Last weekend was the Ludum Dare #22 48-hour game jam and I made game and entered it into the competition.

I used a new language called Monkey which is by the makers of BlitzMax (which I used for most of my casual download games), so it was fairly familiar. However there were still many basic things that I had to figure out, so the weekend was almost more about learning Monkey and beginning to make a basic framework/engine as making the actual game. Because Monkey is cross-platform I kept building the game in HTML 5 because it was quick to test and then I made the final build in Flash so that people could get instant access to it online and it would be nice and fast.

The theme for the game jam was “Alone” and I decided I wanted to make a game that had a proper story because in the past my minigames haven’t every done that. In fact none of my games have ever really had a story.

The game tells a story about a boy/man named Jim and his journey through life and is an extrapolation of feelings that I sometimes get (and many other people have since commented that they feel the same too sometimes). The game starts off lighthearted but the tone changes towards the end (level 4), so don’t play if you are easily depressed. If you feel the need to cheat, you can press J to Jump to the end of the level.

Anyway, here it is.

Always Alone (Free online game)

I hope you like it – please tell me what you thought in the comments!

Last weekend I hosted a 48-hour Full Indie game jam at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. 30 jammers and some volunteers turned up and about 14 games were made made by a mixture of teams and solo devs. We then had a showcase at the end of the 48 hours. It was an epic weekend and we all had great fun!

Metal Spawn

My game was called Metal Spawn and I teamed up with Designer/Artist Cody Church, who did a fantastic job, and musician Brian Werst, who was so awesome that he made music for multiple games.

I spent most of Friday making sure that everyone was settled in OK and then I talked the evening away, so I didn’t get much work done on the game. But by Saturday I was up to speed and trying to complete all the features we had planned at the beginning (we wanted it to be a cross between Space Invaders and Tower Defense). The final version is of course missing some of those features because 48-hours is never enough time. Still, it’s a fully playable game that embraces the game jam theme of Spawning (this was inspired by the fact it was Father’s Day weekend in Canada).

I also spent a while fiddling with various special effects and making sure that everything in the game had appropriate user feedback, which of course takes time away from adding features. Since the jam I made the aliens animate because it seemed a shame not to use the artwork that had been supplied to me, and made a few other minor tweaks.

Oh and by the way, I didn’t stay awake or on site for the whole 48-hour jam, I went home to get about 5 hours sleep each night, but some people DID stay the whole weekend and napped on sofas. Hardcore.

Download for PC and Mac

The aim of the game is to destroy a set number of aliens in the time limit by using Z to shoot and arrow keys to move. Sometimes aliens drop junk which you can pick up and then use to spawn turrets with X. As you progress through the levels, more aliens spawn and they shoot faster and more accurately. Eventually you’ll no doubt get overwhelmed, but how far can you get?

Download for PC (9.32Mb)

Download for Mac (Intel only) (9.56Mb)

Enjoy! Let me know what you think of it in the comments.

During my last month at Big Fish Games, I made a mini-game called Berry Blast in Action Script 3. It’s one of those “bubble shooter”-type games. The mini-game was added to Big Fish’s My Tribe game on Facebook as a collectible decoration that you can play every day to compete with friends for the best score in one minute (Bejewelled Blitz style).

If you want to play it, you’ll have to start playing My Tribe (which I also worked on as part of a team) and collect a few crates until you get the Berry Blast mini-game decoration. It’s a common item so shouldn’t take too long to find. Also there are 3 other great mini-games made by other team members: a match-3, a pachinko-style game, and a spot the difference game (one of many design ideas I came up with that a co-worker did a really great job of).

Berry Blast was good fun to make, and had lots of little complexities that I tried to get right to ensure that it played well, and I think I did a good job because it’s fun and rewarding to play. I actually left just before the game was finished. It was functionally complete when I left, with placeholder 8-bit sounds (made with SFXR) and a few pieces of final art. Then a co-worker plugged in the final graphics and sounds and hooked it up to the My Tribe mini-game framework that handles all the competitive scoring and Facebook sharing etc. I think he even fixed a couple of small bugs, ahem 😉

It may only be a mini-game, but I was proud of it because I coded it from scratch in AS3 and learned a lot about the language along the way, and even made a neat little AS3 game framework (Big Fish owns the code, so I can’t share it, sorry).

If you manage to find Berry Blast in a crate and play it, please let me know what you thought!