Hello!

Bread Duck is finally released and to celebrate I’d like to give a few people the opportunity to become characters in my next game. My next game isn’t confirmed and I have no idea in what capacity you would be in the game, but hey!

I don’t want to make an official contest out of this, but basically I just want to see some videos of people doing cool stuff in Bread Duck. Stick a video onto YouTube and email or tweet a link to me and I’ll check it out. If it’s a sweet vid, then you’re in with a chance.

Enjoy!

I tend to have a lot of ideas about games I could be working on instead of my current project. Sometimes they can be quite serious and cerebral (e.g. something about global warming and the impact it might have), whereas sometimes they are completely stupid (e.g. an idea for a survival game where Jesus has to see how long he can stay riding a bicycle before falling off: “Christ On A Bike”) but I usually make a note of them for future reference. I clearly don’t have enough time to develop all of my crazy ideas so I thought I’d share some of them. If you want to use any of my ideas or any part of an idea yourself, please feel free.

So here’s an idea I came up with earlier:

Single Click Endurance Shooter
This game would have you playing someone who has just set a bomb off/stolen some treasure/set off an alarm/etc and now needs to escape wherever he currently is.

The player character would be a person running along a corridor/cave/rooftop/etc and having to avoid/deal with certain obstacles. Every now and then the type of obstacles he has to deal with might change. For example…

• For the first 30 seconds clicking would make the character jump, with obstacles, gaps to jump over.
• Then the obstacles/gaps would disappear and enemies might appear, chasing after the player (running behind him or flying overhead) with the mouse cursor turning into a crosshair. Clicking the mouse now would make the player shoot towards the crosshair to take out the enemies.
• After a while, the game would change again. Enemies would stop spawning and some other threat would appear behind the player (e.g. a massive boulder). The player would now have to click the mouse rapidly to make his character run as fast as possible so the boulder doesn’t run him over/
• Etc…

This cycle would repeat until the player dies, with the score being based on how far the player manages to get before dying. There could be bonuses for collecting certain items/killing certain enemies/etc or something.

It would be a very simple game, sure, but I think it’s potentially a good idea and would like it if someone made it!

Am I the only one with ideas they like but don’t have time to make? Does anyone else have any game ideas they want to share?

Coffee Makes You Go
This was an interesting little platformer game with the main gimmick being getting the coffee so that you can jump higher and reach more platforms. I quite liked how absurdly high you could jump after a few coffees, though the movement of the character could use a bit of tweaking – it felt a bit sluggish to me. It was pretty easy to get through all three levels, but no one expects stunning level design from such a short development time

Trip’n
Guide a plane past some nets and pick up the stimulants along the way. A fun little avoidance doodad and kind of amusing to see a plane flying backwards. Probably best not to play this if you’re epileptic, though.

EatPlantsToSurviveAndKeepStaminaUpWhileYouStayAwayFrom TheHumansWithTheNetsAndEventuallyKillThemWithAcid!
Wins the “Name Longer Than Its Own URL” award. A slightly opaque game that will require you to read the instructions before you dive in (I always make it a habit of ignoring instructions and seeing if I can work the game out myself), but reasonably fun once you get the hang of it. I didn’t last very long, though.

Crack Spider
I couldn’t get this to load so can’t really comment on it!

…and that’s it! Usually the GPC produces many more games than this and I’m not sure why it got so few this month. Burnout from all the game jams and GDC awesomeness so far this year? Maybe.

I’ll certainly be making a game for the next GPC. See you next month!

The Game Prototype Challenge has rolled around yet again, with the themes this month being NETS and STIMULANTS! Obviously my first thought was to make some kind of game where you have to catch things with nets, but that seemed kind of obvious.

Instead, I made some kind of dialogue driven game where you play as a sentient net who is looking to score some stimulants. I’m not really sure what I was thinking, but you can go and play it over here.

Play Helix Defense

Wow, it’s really been a long time since I released Helix Defense. It was originally released on November 28th 2007 and since then has been played millions of times (not sure exactly how many times as the Mochi analytics doodad isn’t playing nice at the moment).

The game itself is pretty simple, partially because it’s just a basic Tower Defense game and that’s what those types of games tend to be like, and partially because my own technical skills back then were pretty poor (self-taught ActionScript 2!)

So the game itself is a standard endurance type thing, with a game session lasting until you die and the main challenge being to see how long you can last before your inevitable death. Enemies come at you in waves of ten ships, with each wave being stronger than the last, requiring defenses to be continuously built to keep up. Each successful wave gives you more energy (used for building) according to which wave you just completed and how many extra generators you have.

The key strategy of the game was to try and build the minimum defenses required in the early waves and instead spend all your energy on generators to increase your income. This pays off later on as the generators end up paying for themselves and then some, letting you better fight off the more difficult waves. The turrets themselves were largely equivalent in effectiveness as enemies never had any individual quirks that might make them vulnerable to one defense but not another.

I’m still quite fond of the game, overall, although there’s a lot that I would change if I was to make it again. One of the most obvious things to change would be to have more than ten enemies per wave (this was done in this game because of technical limitations!) and a better variety of levels to play on. Both of those things ended up being fixed in the sequel.

Another thing I’d fix would be to properly add a leaderboard (maybe one that reset weekly?) that would stick around permanently. The original game did have a leaderboard, but it depended on external php code that is long gone (and also apparently had some major security holes, haha).

I mixed up the format by a hell of a lot for Helix Defense 2, but there are still quite a few people who prefer this original version. Maybe because the endurance format is more appealing to some, maybe because they like the simplicity of the basic design.

Either way, I still think this was a good game. Maybe I’ll make a Helix Defense 3? (Probably not, but I might do another tower defense inspired game!)

A couple of times I’ve made a game for the Experimental Gameplay Project, which is a thing where you make a game pretty quickly within one month based on a certain theme. February’s theme was Infinite Worlds and here’s what I came up with.

The idea was to have a literal infinite world that you can fly around and shoot enemies in. The world generation is a bit clever (if I do say so myself) – it will generate tiles to populate the world as you travel in a certain direction, removing tiles you move away from. However, the game remembers what those tiles were so if you did move back to where you started, you would see the same tiles and not just different randomly generated terrain. There’s a lot of potential for this for other games. E.g. a top down driving game where the city and roads are generated on the fly as you drive around.

I quite like how this turned out, even if the actual gameplay aspect was pretty last minute. I have ideas on how this could turn into a full project, which I may investigate!

Play it here.

I’ve had a few people bugging me for an update on Bread Duck, seeing as I said on Twitter that it was finished a long time ago and haven’t said anything since. I realise I’ve been quiet on the subject so here’s the official word:

When is the game coming out?
It’s difficult to say. Usually with my games I’ll put them up on FlashGameLicense to try and find a sponsor and this is exactly what I did with Bread Duck. The thing is, it can take a long time to find a sponsor and it’s difficult to predict how long the whole process will take. The bidding process for Bread Duck has gone very slowly so far so unfortunately I haven’t been able to release the game yet (despite really wanting to!), but I’m hoping to finalise a deal soon, so keep an eye out!

Why haven’t you posted anything on this blog lately?
So far I’ve tended to write blog posts directly related to current projects I’m working on and small games I’ve made for contests, etc. Most of my recent projects have been pretty big, though, so my current thinking is that I should make more of an effort to get more content on here. I’ve got some ideas for new blog posts, so keep your eyes peeled on this here webzone and I’ll have some new content up shortly!