Game 9.5: Kitten Hero

PuzzleScript is such a wonderful game library. Editor in browser, no knowledge of maths or programming required. I can't get over how great it is. You can only make games that are similar to block-push-puzzles in it but that restriction is nice. I made this in about 3 hours and most of that was adding art and designing levels. The code for the game is just 10 lines! Try making your own!

Game 9: Defender

Windows only, sorry!
edit: Mac App made by my friend.

I made this in C, using SDL. I'm happy with how it turned out, I think my pixel art is getting slightly better! The portals look a bit rubbish though. As usual I left the UI until last and it's a bit rushed.

C is very tricky to get used to. I'm glad I made something in it and I can see the power of using it but it's a lot easier to make mistakes in. That or it doesn't tell you when you're doing dangerous things. I had some interesting bugs, including an array overflowing into another variable!

SDL was absolute hell to work with. Configuring all the various libraries was horrible and actually getting anything working took hours and a lot of help from a friend. It is very fast though, so maybe once I've learnt some more C and got used to it I'll be able to use it better.

Next week I feel like making a puzzle game? Maybe!

Game 8: Bad Music Game!

This was made in Haxe, using OpenFL. Haxe was ok to use, it's fairly similar to javascript. OpenFL was a bit of a pain to get working and learn about. I think it's not as popular as openGL and google kept thinking I was googling OpenGL instead! I couldn't get completely smooth movement from OpenFL, it always looked slightly jittery to me, but that's probably me misusing the library.

It didn't turn out very well, partially for the reasons outlined here. I got a bit annoyed with the timing issues and lost heart a bit. I'd like to make a rhythm game some time but I'll need to do a lot of research beforehand next time!

Game 7: Lava Goat

First time making a platformer. I think the controls turned out pretty good, although walljumping is a bit weird sometimes. I got a bit of help with editing my sprites and I think the goat looks great; I might be able to draw simple sprites like that myself in future.

My third week with Unity. It does have some nice features but I'm starting to get a bit tired of it. I spent about a day trying to get the 2d physics to work properly but it doesn't seem to fit at all with a tile-based platformer. I ended up creating a raycasting-based collision system which worked perfectly!

I am looking forward to trying something else next week though. Haven't decided what yet though.

edit: I really liked this game and don't want to lose it to unity webplayer going under so I made a gif!

Game 6: LaserShoots

Ach I have a pounding headache. I need to learn to finish games earlier!

Another week with Unity. There are some thing I love about Unity and some things I don't. I'm starting to find my way around it a lot more now though. I'm sad that my engine particle effect and the starfield look a bit buggy in the webplayer. I had to fight with it a bit to stop everything from being controlled by the physics engine but I think I have that worked out now.

I am very happy with how the ships turned out in this game considering I can't draw at all. The sound effects came out ok but were a bit rushed. I'm pretty happy with the gameplay and, as usual, it has a super hard final level- wave 7. I love working with particle effects and I think the enemy ship explosions look alright!

I'm beginning to see more how the code integrates with unity. I think I will try to make a platformer in Unity next week.