HelixFox | Games by Kyle Rodgers

This weekend I have been mostly making a game for the Global Game Jam! I attended the Jam at the Qantm College site down in London and had a blast.

For those who don’t know, the Global Game Jam is an annual rapid game development event held in multiple locations around the world. Participants are given a theme that their game must incorporate somehow and have roughly 48 hours to develop something in the platform of their choice (even non-digital games are allowed). The theme for this year was ‘extinction’.

My team included a c++ developer, two designers and myself. Since we had two programmers who specialised in two different platforms, we decided to make two different games with the idea of sharing assets between them. You can download what we came up with here or play the flash one here.

Sadly we didn’t have any actual artists for the games so the visuals are a bit lacking (I didn’t have time to contribute anything to visuals or I would have come up with some pixel art similar to Ice Skating Vampires), but the code is solid. The platform engine I built is quite robust and I think I’ll definitely develop it further once my current project (details coming soon) is over.

Working at the Jam was a great experience and I made sure to spend a lot of time mingling with all the different groups, seeing what they were getting up to. Of course, I experienced quite a lot of friendly antagonism towards Flash as a platform but you get used to that sort of thing :p

Here are a few of my favourite games made at our Jam site:
Frayed was a platformer with a very interesting concept. The idea was you controlled two people, one of whom was whom was a person suffering from hallucinations and the other his carer. As the carer moves further away from the main character, the game world changes, creating holes or platforms where there were none before. For example, to cross a massive pit in the hallucination world, you have to move the carer closer so the world turns into a regular corridor. It’s a pretty unique idea.

From Beyond puts you in the position of a deity bent on wiping out all life on a planet. You do thing by flicking rocks at the planet, smashing people across it. I was really impressed with the physics in this game – gravity is modelled with all game objects being attracted to the planet, so you can actually fling rocks around the planet in a sort of temporary orbit if you get it just right. Very cool!

El Goatinx made me laugh. You go around as Charles Darwin and combine different animals to create different effects. For example, you can combine a tiger with a lion to form a Tigon, which is actually one of the less weird combinations (there’s a stop sign you can combine with some animals to create a version that has a stop sign textured skin).

And Then The Lights Went Out had great graphics and a fantastic atmosphere to it. The idea is you shine light on a planet to create life, but eventually the planets’ resources dry up and everything dies… and then the lights go out.

All in all I really enjoyed jamming (despite a lack of sleep and being a bit of a zombie by the end) and will definitely be doing it again next year!

I recently found out about the Game Prototype Challenge, a week long challenge to produce a game prototype based on certain themes, which are immortality and thin ice for this particular challenge.

I decided to knock something up for the challenge. A work colleague suggested having a vampire be the main character and discussion led to the idea of having a vampire ice skating. I started work on the prototype and eventually had a little game where you control a vampire who can skate across a 2D screen, kicking up ice when he changes direction. Other skaters roam the ice and the idea was going to be to get rid of them by bumping into them or by spraying them with ice.

However, my experimentation with this concept didn’t really lead anywhere in terms of making the game fun. I messed around with a few concepts but ultimately moving a vampire around a simple environment doesn’t offer enough gameplay variety to really engage potential players, so I’ve decided to abandon this idea for now. I might revisit it again if I come up with some way of adding depth to the gameplay.

Here’s what I came up with anyway, for anyone interested:

Things I was going to include:

• More character graphics including animations for the enemies being hit.
• Earn points for chasing off enemies, including multipliers for doing it without bumping into them.
• Time limits for each game session, presented as nights. E.g. The game would start at 6pm and end at 6am with it being about how many points you can earn during those twelve hours (which would obviously not be twelve real hours! Probably more like two minutes).

However, I don’t believe this prototype works very well, so I will return my attention to other projects, but this has been a fun diversion

Hey, friends and game players. Helix Defense 2 has finally been released.

You can play it here.

Hello friends.

For August I was working on a simple Tower Defense game as my monthly game, but as I was moving that month I didn’t get to finish it in time. So I decided to spruce it up and turn it into a full-fledged game, complete with (gasp) polish and features and all that good stuff!

Here are a few screenshots and some words about how the game is going to work.

Here’s the title screen. Right now the logo says “Helix Defense 2″ but that’s just a working title. Most likely the game will be called Helix Defense with a wanky subtitle. These pictures were taken at 640×480 but the game will support any resolution (within reason – 200×200 might not work too well :p).

This is the level select screen, showing a few sample levels (mostly in place for testing purposes at the moment). Clicking a level shows the detailed view at the top, including your objectives and a bit of narrative text explaining a bit of backstory for the mission. Objectives will usually include “defeat x number of waves” but can also include things like “end with x number of resources” or “defeat x number of enemies” (for levels where enemies can escape).
Completing a level will give you a certain amount of points, with additional points earned by doing well in the level.

Here’s a typical level:

There’s a path clearly obvious in the level leading up to the reactor sat in the middle. Enemies will travel along this path to the end then begin to attack the reactor, which will be destroyed after taking enough damage, making you lose the level. To defend your reactor, you must build towers!

Towers can be built using the buttons in the lower right corner of the screen. There are three towers for this level: the Gatling Tower, the Slowing Tower and the Mini-Reactor. These towers cost resources to build, which can be obtained from your reactor (and any mini-reactors you have), which will constantly be generating resources. Some levels may also reward resources in other ways, such as destroying enemies.

Towers can be placed down anywhere near the path (but not on the path itself) and will automatically attack any enemies within range.


(Enemy graphics are currently a placeholder!)

Here’s another level. This one allows you to manipulate how enemies move throughout the level, with their initial path shown below:

The enemies will always take the shortest path they can towards your reactor, which isn’t very good! To remedy this, you’ll be able to build at certain key points to force the enemies to take a longer route (giving you more time to shoot at them!). Here’s the same level with two towers built:

For this level, eventually you’ll force the enemies to travel around the entire spiral, giving your towers the maximum amount of opportunity to blast them out of the sky. Some levels will have dangerous lava tiles that will do damage to enemies, whereas some might have tiles where enemies are protected from certain kinds of attacks. It’s up to you to manipulate your enemies to your advantage!

There will, of course, be levels with large open areas, letting you create mazes for enemies to move through! With this variety in how levels are built, along with the different objectives and a drizzle of story, I’m hoping to have quite a diverse set of levels for players to go through!

All in all, development is going pretty well. At the current rate I’m going at, I’m hoping to be mostly finished with the game at some point during October. Distribution channels are yet to be decided but expect some more news here soon!

I finally got around to posting my game from July online!

Play now!

The monthly game project is on hold for the moment as I’m working on something a bit more substantial. It’s a sequel to Helix Defense and is looking awesome so far. I’ll post some kind of preview once I have something to show!

If you’ve been paying attention to this blog you’ll notice that I promised a game a month, but haven’t delivered anything since the second game. This might lead you to believe that I stopped working on them extraordinarily quickly, but that’s not the case!

For recent games I’ve been investigating into getting a sponsor for them, mostly as an investigation into the state of flash game sponsorships right now. This meant I couldn’t publish the games to the internet until a sponsor had been found (or until I gave up). It seems like sponsors are more interested in longer, more polished and more developed games, however, so my crappy little 10-hour jobbies just aren’t going to make the cut. So in future I’ll just throw them straight up here and won’t bother with sponsorships!

So here you go, three fresh new games:

Kill More Birds With Rockets


Cloud Rising 2


Kill Yourself


Enjoy!

Making Get Out was really fun. It was a very short project and the result isn’t spectacular but I think I got a lot out of it.

A lot of game developers, especially in the big leagues, spend all their time working on huge projects that can take years to finish. That’s a lot of time where you’re not actually reaping any rewards for all your hard work. Also, what if your game turns out bad? That must suck to work on something for years only to have everyone hate it. I can’t imagine anything more demoralising.

Game development is one of the most time-intensive of creative pursuits. I see some kick-ass artwork on deviant art and look at the description, where the artists claims it took twelve hours in total. I think to myself “That’s a lot!” and am suitably impressed, but is it actually a lot? I spent about twelve hours on making Kill Birds With Rockets and I consider that to be a very quick development time. It seems like traditional artists have the advantage of a far lower time requirement before people can appreciate their work. Does that mean that they ultimately get more satisfaction from their work by virtue of more actual creations, or is the satisfaction garnered from game development proportionate to the amount of time put into it? I’m not sure.

I’ve had my fair share of big projects and I usually find that after I while I get a bit tired of working on them – general boredom and such. Case in point: I haven’t worked on Duck Alliance for quite a while and am considering taking a break from it temporarily. The reason for this is I’m having so much fun making these dumb week games once a month that I might just focus entirely on really quick projects like that.

Hair stylists are creative folk too – they make artwork out of peoples’ hair, essentially. A hair stylist will usually work on many people throughout a given day. Eventually they’ll make a dud and mess someone’s hair up, but it’s no big deal because the next potential success is only minutes away.

So I think it’s worthwhile to work on smaller projects. It stops you from getting demotivated from working on the same project for an extended period of time, helps you prototype basic game ideas that could be worth developing further, gets more stuff out the door and into the world, and, most importantly, lets you get precious feedback and satisfaction much more often, even if it would be less than you would get from a full epic production.

It’s a really nice feeling to create something and release it out into the world for people to enjoy and it’s a feeling I fear many developers don’t get to enjoy often enough. So put aside your gigantic projects for a while and just make a stupid little shitty game or even a gimmicky app, tacky gradient balls and all, and get it out there. There’s a hojillion people out there playing web games – someone’s going to like it, even if it’s not a big viral hit, and if I can make something that can bring a smile to even a single person’s face then that’s a job well done.