run is a new take on the concept of piloting a little ship around an environment shooting enemies and collecting items. The core of the game is learning to control the ship accurately through increasingly narrow tunnels.

Rocket Run : pixel art and particles

Having tried various graphical styles, I've opted for limited palette pixel art graphics. 8-bit games Starquake,Underwurlde and the more recent Axiom Verge have been my main influence. I'm not really an artist so need plenty of good source material to draw inspiration from.

For the first time in a Defold game I'm implementing parallax scrolling. There's a simple repeating background that scrolls more slowly than the foreground to create the illusion of depth. Right now, it's not possible to place game objects between tilemap layers so the background is just a repeating sprite. Hopefully in future releases of Defold, it will be possible to have a foreground and background implemented within a tilemap. As of this evening, the game has a single map and the player can fly around, bump into the scenery and shoot.

On the to-do next list is:

• Static enemies that shoot
• Fuel cans and other items to collect
• Add tractor beam to ship

Victory Lane

Not much of a development log this one as the game is already complete! Well, in a fashion - there's always room for improvement.

The crossroads of life

Only a week of toiling away to make this one - I'm super impressed at the speed someone can make games using Defold. This is my third game in as many months using the platform and I feel set to continue creating games with it for the foreseeable future. It does most of what I need and now I have something of a handle on it, development moves forward at a ferocious rate.

Onto Victory Lane.. the game is inspired by a couple of old games: Chequered Flag by Konami, an arcade game from 1988 and Overdrive by Team 17 - another overhead racer from the Amiga days.

Within 3-4 hours of development I had a car whizzing around a track controlled by the player. Another few hours later, computer-controlled cars joined in the melee. Happily, my idea for how the AI functions worked better than expected - I was expecting hours of tinkering but the cars made it round the track first time.

A car sandwich

For now, the game has 4 tracks and the player takes part in a single 8-lap race. There's room for various game modes but I didn't want to invest too much time in a game that no one will see. I intend to pursue this model from now on - this is supposed to be fun and that will mean creating 'bare bones' games, at least to begin with. Enough to show fully what the game is like but without all the bells and whistles.

Victory Lane is the first game I've released on itch.io, so it's unknown how that will turn out. Itch seems like a really well made site made by people who understand indie game development.

Links are available on my main site.

Psychon 2 - Update

It's been another fairly productive few days continuing development on Psychon 2.

Five varieties of cabbage

The enemy AI has been improved - the little robots now chase after you when they see you. I wrote a line-of-site function using vectors for this before noticing there is functionality already in Defold to cast rays. I've not looked at this in detail yet but will modify the code to use physics.ray_cast if it turns out to be suitable.

Sentries have been added and have turned out to be quite formidable enemies. There's a trick to defeating them though! They work similarly to the robots and have a proximity trigger using a collision object. They're fixed position but can rotate and shoot laser bolts at the player.

Sentries: a world of pain

Some other peripheral stuff has been added or improved. The in game OSD has been neatened up and various fades and transitions between the front-end and the game added. These help make it feel more like a cohesive game - though there's still lots to do.

Next on the list is making the mini-map - something the player will likely need in order to track down the crystal fragments on each level. Even I get lost in there sometimes.

I'm putting off re-arranging the various collections to allow different levels to be loaded. I'm not confident yet I know fully what to do. There's plenty of reading material in the API reference and on the Defold forum to help though.

video of gameplay

Psychon 2

As is my prerogative, I've decided to do another side project before undertaking Pixel Station II.

While relaxing on holiday I realised it was time to revive an old game of mine and give it a decent sequel.

During the winter months of 1994/95 I wrote "Psycheual" for the Amiga and released it as shareware. Three years later, the game was remade for the PlayStation Net Yaroze and renamed "Psychon". For some reason, it gained a cult following, despite having been thrown together in 10 days.

I'm planning to spend a little longer on the sequel and hopefully iron out some of the issues present in the original.

Once again, I'll be using the Defold game engine - I really like Defold; it's perfect for this sort of game and allows releases on multiple platforms without any great hassle.

I've committed a couple of days to it so far and have a working prototype with the player navigating a test level decorated with some graphical ideas. These will be developed further and some new elements added - one of the issues with the first game was the repetition. The levels all looked the same and there wasn't much to do other than try and stay alive long enough to reach the deck lift.

It's still going to be a simple game so I don't anticipate more than a few weeks development time. One challenge will be making a touch screen version of the game for release on Android - and maybe iPhone if that's feasible.

For now, here's an early screenshot:

Psychon 2 - currently in development

Pixel Station II

While I wait for some assets to appear for the collaboration development I'm a part of, my time will be spent creating the sequel to Pixel Station, which was released on Android in 2015.

Although the first game fulfilled most of what I'd imagined for it, I lost interest near the end of development and felt the game underachieved in a lot of ways. It was too repetitive and there wasn't enough to do. I'm still attached to the concept though and want to give it a second shot.

An early test level

This time, I will be using the Defold game engine and targeting Android primarily, though other platforms may get a release as well depending on how I feel about the game when it's ready.

It's early days, so there's not much actual progress to report yet. Given the speed with which Defold gives to developers, I anticipate fairly quick progress in the next few weeks.

The overall gameplay will be similar to the original but there will be more variety in what the player can do and more interactive things to enjoy while playing.

Cosmic Clash Demo

After a week of hard slog learning Defold and Lua, I'm releasing a short demo of Cosmic Clash.
Play in browser (HTML5)

Download
Windows | OSX | Linux

Have fun!

Cosmic Clash

A few weeks ago while researching 2D game frameworks, I stumbled across a new one on the scene called Defold. The philosophy behind it is a little different to the norm - it's been in use for several years by the developers at King (the Candy Crush people) and they have recently opened it up for everyone to use for free. The idea being that having many more developers using the framework, it can be improved more effectively.

As I've got a few days off my day job, I've been working on a simple game to learn how to use both Defold and the scripting language Lua, which is the coding part of the framework. It's been tough going as I've never used a framework before and Lua is different to every other programming language I know - most of which are 'C' based. So pretty much every small step has required research.

Pew pew pew

After a few days I've managed to produce a simple playable shoot 'em up game with spawning aliens and a basic laser weapon attached to your ship.

Over the next few days, I'm intending to develop the game further and learn more about how to make games using Defold.

Probably the most advantageous thing about using a framework, is that you're targeting multiple platforms. Previously, all my games have been for specific systems - the most recent stuff targeting Android. So, I can now build applications for Windows, OSX, Linux and both Android and iOS platforms. I can also build packages in HTML5 so the games can be played in an internet browser.

I'm excited about this new framework and the opportunities to reach a much wider audience than with previous projects.

When Worlds Collide

I'm a few days into trying out some ideas for Kingdom and have enjoyed some success with getting a few ideas to work.

Generating levels completely from scratch was the initial plan but after some consideration I've elected to implement a sort of half and half approach. The basic outline (walls and floor) will be done by hand but all the detail and populating of levels will be done in code. This allows for quick creation of each level and ensures a good degree of quality control; it also affords differing types of level without the need to develop separate algorithms for each type.

Funny looking cave

At this point, I've implemented some file i/o to load the raw level data and a basic detailing function to work out where the walls meet the floor and select the correct blocks accordingly.

Further to that, basic player/world collision detection is working as it should so no more warping through solid rock and other such nonsense.

At this point I feel positive at having broken the back of the new concepts needed to get this thing off the ground. It wont be plain sailing but right now I can't think of any part of the planned game that I don't at least have a good idea how to do. It's a good place to be.

Branching out

Right, so it's been a while since I did any game development. After the last couple of releases for Android tanked badly due to lack of exposure, I felt less than enthusiastic about the platform. Getting any kind of audience for a game or app on there is quite random/difficult - a common story when reading other developer's tales.

My next creation will be desktop based and written once again in Java. I've written about Kingdom before on this blog and am finally getting a crack and developing it - after 18 years since the idea first arose!

The weekend has been spent wrestling with new concepts and ideas surrounding Java game development for, in my case, Windows. I've been getting to grips with delta timing and the various requirements for building the most basic parts of a Java program's framework.

Brother Mike and his friends

Right now, we have Brother Mike, standing in a field with nothing but some debug information for company. Using the cursor keys he will move around, or rather hover around as he is not animated yet.

The main character will be one chosen somewhat by the player, with a few customisable options, as is the style in RPGs. That's all a long way down the road at the moment. This will be the largest project I've ever undertaken singled-handedly and so I'm expecting many month of development before it's ready. Once the overall framework is more mature, the game will appear to grow more quickly - right now, it's mostly behind the scenes stuff.

RETROCOPTER - out now!

Retrocopter is now available for Android devices via Google Play.

Retrocopter footage

Out tomorrow!

Retrocopter

Following on from Tap Runner, I realised the game structure (and therefore the code) is very similar to a type of game I've wanted to make for a little while now.

There are a few helicopter-flying-down-tunnels games around but I've yet to find one I actually like.

Solid walls hanging in space

As a result of this and about 4 hours adapting the Tap Runner project, I have working game. The tunnel walls are still curved rather than the straight lines other games of this ilk have but on reflection, this is actually fine. I would imagine having straight walls was simply a programming decision because it's simpler. As I've already got the code to generate curved scenery, I'm going to stick with it.

This is only a 1-weekend project but as the game is functionally complete already, I'll be spending the remaining time polishing it and adding different 'copters to fly and wotnot.

This will be my fifth game for Android and I've realised having that body of work at my disposal now, developing new games is considerably fast and more pleasant. No re-inventing the wheel and figuring everything out for the first time type situations that hose away hours of development time.

Retrocopter is scheduled for release on Monday (Jan 11, 2016).

Tap Runner - OUT NOW on Google Play

Tap Runner is now available for Android devices via Google Play.

Tap Runner - Beta Footage

Tap Runner - First Footage