It’s an old turn based racing game we used to play on paper when I was a kid.
You have to select one of 8 possible moves, the next move will start by moving the same amount as you did last move.

So if you moved 1 step forward as your first move, the next 8 possible moves will be around 1 step forward from your current position.

The hard part is trying to gain maximum speed and to remember to brake in do time. 70% of the time you gain to much speed and won’t be able to turn in time. BOOM!

Again it took waaay to long to develop. This time caused by a small oversight on my part that took hours to find I missed some coliders/layer in my raycast

Now it’s time for ZZzzzzzzzz………

Now, go make games!

– Henning

As the name sugests you have you yell at the game, to move. The louder you yell the further the player objects move apart.

I added a sencitivity slider to adjust the needed sound volumen to move, so you don’t really have to yell at the game.

The game only works if you allow it to use the default microphone of your computer, so if you don’t want to, then sorry you won’t be able to play.

Have fun yelling at gamejolt

Now, go make games!
– Henning

I had to think of something? Sleeping until 7 and didn’t help, food and a shower.. Now an idea started to form. The void ship from the Dr. Who series and the hunt for the Maquis from Star Trek, void ship = between worlds,  hunt for the Maquis = turbulent and violent space.. hmmm. To the blackboard, and draw 3D, draw 2.5D, ok then 2d.. Couldn’t figure out how I wanted the game to look, as I would like to do it in 2d (haven’t done 3d since unity came out with their 2d support), I just couldn’t squash the 3D into 2D.

Remembering that I only had 48 hours and 5 was gone sleeping, eating and showering already. I had to keep it simple. So why not having two universes, one on top of the screen and one on the bottom, and having to fight invaders from the other universe. So I set out to do so.

What I have ended up with is almost that. Only change is that the enemy ships are wormhole generators that you have to shoot down before they can open a wormhole, and there by destroying the other universe (I have allowed myself some freedoms as I do not know how wormhole from a universe with other lawn of nature would impact our universe or it’s even possible).

You can play the game Join Us! online, or download the PC version here.

Learned a lot, especially not to optimize as much as I do. I have done some things where I thought, this will be slow, but it’s micro seconds, so doesn’t matter. Ended up with at most 10 draw calls which is nothing. Now I have uploaded the PC version and the web version to Ludum Dare I don’t really wan’t to work on it any more, I’m mentally tired and just want to relax and not think about “Join Us!” anymore,  for now…

It’s been fun and amazing to see how much you can do, when you don’t focus on having to deliver something amazing and super polished, but just a game someone would enjoy So hope you will play it, enjoy it, and rate it on Ludum Dare.

Now, go make games

– Henning

A couble of pointers:

• Make one keystore and make sure that you have a backup somewhere safe. You can’t update your app if don’t sign it with the same key.
• Supporting different aspect ratios on different devices suck! Learn to live with it. Compromise is essential!

Download “Beach Fun Seagull Hunt” at Google Play.

Now! Go make games

– Henning

I’ve changed a few things, and some things I really don’t get why is happening.

1. First thing that was noticed was that the game doesn’t fill the entire screen.
   This is as designed All players are to have the same playing area, same height and same width. If this wasn’t the case, some resolutions could have an advantage, for instance; a high narrow screen would be a lot better than a wide screen, as the ball has a lot less chance of hitting a seagull. There are probably a lot more scenarios where aspect ratio matters, but to make sure every player sees the same, the aspect ration is fixed. I did add a frame to the game area, to make it visible that the size is as intended. So no big change here.
2. The game runs very fast on low-end devices.
   Ok, this one I don’t get? Everything that moves in the game is either controlled by the physics engine or is moved by scripts, and yes I have checked, every movement is done using Time.deltaTime. So?
   I did some digging, and found a possible solution, not that I can see why it should work? Time.deltaTime should still make everything move with the correct speed? But it’s worth a try.
   Under quality setting I found that the setting for VSync Count was set to “Don’t Sync” for the Fastest and Fast levels. So I have changed them to do VSync, to see if this solves the problem on the low-end devices.
   

Well that’s about it for a couple of days testing Thanks again to all the testers and the people helping to spread the game.

The newest version of the game can always be found in the bottom of the post Seagull Hunt.

Now go make games!

– Henning

So I’ve use a few weeks making this small puzzle idea into a working mini-game. It popped into my mind over the Christmas holiday. I thought that it would be a fun little game, and I was sure that I would learn a thing or two. So here is what I did, and learned

The basic idea:
A top-down game where you have to build a bridge to save some small cute creatures. But as always the idea changed over time and turned into something else.

The different planks used to build the bridge would be rotating and changing length at different speeds and amount. I figured that 5 different planks would be a fine.

Getting started:
So I started out by looking at the plank dynamics, I wanted to add planks at the end of the previous plank and in the same angle. But first, ONE, plank Keep it simple, right?

First run of Left

Ok, that worked So now, adding more planks.

Getting planks to align, and stay there:

Getting the planks to appear at the end of the previous plank wasn’t  a problem, except for one out of about 10 planks, so it was very hard to debug.

But after recording a video of the game, I could see the planks was placed at the correct position, but was then pushed in the first frame.. Ah, the physics engine! Problem identified
All the planks have a collider and a rigid body to be able to collide with the walls, the goal and to be able to be use the it for the death sequence, where all the planks fall to the ground. So I couldn’t just remove the rigid body from the planks.

The solution:

I simply chose to lock the position and rotation every frame. Well, simple but wasn’t easy to implement because of the way I had implemented the plank control, but it worked. And then every thing was locked into the right place

What did I learn:

• 2d and 3d physics engine doesn’t act the same. Colliding rules are different, follow link and see section “Collision action matrix” which works for 3d, but (and now I can’t remember the other link, sorry) this isn’t true for 2d.
• Dynamic loading of levels
• Got better at using animations instead of moving logos in code
• Deploy to OUYA and very basic OUYA input control (one button).

Things to do better:

• If I want my POCs to be playable, make some simple object relation layout BEFORE coding a single line
• Use more object pools, instead of creating objects on the fly.
• Find a better way to handle the growing switch/case section in the game manager.
• Graphics.. I started looking at blender again. Did the beautiful stars in it
• Write posts on the way instead of having to remember what I did after the fact.

Hope you enjoy the 10 levels of this mini-game “Left” (named as such, as  you have a tendency to turn left).

Now, go make games!

– Henning

Screenshot of main screen, the 10 levels and the game completed screen.

Well, having made a small test level in Pyxel Edit, I had to see if I could write a small importer for unity to make use of this new wonderful tool. I had newer written an editor script for unity before, and did have a lot of problems with references to the sprites I generated in the script… They did not exsist after the script exitede! :/ After a day of googling, asking in the unity forum, installing IRC and asking in the channel #unity3d without anyone being able to help, I did figure it out myself.

I had to import the sprites in unity as I normaly would, so they exsisted and would be referencable from the script, this I could do by loading them via Resources.LoadAll<Sprite>(name). The other problem was that all the tiles was clones of the original created game object and not the created prefab? Well that turned out to be simple to solve. All I had to do, was to use PrefabUtility.InstantiatePrefab instead of the normal Instantiate function, and everything worked
It was wonderful to finally see a level show up in unity that was created in an external editor.

I have continued to modify the editor script to make it more useful i.e. not to overwrite existing prefabs, as I want to be able to add colliders and scripts to the different prefabs without them being overwritten every time I update the tileset.

Use and modify the Pyxel Importer script as you want (Link to script), if you make any improvements to it, please let me know, so I can add the updated version to this post.

Two minor details about Pyexl Editor though

1. I can’t figure out how to detach a tile AND delete the drawing in one operation, for now I have to detach a tile by Ctrl+right clicking and then use the the eraser or the selection tool, mark it and delete.
2. It’s not possible to have multiple canvases per doc, so you would be able to create multiple levels using the same tileset without manually having to synchronize the tilesets between the different canvases. The developer know this, and are open to add this feature in the future.

Conclusion, I love Pyxel Edit! So much that I bought another copy today ($20) It has made it possible for me to start making tile based games, as I want them.

So now, go and buy Pyxel Edit and make games.

– Henning

I havn’t finished any of the games I have thought out the last half year. Some I’ve gotten far with, but didn’t enjoy playing enough to finish them. Others where just to big projects for me to finish at the time. So I set forth to make so small a project for myself that I would be sure that I could and would finish it in a short time period.

So over the last two weeks i used a few evenings to make this small game that I call Strazer, from the words stress and racer. The game is loosly based on an old game for the videopac G7000 called Speedway. I found this screenshot of the old game.

I would say that the old graphics is more simple and stylish. I’m not the big pixel artist, but I did want to try to make the game in an old arcade style. The cars are ugly, but who cares

I use a small script that takes a screenshot every time I start the project and then 5, 10, 60 and 240 seconds there after. I merged all the screenshots into this small video and added a video of a single playthrough to the end of it.

You can play the web version of Strazer, or download the android version.

I’m really glad that I did finish it even though is not good, very fun or pretty. But I learned a lot about the use of animations and the animator.

Have fun! Now go make games!

– Henning

Take a look, and now go make games

– Henning

After only a week and not much time to look into Unity 2D I must say that I don’t think I’ll ever look at another game engine ever again The 2D workflow, sprite importer, animator, ordering layer and so on, just makes everything SO easy. I’m simply blown away.

I have so many options now, that I don’t know what game to start making, which i great Now I just have to finde the time to make it all happen..

If you don’t have allready, go download Unity 4.3….  To get started take at look at 2D Game Development Walkthrough.. Unity 2D RULES!!

Have fun and go make games!

– Henning