super cheffing

Promise (empty?) to myself that I will post a game right here by this time next week.  Maybe new, maybe just finish something old.  Dunno yet.  Ha!

So I’m not doing a MvC2 demake anymore.  I wanted to, but fighting games are too much work for two or three people with less than a month.  Even if it is a demake.

I guess my problem is that even if I’m demaking something I want it to be fun and I want the quality to be top-notch.  A fighting game has too many factors to do it justice, so I’m switching gears to something that’ll be a bit simpler.  I think it’ll be a lot of fun, too.  I’ve started some quick art so I can get the engine working, then we’ll go from there I suppose.

Poor TIGSource’s been sick lately, so maybe the deadline’ll be extended, too.  That’d be good, seeing as I wasted 4 or 5 perfectly good days doing nothing!

Just read an interesting article on insomnia.ac and thought it was worth linking, given current projects and all.  It’s about space control in 2D fighters and raises some interesting points.

If you enjoy that article, I think Sirlin’s Super Turbo tutorials are great as well.  They give a more in-depth explination of space control along with in-game examples and go beyond just fireballs.

Haven’t made a whole bunch of progress on the engine - I’ve been thinking about systems before I start, and I was at the zoo all day.  I might get to work on it some tonight or later tomorrow.

That’s the NES palette with hardware restriction details, made by AdamAtomic.  There are a lot of resrictions on there, but I only pay attention to two of them: I try to keep my sprite sizes in powers of two, and I try to more-or-less stick to 3 colors per sprite.  If something looks better without the restrictions, though, I start to ignore them.

I just remembered this little fighting mockup thing I made a year or two ago, and it’s slightly relevant.  I was messing around with the idea of attacking and defending in fighting games, so I built a little prototype for it.  In this game, attacking and defending are two distinct types of play.  Arrows to move, Q, W, and E to attack.  You start off attacking, but if you get kicked, you switch to defending.  You then have to kick your opponent to begin attacking again.

This will probably just confuse the matter because it’s really hacked together.  I might build something like this into this new fighting engine, though, and I’ve never showed it to anyone, so I’m going to post it anyway.  You’ve been warned!  Link.

So I’ve almost finished this crazy banana-em-up.  I even have a title screen.  What I don’t have is a score screen, a game over screen, an instructions screen, etc, etc, etc.  I coded the game in a week and the interface has taken me a month.  Go figure!  Hopefully I’ll have it out to potential sponsors before I leave for school, though.  In the meantime, ogle at the title screen!

I was going for a chlidren’s storybook-type look, and I’m actually really pleased with it.  I also decided to keep going on the cat game past 3 hours because I have a few interesting ideas I’d like to mess with.  Since I haven’t posted anything playable (do I even post at all anymore?), here’s a little gameplay demo.  And I mean little.  Click to start, then arrows or wasd to move.

Link!  I think my best is around 106.  Have fun!

Also, Bootleg Demakes.  I’m ecstatic about this one.  Rock rock on.

Friday I was reading about some 3D Actionscript stuff and I had a really great idea for a game, right out of nowhere.  I wasn’t really even thinking about making a game before my Halloween project, which will be a bunch of fun hopefully, but inspiration struck and now I’m teeming with excitement about this new game.  I spend hours upon hours trying to come up with new game concepts, but they always hit me when I’m not really even thinking about them.  I guess that’s pretty common, but it’s one of the best feelings in the world.  I’ll have to squeeze this one in before September, but I think I’ll be able to, especially if I get some help.  Can’t wait to talk to some people about it!  Maybe I’ll be entering IGF this year after all.  I was going to stay away after the crash-and-burn that was last year’s attempt ;p

Last week I pixelled a monkey for the banana shmup.  Banana shoot-em up.  Banana-em-up.  It’s getting really close to finished now.  Hopefully everyone’ll be able to play it soon!

A gameplay shot.

This isn’t Flash but the Flash thing isn’t quite done yet, so I’ll put this animation here instead.  It’s for a game about a banana.  In Flash.  Maybe the game’ll be done this week.  It’s shooting banana, but that animation’s done with code, so here it looks like he’s being eaten by blue.

And here’s a walk cycle from a game I made that was no good because I ran out of time.  It’s not too hot, but oh well.

I guess the vampire could have gone here too but I wanted an excuse to make 2 posts because it makes me feel like a blogging phenom that really does use this site for more than just hosting my files.

With the pen tool and a mouse on a bad mouse pad.

Muchos busy the last few days, but this just made my day:

Iron Chef Japan

It’s back May 5 on Fine Living Network!  I was so sad after Food Network took it off the air earlier this year, but I will finally get to see it again.  And, judging by this list, it looks like they’ll be starting from Season 1, Episode 1.  I’ve never seen those, so I can’t wait!

I still haven’t gotten to play James Blake.  Maybe after the Oaks.  After that last match went one and a half hours, I’ve been a bit cautious about playing.