Last year I made a video game for my family to play on Christmas. I didn’t have much money at the time so it was part of my gift to everyone. It ended up being a simple board game where tokens moved forward on a timeline, the past year, and the goal was to reach the end. Once everyone made it to the end of the game it would tally up memory points and determine the winner.

The memory points were gained by landing on event spaces. There were 10 major event spaces and 15 minor event spaces. The major events had something to do with our family in the past year like when someone got a new job. The events were placed in the timeline in the month it occurred in (each month having 10 spaces). Minor events were just generic things like buying a cup of coffee or having to shovel snow. They could add or subtract to your score while the major events only added.

Other spaces included move ahead/backward squares and lose a turn. It’s generic to most board games but added enough variety to make the game fun. It was all done on the computer so I stored the board layout in a file and loaded it at the beginning of the game. That made it easier to test different layouts.

To move our tokens I decided to use physical dice instead of randomly generating numbers on a computer. This allowed me something to give my family before showing the game to pique their interest. I also did it this way so that my parents felt they had control. After each turn, I simply input the die roll into the computer to advance the game.

Overall it might have taken me a week or so to get the game done in my free time. The result was something that my entire family enjoyed and let us reminisce the past year. If enough people are interested in the project I might consider putting it up on GitHub.

A few months ago I took part in a speed-game contest for the Christian Developers Network. The game ended up having exploration style gameplay with power ups much like Metroid. You can actually play Current if you want to check it out. There isn’t a preloader so give it a minute or two to load up. Or read on for my post-mortem…

I was working together with an artist, Brenton, and we found that it was best to prototype how the gameplay would work at the beginning of the contest. We went through a couple of iterations and finally ended up with a game where you play as a bubble and can collect other bubbles. Believe it or not the first prototype involved men taking baths in clouds… don’t ask.

Since we were doing complex levels involving rocks and underwater flora/fauna we needed something to define collision areas easily. I used an ogmo project to draw small squares over the main collision image. While we could have used pixel perfect collision it would have slowed down the game due to the size of each area.

The first 10 rooms are hand drawn levels which look very beautiful but we knew that it was going to take too long to finish the game if we kept going down that route. So we switched to using tiles and creating levels that still look decent but were a lot faster to create. Meanwhile I was adding things like enemy fish and power ups.

The first thing I had to figure out was how the small bubbles would float around the main bubble. I tried it with the bubbles free floating around the main one but it felt loose and fish could easily pop the followers. So after several attempts I finally got it right. The small bubbles would spin around the main one and quickly catch up if they got behind. If bubbles were popped the others would file into place to fill the gaps.

Once accumulation was working we decided it made sense to have some way to consume bubbles. Since your followers protected you from other fish you had to decide whether to use your bubbles for armor or skills. The first skill we added was a grab mechanic because we planned to throw rocks around.

After that we decided to put in gems that unlock doors. It added a puzzle element to the game instead of just exploring. Gems couldn’t be dragged to different rooms though so later we decided to add in keys. It’s cliche but we were running out of time at the point.

Save points were another thing that went in early in the game. I had been playing VVVVVV and loved that save points were in almost every room so we decided to go with that concept. All you have to do is hover over them and they activate. It allowed us to be less forgiving because you didn’t lose much progress when you died.

Finally I decided to put shooting in the game. In the beginning of development we didn’t want to put shooting in. There wasn’t a purpose to do so and we felt it made the game like any other shooter. Halfway through the contest we figured out a reason to fire bubbles, sea urchins. There are several areas in the game that you have to shoot stationary fish to continue. It also gives the player something to do as they are floating through the game.

I’ve been a fan of Bethesda games since Morrowind came out. The combat in Morrowind always felt weird to me. You could attack something and miss even though it was staring you in the face. It was like mmo games where your character flails around for a while and eventually hits the monster, unless you die. Then Oblivion came out and had much better combat but still had the weird dialogue options.

I loved the Elder Scrolls up to that point but Fallout 3 made me fall head over heels in love with Bethesda’s games. I could finally have a conversation with an NPC without needing to hunt through a list of dictionary words. The VATS system was cool but it slowed down the game a bit, making my shooting skills feel inadequate. Recently Skyrim came out…

I don’t usually get excited about the release of new games but Skyrim was a different story. The past week I’ve been playing it every chance I get and the game keeps getting better. It’s packed full of interesting characters, useful items, and how can I not mention… dragons.

They got it right this time. The combat is much more believable and includes things like shouts, blocking, and shield bashing. The dialogue is excellent, showing what you have already said and what new options have opened up. And not only did they learn from their past games but they made further improvements to the user interface (at least on consoles).

The ability to favorite a spell, weapon, potion, or clothing item is awesome. You can also quickly get to all of your items with a limited number of button pushes and flicks of the control stick. The waypoints now show if you are expected to walk through a door or if it is located in the area you are searching. It’s a much less intimidating ui than the previous iterations.

My only complaint so far is that the dragon battles tend to get repetitive after the first few. Typically they land for a moment, breath fire/ice/etc and then take to the skies just to repeat the pattern again. When health gets low they stay on the ground and try to kill you quickly with their breath or by attacking you directly. As a magic user I found if I stayed at a decent distance the battles were relatively easy and I’m playing on master.

To anyone that enjoys action RPG games I highly suggest Skyrim. You should plan to spend a lot of time with it though because you’ll get sucked into the atmosphere.

Bethesda, I look forward to your next game but feel free to take your time because clearly your games keep getting better when you do.

I’ve been working off and on with HaxePunk and finally put two of my prototypes up. The framework should be working almost exactly like FlashPunk and with some loving will work with NME.

Want the source code? Get it on GitHub and post about how you are using it in the community forums.

The second thing I updated was adding some of my more recent flash games. I might even consider putting up some prototypes I’ve done if people are interested.

The final update is about the game I’m working on. I’ve got about 100 different rooms to explore and added a bunch of enemies. Just need to work up some bosses and spend a bunch of time polishing the game but it is looking great. I’ll probably post up a YouTube video by the end of the week.

I’ve finally finished up my game Pounce and created a video on YouTube. The game is being reviewed but hopefully will get sponsored for a website soon. I’ll post up details later.

If you absolutely can’t wait to play the game feel free to contact me and I’ll make it happen.

Lately I’ve been doing quite a bit of web development work. I’m in the middle of designing a church website and am looking for any other work. If you are in need of a website or need some PHP code tweaked please let me know and I’ll send you a quote. You can view my portfolio at http://tenaciousturtle.com and there is a contact form on that site.

I prefer to do business sites but have designed some fun websites as well. Please give me some details as to what you’re looking for and I will let you know if I can be of service. Thanks!

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been trying to land a job recently and haven’t been real focused lately but I want to show what I’m working on.

The game is coming along nicely and I started mocking up the battle screen. I’m still sticking with the NES color palette but have discarded the idea of keeping to the sprite limitations. So needless to say this game would have never made it on the original NES but maybe SNES (with a limited palette…).

One of my favorite old-school RPG games is Lufia and I loved their battle system so I wanted to borrow from their UI design. It also will work well on touch screen devices which is what I’m hoping for anyway. The player picks one of the five buttons on the screen to attack, defend, run, use an item, or use magic. Which brings me to my next point.

This game will not have traditional magic. Instead it will be replaced with something called spirit. Instead of how many older games replenished magic by sleeping you will gain spirit back by walking around or going in a church. Since this game is based on the clash between darkness and light I found it fitting to have a small twist on the mechanics. There may be a few other details that change as well.

I haven’t completely worked out the system yet but it’s progressing along nicely and hopefully I will have a working system in a few weeks. Since I’m tied up with other things at the moment it will probably be a little while until my next blog post. As always, I love hearing from people so drop a comment below.

So I’m almost finished up with my game Pounce and having people playtest it has been a lot of fun but getting it on a mobile device has been a real pain. The biggest issue is frame rate which is a huge problem for an action game. I wanted to work on a game where the frame rate doesn’t really matter much and the first thing that popped into my head is an RPG.

Spire is a reflection of what NES RPG games were. The graphics are very simple, in fact I used the NES palette and limitations, and the gameplay will be limited to battles and exploration. This isn’t going to be the next Mass Effect but hopefully people will enjoy it for what it’s worth.

The game has an overworld, towns, dungeons, and seven spires which the player can explore and battle enemies. There is even a story to the game. In fact the entire game will probably take several hours to beat once it’s finished.

You will be able to pick multiple characters at the start, much like Final Fantasy, and buy different weapons/items along the way. Honestly it’s turning out to be quite a rich experience and I’m surprise at how quickly it has been coming together.

I’d really like to get this game on mobile devices and am hoping that I can have it finished in a month or two. Hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll be able to post up some videos of the gameplay and give a few lucky people the chance to playtest the game.

So if I’m a little silent in the next few weeks at least you know what I’ll be working on.

I quickly ported the FlashPunk community UI recently and started building on top of the framework they built. Actually it diverged a bit from the original but I think for the better. The biggest change is that the NineSlice class is now extends from Graphic so that it can be drawn easily each frame.

At the moment I have buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields, and panels working. I’ll see what I can do about a scrollbar and menus but I haven’t had a chance to hash them out yet. Although I think the code is flexible enough that most anything is possible.

You can pick up the code on GitHub and take it for a spin. Just to give you and idea of what’s possible I’ll present you with a flash version of the framework.

[swfobj src="http://matttuttle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/HaxePunkUI.swf" width="640" height="200" required_player_version="10"]