Event Horizon arena mode!

I'm pretty happy with this addition, it's a good step towards the big overworld game thing I'm planning. The interface screens and stuff are a bit terrible because I suck at that but I hope it makes some sense.

The finished game I envision won't have difficulty levels as this does; the ships with worse generators/computers for battle will be more manoeuvrable and have cooler abilities on the map.

Download
Please let me know if you come across any bugs, I think I've ironed out most of them. Or if you're new- how was the tutorial? What stuff didn't make sense?

Other than bug fixes, I'm going to take a couple of weeks off from spaceships. Make a small game or two and brush up on some maths.

Sweet new ship by Gnap (thanks so much for this!)

Rockets!

Rockets are fun to make! Took a while to get the movement feeling nice. Still not sure about the rocket body though.

Should be on track for arena mode demo in a week's time, I'm looking forward to playing it!

Ludum Dare results

Our results!

Ahh we did better than I could have hoped! Gnap and Willfor were amazing and they pulled us into 35th place out of >1000 entries. I'm proud of the rest of the results for my first jam too. Game jams are so much fun, I'm going to try to do at least one every two months from now on.

Event Horizon arena mode is on its way. Should be a playable demo out in a couple of weeks.

Swift Post-Mortem

This was a really fun jam- just a few friends staying over for the weekend and making games! Everyone finished a game and they were all very different and fun.

I think this is the first game I'm really satisfied with. It all turned out exactly as it was in my head. There were a couple of bugs that only happened outside of the IDE that I fixed after, but other than that it all went pretty well!

The good-

• The art style turned out pretty well, I'm a bit terrible at drawing but it seems I can make not completely horrible basic pixel art.
• The sound effects are simple but fit well.
• The random level generator worked great.
• The scoring system is intuitive and (hopefully) doesn't require a tutorial.
• The scope was well-judged so it was all finished on time and I even got to add a few bonus effects that show up every 3 levels.
• I picked a sensible aspect ratio!
• I like the tension that's created when you're trying to be accurate but also fast. I might revisit this in future games.

The bad-

• There's no tutorial, but that sort of thing is often tricky with 48-hr jams.
• The people who came over to play it didn't seem to like it as much as I did, but what do they know : )
• The time limit for picking tiles is really unclear. Should have added a timer bar.
• It's also unclear the picking quicker gives you a bigger disc. I guess I could have had a disc get made in your corner or something but I'm not sure how much clearer that would make it.
• The arrows/buttons in the middle showing which direction is which is confusing. This is partially due to it being gamepad/keyboard and partially due to the weird isometric angle I picked. Regardless I should have made it arrows for keyboard mode and letters for gamepad mode.
• Also due to the angle, it was difficult to draw straight lines from one tile to another.

The isometric view looks super rad when the tiles are falling but everything else would have been better if I just made them head-on.. For now I'll carry on making Event Horizon and do a game jam or two every month.

Swift

Whoop, we all finished our games! I'll let the others write posts for here but here's my game.

The issue with this jam is that the games require you to have 4 xbox controllers to play them. This one can be played fine with a single keyboard and 3-4 players though.


Extra instructions-

• 1-5 to change window size
• Choose the direction that leads to your flag to get points
• Pick quickly, the fastest person gets a bigger disc worth more points, and if you take too long you get nothing
• Blue arrow things push you in a direction but don't change your facing
• For XBox controller mode, press A on any controller. Unfortunately you can't play with a mix.

First few hours update

Haven't done any gameplay code yet, but I'm happy with how it looks so far!

4PLMXBCGJ has begun!

In 48 hours we'll hopefully have created 4 games! Good luck all.

Big explosion!

Feels good to get back in the swing of programming. I had a memory leak with this, which was a HUGE pain but it felt good to fix it. Like removing a splinter.

4-Player Local Multiplayer Xbox-Controller Game Jam (4PLMXBCGJ) starts in about 16 hours and I've got my idea prepared! I'm going to try to learn to make some bad music tonight.

Quick update

I spent some time changing the LibGDX template/library thing I've been working on to help with game jams. It's not perfect but I like it better now. It took some time to refit Event Horizon with it but now it's working and I've got a better shield effect. Just got to put in arena mode and I can release another demo!

This weekend there's a mini game jam happening at my house. The theme is 4-player local multiplayer xbox controller games. A bit niche but it's going to be fun, I've got a nice setup for local multiplayer games and I'm interested to see what people come up with. The game I'm planning on making is very simple and should be possible to play with 4 people using only a keyboard so I'll release it here too.