Platformers October 21, 2008
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentI haven’t been doing much real game development work lately. I wrote a prototype for a puzzle game, but it was a failure. While I might revisit it someday, it’s certainly not my next game. Instead, I’ve started work on my next platformer. I don’t need to prototype that, because Being was the prototype.
But instead of working, I’ve been playing other platformers.
- Cave Story
- Within a Deep Forest
- An Untitled Story
- Treasure Hunter Man
One of the big success stories for what’s possible as an independent developer. It really is an amazing game, and news of its upcoming WiiWare release made me nostalgic, and I had to play it again.
While Knytt Stories is the game I’ve read more about, WaDF is my favorite of the games from Nifflas. I’ve played all the way through twice. It’s surprising how attached I got to a little ball.
I really enjoy the boss fights in this game. This game makes me giddy with all the exploration you can do. I have to admit that it can get pretty frustrating trying to get through some of the difficult areas. How crazy is it that I went grinding for money so I could furnish an apartment for my little guy?
This is a new one from Bernie, who has a bunch of freeware indie games to his credit. I had alot of fun with this game, and played until I’d collected all of the items and achieved both endings. I feel a need to play his other games now.
All of these games are free to download and play, and I highly recommend them.
Dream Build Play entries September 30, 2008
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , 5 commentsLooking at the gallery page there’s over 280 submitted entries. That’s insane! I knew going in that I didn’t stand a chance to win anything, and that I was only entering because it’s fun to participate, but I’ve been really blown away the the quality of some of these games. (Note: The gallery page seems to have disappeared, so I removed the link to it, but the rest of this post should be fine.)
I present some of my favorites, in no particular order.
First up is Bloc from Metacreature Games. It looks similar to a dual-stick shooter, like Geometry Wars, but it plays quite a bit differently. I enjoy this game a great deal, but I have to admit that I’m completely terrible at it.
Next up is Zeit2. This game marries a side-scrolling space shooter with a time rewind ability similar to what’s in Braid. Instead of undoing your mistakes, though, you use this to take out more enemies and getting special attacks by shooting at the previous version of yourself.
This next one is An Awesome Game Where You Shoot Stuff And It Blows Up And You Win The Game. (An Awesome Game for short.) It’s a Metroidvania game (a term used to describe games that combine elements from the 2D Metroid and Castlevania games), with tons of clear influence from other games. This trailer is insane. (The game is nuts too. In a good way.)
And finally, here’s Battle Tennis. I don’t really need to say much about this one, the video speaks volumes.
New web host September 17, 2008
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentI had a bit of downtime here for the last couple of days. I’ve been moving the site over to a new host, and things didn’t happen invisibly behind the scenes like I’d hoped they would. (My mistake, not the fault of the new host.) Whoops!
This is a much newer version of WordPress than I had on the old server. If things looks odd, that’s probably why, but I’m working on it.
Help the homeless ninjas! September 6, 2008
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentA good buddy of mine is making a movie. Check it out:
If you dig the video, please take a second to digg it and help him get more exposure.
Animation Editor October 5, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farSo, I’m getting started on a 4E6 entry. My biggest gripe (and it’s minor) with XNA as it exists now is the difficulty in working with the standard .Net Framework to build tools. Apparently this will all be cleaned up with XNA Game Studio Express 2.0, but it’s somewhat annoying now.
However, while you can’t yet drop an XNA game window onto a .Net form, you can create one separately. So that’s what I’m doing.
That’s my dead simple animation editor. You draw boxes around each frame you want, and then set the frame’s origin. (In this case, I mean pivot point for rotation.) This information will be saved out into an xml layout that I’ve already built into the content pipeline. I’ll be building a simple sprite editor next, then follow that up with a level editor.
Four Elements October 4, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentAnother six months of silence. I’m an excellent blogger, huh?
Soon after writing that last entry (the mammoth one that I just modified to prevent it from taking up the whole front page), I got a job offer to return to a company I had worked for previously. I’d regretted leaving the job almost immediately after I did, so going back was pretty much a no brainer. So once again I work for Veil Interactive, which is a branch of the Koplar Communications tree. The reason this might be of interest to anyone reading this blog is that World Events Productions is another branch. (A sibling company, I suppose.) They’re the company responsible for Voltron, and they work upstairs from me. That’s pretty neat, in my opinion. I’m not sure what the blog policy is around here, though, so I probably won’t be writing about work very often.
So, once again my game development time got swept away while I was busy worrying about life.
And while I don’t have a ton of free time now, I do want to continue working toward someday finishing something. Anything would be nice. Lucky then, that new motivation has come along. GameDev’s 6th annual Four Elements contest.
I get to pick three of the four elements, explosions, crystals, ponies, and accountants, and create a game using them. My current thought is to build a game similar to Galaga, set underwater. After destroying (explosions) the enemy seahorses (ponies) you can collect the treasures (crystals) they leave behind to purchase upgrades. Something like Titan Attacks would be amazing, but I think I’ll target something that requires quite a bit less work. 
Finally, I should mention that I wrote a few entries in to my dev-journal on GameDev, about the development I’ve done recently. I’ll probably mirror them here at some point.
Fun design work April 13, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentGame design was never more fun for me than when I was in elementary school. My friends and I would constantly pass back and forth our level designs for Ghosts ‘N Goblins and Castlevania. (I’m sure our teachers found it quite annoying.) It’s hard for me to imagine the huge number of hours we spent on those drawings. My friend’s mom even helped us find mailing addresses for Capcom and Konami in our Nintendo game manuals, and we mailed our levels off to the companies. It seems most likely to me that they were just quickly discarded, but it’s nice to think that they might have been forwarded on to the original Japanese developers along with other fan mail. Those were fun times.
And I got a small taste of that feeling again a few days ago. I’ve been mulling ideas for what kind of game I could write to enter the MyDreamRPG contest and I think I’ve come up with something pretty neat. It’s a platformer with lots of rpg elements. And just like twenty years ago, I’ve gotten swept away doodling up maps, writing stories, and coming up with special powers for my imaginary heroes.
Still alive February 5, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentI apologize for the lack of development updates or new game reviews. My day job has gone into crazy crunch mode and I haven’t had much free time to write or play games lately. This project (at least the part of it that’s causing all the overtime) is scheduled to wrap up in three weeks, so expect things to go back to normal around then.
New development machine August 2, 2006
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentA couple of weeks ago, I ordered my new development computer. (And lets be honest, it’s my new gaming computer too.)
A few years back, when I built the computer I’ve been using, it was far cheaper to buy individual components and build it yourself. Now, I added everything up, and the price difference was minimal. So I ordered a new machine from I Buy Power.
Here’s the info, for anybody curious:
Coolermaster Ammo 533 case w/420W Power Supply
Athlon-64 3500+ CPU
eVGA SLI PCIE Motherboard (133-K8-NF41)
1024 MB DDR-400 PC3200 Crucial Value RAM
Nvidia Geforce 7300GS 256MB Video Card
250 GB Serial-ATA Hard Drive
Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW
I’d like to say that everything was perfect when it arrived, but that’s not the case. Apparently the motherboard is finicky when it comes to the type of memory you use, and one of the 512 MB sticks was unhappy. Neither the bios memory test nor memtest showed any errors, but things would mysteriously fail. For example, when installing the updates for Windows XP, every fifteenth (or so) update would just report “failed.”
Eventually I found a reproducable test so that I could identify the problem. When running the Firefox installer, the first thing it does is unpacks compressed data. During that unpacking stage, sometimes I’d get an error “CRC failed.” When I took out the bad stick of RAM, the errors went away, and when put it back in, the problems returned. I bet that’s the first time Firefox has ever been used as a memory diagnostic tool.
To their credit, as soon as I told I Buy Power about the problem, they immediately said they’d exchange it for a new stick, no questions asked. However, when it came in yesterday, I ran into even more problems than before. Windows started doing some very wonky things, so I tested it, and both the bios memory test and memtest both give errors almost immediately. Thinking that it was another finicky motherboard problem, I brought the new stick to work with me, and put it into another computer with a known solid motherboard. I got the same errors.
There is an upside. In my research on the motherboard, I discovered a few settings I could play with, and managed to get the original “bad” RAM to work correctly. I ran my Firefox tests, and then played World of Warcraft for a half hour. I left the computer on overnight running tests, and everything is super stable.
Despite the trouble I’ve gone through, I’d still recommend I Buy Power. I can’t blame them for the finicky motherboard, and faulty hardware just happens sometimes. Their customer service has been awesome so far. I’m really happy with my machine.
Now if I could only get some work done.
A new beginning June 27, 2006
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , 2 commentsWelcome to my first post in my brand new blog.
This blog will be mostly about video games. I’m an independent game developer (it’s a hobby at this point, though I have grand plans to turn this into a small business soon) and I’ll be writing about my development experiences here. In addition, I plan to write reviews of games I play from other independent developers.
