O - Time to show it Off

It may seem that I have been slacking off on my puzzle game project but in fact I have been obsessively working at it. I decided not to post regular demo versions because by the nature of a puzzle game you can really only play it once.

The game only uses WebGL and some serious graphic card features so you really need a computer and a 'real' browser to run it - Chrome, Firefox and Safari work fine. Very high end android devices seem to run it okay but reports are that the frame rates are very bad on Apple devices.

The game is unique in this collection in that it has no tutorial, no instructions, no score - in fact no text or numerals of any form. Never the less I think it is easy to understand and quietly meditative if not exactly difficult as a puzzle. It also has sound effects and some beautiful ambient music so all in all it is probably my most 'complete' release.

Here then is my final version of the game.

Game 10 - Called 'O'?

I have done some recent work on the 3D puzzle game; I have decided to call it 'O'. I would like to make the game as non-linguistic as possible and will the idea is that it will need no explanation and the player will just find their way by fiddling.

Have added textures and better lighting to my models and they look pretty good. This demo shows a typical level of the game (perhaps level 3) - the idea is to free the gold rings.

Game 10 - Nails on the Mind

I have been having technical and architectural problems with my Noah's ark game and have decided to work a bit slowly on it for a few weeks so that I can get the basics right.

I wanted another project that is more fun and carefree to do in the meantime. As part of the twelve games I wanted to explore the new 3D technology provided by WebGL using a famous library called three.js.

So my tenth game is going to be a puzzle sort of thing created in 3D - I get to play with textures and pipe-line shaders which is all good fun for a techie.

Here is an example (desktop only atm I think)  of the webGL stuff running - you can drag to rotate or click an object to move it.

Game 9: Still Waiting for the First Turn

Life, laziness and work have been getting in the way some but the Noah's ark project is progressing at a deliberate crawl.

The new demo looks a lot more fancy and has interactive cards and action menus which show interface. I have decided on a four pane layout for the various bits of game the simulation involves.
Game state and a 'card state' for a specific action are now stored and can be accessed by the scripts and card validation rules can be set up - so I have a lot of what I need to get started.
I have also redone all the main art work which is now a bit better if not good enough for release.

You can take a look at the latest demo here.

Game 9: Waiting for Rain

I have been making slow but steady progress on my Noah's Ark simulator for the past quiet weeks; I have created a system to display arbitrary simulation spaces which display some aspect of the simulation. These spaces are square and only one can be 'active for interaction' at once. Spaces can contain various elements and currently support condition displays of graphics layers and a full mark down text layout engine.

Some elements in these spaces are linked to action lists which allow the player to open cards - a card is a modal surface containing details on a specific issue and can include controls that can be selected from and manipulated.

So I have a working demo of this technology here with some scrappy art work - it doesn't do very much but you can see the basic ideas are in place from an interface perspective.

Game 9: A Kind of a Sim Thing

Next on the hit list for game genres is a more serious simulation sort of thing - I have a background in business and technical simulations for education and am looking to develop a framework in which such ideas could be rapidly prototyped. In preparation for that long-term project I wanted to do a fun, quick concrete example of such a game as one of my twelve games.

One of my favourite business associates has a game idea around a complex and technical large scale engineering project simulation; her idea also encompasses the social and economic changes and pressures such a project is associated with. That idea is very exciting to me but the part about modelling the process in such a way that people would find it 'realistic' seems really boring.

So I was looking for an engineering project in a fantasy domain that was famous enough that most people would easily grok. So I thought of Noah's ark - it seems to fill all the criteria and some vast portion of the world would know what I was going on about (seems like as much as 50% of peeps are born into Abrahamic traditions). A bit of investigation suggests that the story is much older than our bible and extends to the very earliest written records.

So the plan is to play as Noah as the project manager on the most outrageous project ever (build an ark to save to world from a flood that no one else believes in). Given the inevitable rains the game will be about managing the resources you need to equip for the flood, build the ark and collect the animals.The old testament provides surprising detail as to the technical specification of the ark and the personages involved although fails to list a complete set of of animal species in sufficient detail.

Part of the experiment must be to present this simulation across a broad range of devices using local device storage to save and retrieve simulations.

js13k - Release Day

The js13k contest finishes tomorrow at 2pm and I have a busy day so I have just submitted my final version of which I am very proud.

I have used 12 400 bytes of the 13 416 available and a lot of programming time.

You can play the game here.

This is the original list of features I wanted in my first post with my comments about how it went in bold

• old-school arcade game feel - I am really happy with the moon patrol vibes; not so close to the old games as to be called a copy but very reminiscent.
• subtle narrative - This part worked out really well for me - I like the use of the generated but structured levels and the techno-babble text to tell the story. This is the first game I've made with a proper narrative and I'm very satisfied with the way it came out.
• over and under the sea - both looks very cool as I hoped it would and adds a lot more game play because of the different handling of the avatar
• ascii art -  This worked out well - I especially love the cows.
• chip-tunes - Never got to this, I seriously doubt given more time I could have packed it into the 13k - but I'm still so keen to write a chip tunes generator.
• sound effects  - Got engine noises and lots of cool retro jump and explosion noises. Also the sound on the ticker tape text console is really cool.
• type out mission control texty stuff with good copy  - This feature turned into almost all the interface; inter-level screens; title screens and its use during game play. Similarly the techy language worked really well.
• analytics - I wrote this feature (and got it to repress browser console errors if offline) but after querying it with the contest organisers I had to take it out as they consider this an external dependency (and thus illegal).

As ever source is available and free in both senses here.

js13k - a week to go..

More or less now is a week before the js13k deadline. My cargo-72 is coming along looking along.
I currently have the first 5 levels working pretty well - it has cows and jellyfish; and some rolling hills. I have also implemented touch screen controls which although currently not working well enough to play with are a good start and enough to at least let me test that the game is playable on my mid-range phone and low-powered tablet.

So excepting sound and music the game is mostly feature complete, mostly it needs levels and narrative content - the current zipped size is ~8500 bytes so I'm still doing okay.

Here is my latest demo. it isn't really mobile device ready yet but it kind of works.

js13k - Day 20 - Is it a game?

I've been working hard on my creation and at the moment the to do list looks very long but at least I have something sort of playable with an interface that I am pretty happy with (for desktop anyway).

You can play the first two levels of cargo-72 here.

js13k - half way today - Getting Prettier

Today is the mid-point of the js13k contest time. I have been adding features and generally prettying my idea up.

I had hoped to have a fully playable level of the game by this point but I am still a day or two away from that - so a bit late but not very late. My current zip file size if 5296 bytes.

I have added a slew of new features

• Base buildings and towers
• New cargo-72 avatar - more robotic; more bright; more solid
• New transparent gradient fill to change the tone of the ocean water with altitude
• Ability to load cargo and carry cargo on the buggy

So here my latest demo - you can drive with A,D and space - you can go all the way right and load up the standard weight cargo and then return in reverse.

js13K - Day 13 - More Cargo-72!

A few more days, a few more features:

• Parallax background layer with it's own styling
• independantly rotating wheels
• curves and slopes; hillocks and dells
• The buggy can jump
•  All new text console which displays messages to the user

It's slowly coming along then - currently it's not very pretty but the hard parts are falling into place. After closure and zip the count is at 4,026 bytes - so far so good.

My latest demo can be played here - use A and D to move and <space> to jump.

js13K - Day 11 - Cargo-72

Suddenly my js13k project seems to be coming on a little better - I seem to have the beginnings of a little game:

• Terrain generation that gives me more or less randomness/control in different sections
• regex styling functionality that makes the text art look cool by styling some characters differently
• A buggy with independently rotating wheels controlled by keyboard, with different dynamics forwards and backwards
• Physics for bouncing and ramping on the uneven terrain
• Collision detection

After you google closure and then zip all of this you get 3.14kb - that seems pretty good to me at this point.

You can play the demo here  - use A and D to control the buggy.

js13K Day 8 - A Name and a Bit of a Demo

I haven't had an easy week (or perhaps it was too easy) and so haven;t put a lot of time into the game.

I rapidly established that very wide (4000+ characters) spans were never going to work on mobile devices - so I've developed a system that breaks the levels into vertical panels so that I can add and remove then from the DOM dynamically to keep the bits the browser has to render to a minimum.

I also decided on a name 'CARGO-72' of which I am very fond.

Here is a demo of the terrain modelling of a typical long level.

js13kgames Day 3 - Design Docs

I've got other priorities this weekend but I promised to post the design docs I've been working on. I played Moon Patrol a lot when I was less than 12 years old - these designs and the general aesthetic I wish to invoke owe a direct debt to that game.

On paper...

And some details copied from my documentation:

Game consists of 10+ short missions. Each mission involves going over the terrain twice once forwards in the buggy’s best mode then backwards in the buggy’s weaker mode.

Ascii art to generate stuff - only the ‘solid world’ will have a strict Scale and orientation - everything else will use a rectilinear bounding box but be free to use altered scales and changing rotation.

The game is 2D with parrellax backgrounds.

Missions will be randomly generated from mission decks.

Controls: faster/slower + jump + fire + weapon rotate

Features:

• old-school arcade game feel
• subtle narrative
• over and under the sea
• ascii art
• chip-tunes
• sound effects
• type out mission control texty stuff with good copy
• analytics

js13kGames Day 2 - Working on reversed

Yesterday was the start of the js13kgames.com contest; the theme for this year is 'Reversed'.

The idea for the contest is that you have 30 days to scratch write a HTML5 based game that ships in under 13kb total zipped size. For the non-technical that is a very small amount of stuff to organize into a game.

I completed last year with Strata; of which I am proud but had to write in under 10 days because of my own travel plans.

This year I have much higher ambitions. I want to make a complete if not particularly original game. For me complete means all of these: good game-play - playable for significant lengths of time, player development and skill, polished visual look, sound effects, chip-tune music and a sense of narrative progress.

All of that in 13kb - the text is this post is about 6% of 13kb.

I've got a pretty plan - will publish my sketches tomorrow.

Game 6 - TextFlight - Release

Although this blog has been kind of silent on the subject I have been steadily working at my ascii art based flyer.

I am proud to have implemented sound for this game (a feature that always gets left on the backlog) - in the spirit of the ascii art the sound is all algorithmically generated; no sound samples were used. I've also created three distinctive worlds which demonstrate the general flexibility of HTML, CSS and text in general - all the 'graphic' elements are rendered using text DOM elements.

My final version only works in chrome on a desktop (although it mostly looks okay in firefox):Take a look at the game here.

As ever the source is free for all here so clone, fork or copy.

The Final Twist - Sunday 9pm - Release

So at the end of my weekend I'm pretty much done. It has been a bit move of a mission that I had imagined but I am happy with my final product - I think it has a good finish and is definitely a playable game on a smart phone for a few minutes.

This is my final release at the time writing try it out - play some; it's probably good or bad for your hands. The source is available as usual.

Almost Twisted - 3pm Sunday

I took an early relax last night so didn't end up doing much work on the game after the last demo; however unexpected free time happened to me this morning when a regular commitment was cancelled so I've got my progress back on track and at this point have a mostly working game which is quite fun to play.

Have the the playing surfaces responsive  so they work nice on all devices now (I hope).

It's now got start and completion screens, and a scoring and timing system. There is still some significant work to be done tidying up the graphics and display css; and I'd like to add a few more small features to keep the game interesting; and I'd like to record the highest ever scores in local storage. (also analytics!)

We'll see in a few hours how much of that I get done.

All Twisted Up Saturday 3pm

Walked the dog and had a bit of fun this morning before returning to my game - I've added the basic rules enforcement for my latest demo and it accurately shows and count lifting the wrong fingers. The game also indicates which finger to move and what to target on the touch panel.

 I've also tidied the graphics a bit and made an overlay layer. This is the latest demo which works on most fairly big touch screens. Tonight I will made it responsive to different screen sizes.

The Twisted Rush 8pm Friday

I've got the spinner working nicely at this point. The graphics need some improvement but the movement is looking good.

This new demo spins the double spinners every 10 seconds or so; although it doesn't enforce the rules or keep score you can play along with it on a multi-touch device - so I got to play it some and the idea mostly works at the moment on my tablet.

The Twisted Rush - 2pm Friday

Got a basic board working on multi touch (in the sense that it lights up when you touch different panels) and am beginning to develop a spinning selector panel thing.

You can take a look at a demo here (remember it doesn't work with a mouse).

So far so good!

A Sudden Twisted Rush - 10am Friday

I have been a little behind in game development and have still not finished my ascii flyer but I have decided to do a jam-style game development this weekend (which includes today as I am not working). It's going to have to be fast because; perhaps 16 hours total development time is available to me during this period.

So it's 10am on Friday, currently all I have is this design I sketched a couple of days ago:

If you ever played twister you get the general idea - only for use on a multi-touch devices - you get to twist by yourself with your fingers... Now for some massively quick development.

Text Flight - Got Collisions!

Despite ongoing challenges on my time - Grahamstown National Arts Festival and a week of serious illness - I have been pushing on with the text based game and tonight did the hardest part of the coding - character level collision detection on the ascii art.

The terrain generation has been improved significantly since the last version and a new minimal look on most of the art work. In this, my latest demo the plane flashes red on collisions - be warned this code works on desktop chrome only as far as I know - firefox seems to mostly run it atm but makes some z-index mistakes.

TextFlight - Trials and Tribulations

I have been making very slow progress on this my sixth game - the technology is cutting edge and fairly unreliable. A week or so ago I had realized that this game wasn't going to run on ANY IE version because the 3d transform support is partial - this week I found that the game was reliably crashing firefox and only actually worked on Chrome.

Interestingly the current version does seem to run reliably on FF so there must be something specific I'm doing that is confusing FF in some contexts. I have also discovered that many of my assumptions about the browser units 'em' and the width of the fixed font are not in general reliable; a solution I need to fix if I have any chance of implementing collision detection.

On the plus side the system is auto-generating infinite terrain and cleaning up the terrain behind it - also it looks quite pretty currently. So despite being desperately behind time on this one I will continue with it at least to have a fixed course length and crashes.

If you want to take a look (and fly) you can fly with the AWSD keys here.

Game 6 - Text Flight

I have got a lot further with the code and layout on my ascii flyer over the past week. The ascii art library is now able to separate solid bits from absent bits and can color specific sections of the art differently.

The world is looking good and I'm mostly happy with the glider.

In this demo you can move the glider left and right using the A and D and fly up and down using W and S.

Game 6 - An Endless ASCII Flyer

I want to use these winter months for training missions - I have two big areas of expertise I want to explore: ASCII art and Facebook/Parse/Social platform technology.  I have two projects on simmer that need to use the social platform code: a blue sky personal project and a commercial educational game system which is in the wind.

The ASCII art is something I have been vaguely interested in for some time and was hoping to get some creative experience with it before the js13kGames challenge (in September). Given the massive restrictions such a challenge has in resources I think that I could build something quite beautiful from ascii characters without requiring much storage.

In that spirit of practice for this month I'm building a  fairly simple retro-flyer game: you get to steer a clumsy glidery thing left and right and control its altitude as you fly through a tron-like tunnel built of ascii art. I hope to build it as a endless game with auto-generated levels.

I am going to implement the project using the HTML DOM model and 3d transformations; I'm not sure if my final product is going to run on mobile devices - I am designing it around desktop and keyboard use but I would like an alternate control system for tablets.

So far I've got no code but I do have this cute art demo using only CSS and HTML.

Game 5: Release

I thought I had finished up this game a couple of weeks ago and was just waiting for artwork but as I played it I realized that it would be much cooler if it had many more words - ideally thousands more.

So with that thought in mind I downloaded a list of English words, talked Libre Office into calculating a heuristic function for each word (and learned once again that spreadsheets are much weaker tools than they appear) and generated some serious word lists.

I added some tutorial text; credits screen and made the css responsive.
I also received lots of cool artwork from contributors and have added a couple of new bits myself.

So my final version of the game appears here . As ever you are welcome to view; judge; copy ; or mod the source (including the graphical resources).

Game 5: 80/20?

I've got a few more last cards to clean up on this project but I'm basically done - this version is a playable game with lots (but not nearly enough yet) of words and two comic strips.

I just have to write tutorial text; bulk up (and reorder) the word lists and I'll be done. Then I give it ten days to give my artistic cohorts a chance to sketch comics before a final release.

Quicker Than Hanging - Almost a Game

I have come just a little further and now have a version that includes some artwork and replayablility.

You can take a look at the latest if you like and see how the cartoon strip showing how close you are to death works.

I would ideally like 20-50 versions of this cartoon and as such would welcome art contributions from anyone who thinks it would be fun. I need 4 square frames arranged left to right in a single graphic file like so:

The frames represent starting state, one error, two errors and death respectively.
The idea is to do a cartoon of a fast and hopefully funny death.
I don't really care much about resolution but something like 2000px x 500px will look good on high end devices.
Black background: Goes with the rest of the (blackboard) theme but I have a plan for white background cartoons if you prefer.
Ownership: All aspects of twelvegamesayear (including artwork) I publish as free to use creative commons; your contribution will thus become cc.
Mail any art to me directly. (Sooner would be better but I'll release a final version at the end of the month)

Quicker Than Hanging - First Demo

A first demo for my newest game showing some of the font and graphics ideas:
http://elementalsystems.github.io/QuickerThanHanging/v1/

Quicker Than Hanging

For my next game idea I have a simple derivative of the famous paper and ink word guessing game 'Hang Man'.

My version is a little easier because more information is given but harder because it has less room for mistakes. More information in the sense that the bounding boxes of the letters are shown so one can distinguish the tall letters and those that go below the base line from most ordinary letters. Less room for error in that you only get to make three mistakes whereas traditional hangman allows 6/7/8 depending on how you play.

I am thinking of using handwritten look - probably like chalk on a black board. The bit of the board where the traditional hangman would go I want to fill with the same idea with cartoons of sudden ways to die (in square four frames - starting, 2 errors, death) - I was hoping to somehow source these by smiling hopefully at talented friends - otherwise I try some art myself.

The programming is undemanding for this project which is appropriate because I'm short on time this month.

Game 4: Release

Here at last a completed version of my text adventure. It's more an artwork than a game, and more a writing project than a technical one but I'm satisfied with it.

A play through only takes a few minutes so have a look at it: Finding Yourself

Game 4: A Sample

I've made the web version of the software work and have put it up on elementalsystems.

Here is a demo of the system showing off the new on-line system and the layout and fonts that I intend to use for Finding Yourself. The text in this sample is drawn from a friend's micro fiction from a few years ago.

I'm happy with the simple look and think it will work well for my purposes in the longer project.

Game 4: Finding Yourself

For March I'm going to write a 'choose your own adventure' game inspired by the books of my youth. The game will be text only and fairly short with the minimum of interface - the idea I have in mind is more an interactive narrative work than a game, it is supposed to be interesting and perhaps amusing to wander through the story various ways as opposed to being winnable in any sense.

From  a technical perspective I have already have most of the pieces in place with a long term project called Narranet that I have been working on for some months: Narranet is a java-based generic tool for storing and handling narrative-like interactions expressed as a graph of nodes - in English this means it does things a lot like a 'choose your own adventure' with some added benefits. I have a narrative editor for this system and a desktop player that are quite functional. I mostly have a web-server based version of the player that can efficiently maintain a large number of simultaneous games back-ended by a database - but it doesn't do a few major things it needs to.

You can see an example of Narranet in action on my business site where it is used to simulate an interview with a client.

Game 3 - Deadly Dungeon Dash

A few weeks after the game jam and our team has continued to put some work into our board game. Additional play testing; a new pretty set of the game (thanks to JL) and also a play test with strangers went really well.

I wanted to share some photos from our design time during the jam, we had some large bits  of paper and coloured pens, just like real designers:

By the end of the weekend we had progressed to basic designs for cards and tiles tiles, the first semi-digital versions looked something like this:

Here is a photo of us testing our earliest sticky based versions:

A couple of weeks later we played on our first carefully constructed set with pretty coloured cards and plastic covered tiles:

Game 2 - Phaseball - Release

After a double length sprint on this game I've finally completed it.

My final release of the game can be played here: PhaseBall

I am very pleased with the final product, it is much as I imagined it would be in my head and I think the puzzle space turned out quite interesting. The design worked really well on the small and tablet screens in both landscape and portrait mode; the square playing surface was convenient to work with and made it possible to make a smoothly responsive environment without any css media query special cases.

I have some real regrets, maybe I'll get back to them when my schedule permits:
* Audio: The game would be a lot cooler with sound effects and ambient whot-not; I never seem to have time for this on these fast game projects - maybe I need an audio collaborator.
* More Levels: I think the game could have 9 more levels without being boring. I  had planned four stages including a challenge stage between 'Exploration' and 'Hardship' - that would have been good.

The full source code here if you want to copy it, mod it, use it or whatever.

Game 2 - More Pretty

A new release of the game with a lot more levels and a whole lot of intra-level interface and prettyness: http://elementalsystems.github.io/PhaseBall/v6/

Now I mostly have to concentrate on level design to complete this one.

Game 2 - Almost Done

The Phase Ball game has come a long way in  the last weeks, I have intra-level interface and 10 or so levels designed. Also touch enabled and pretty good on small screens.

Here is my current working copy of the game: http://elementalsystems.github.io/PhaseBall/v5/

Next a whole lot of new level designs and a medal system.

Game 2 - Some beginner phaseball levels

Finally got this game to be semi-playable these are the first five levels I envision:

Level 1 - Simple target shoot
Level 2 - a bit more complex
Level 3 - Colour Training
Level 4 - More on Colour
Level 5 - Colour changing balls

Pretty obviously I need a loading screen and some kind of inter-level interface

Game 3 - Deadly Dungeon Dash

For this game I was part of a team doing the global game jam; we had decided before hand to aim at producing a table top game.

By the end of a first meeting on friday night the team had a pretty solid plan for a endless runner type board game.We made a prototype board and cards and by Saturday lunchtime met to have a first play through of the rules. Exact rules and the dynamics of the board and especially endgame seemed a little weak but the general dynamics seemed fun and engaging.Some discussion and a serious pivot around the end game conditions ensued leading us to a new playable verson to test on Sunday morning.

Two complete play throughs on Sunday (for five and three players) with a new refined set of rules - less dynamics and a more balanced board - went much better with clear win outcomes and fun had by all. The general length and play style seemed to match our original goals of designing a fun (potentially drunken) game which would be played out in less than an hour.

The remainder of the day was spent setting up graphic resources and designing rules and wording; hard work that led to an mostly complete set - a new game designed in under 72 hours.

I'll publish the original design documents, the first version photo grpahs and my on going craft project to make a pretty set over the next few weeks.

Game 2 - Everything except a game

My latest release of the level editor with pretty steampunk graphics and a control system.

Now I've just got to do actual level design for this entity and put together some kind of structure to hold the levels and level sets.

Editor available here: http://elementalsystems.github.io/PhaseBall/levdesign3/

Game 2 - Looking Prettier

Been working with some steam punk graphics from this deviant to see if I can't get quite a clean metallic steampunk look. Am happy so far but has some way to go.

My latest designer which includes control to aim and fire the plasma ball has the new graphics too: http://elementalsystems.github.io/PhaseBall/levdesign2/

Other new features: colour physics; targets can be placed and drawn.

Game 2 - Level Designer

I figured that level design is going to be a big part of this project so I wanted to get an easy way to express levels as json strings very early on.

So the first version level designer is just a big text box and a live interpretation of the JSON expressed in the box. So you can live edit the JSON and change the features of the level.

The physics and collision model is working well and looks natural (although doesn't do color-physics yet).

All this currently works here http://elementalsystems.github.io/PhaseBall/levdesign1/  (you need to press the start! button once)

Game 2 - A Plan

For my next incarnation in HTML5 I am planning a simple 2d physics like game where the aim is to hit some targets with as few shots as possible with bouncy plasma balls.
I'm keen to do something which will work well on a smartphone screen - so I want to keep it simple and keep the control out of the play area.

Features:

• Square playing surface - fire from a corner therefore 90 degrees of rotation only
• Control speed of the plasma shot - useful because of moving surfaces and the color shifting
• Color shifting - red barriers only interact with red plasma, also blue, (white is the all plasma color and interacts with everything)
• Plasma balls have colour (or a colour change sequence after launch) which is indicated by the ammunition type

Look

• Got some steam punk ideas for the  controls and board framing
• Lots of blur and motion trail on the playing surface

Impediments

• Level design - going to be time consuming and will require extra tools
• Steam punk - too hard for my design skills (commons?)