Well, that’s it for the Ludum Dare version of Ninjural Selection!

I didn’t have time to add sound effects or *ahem* any sort of goal or progression, but it’s still a fun little playground. You can rate it here.

I’ll keep working on an updated version, which you can find here.

I guess it’s time to play and rate some games! See you around…

I finally let go of my “left and right arrow keys only” purity and adding aiming up and down with the up and down arrow keys. 😛 It’s fun! I think for this game, optional complexity is totally fine. You don’t have to shoot up or down if you don’t want to…

I’ve been busy playing and rating games (42 so far, to be exact) but I also went ahead and made a small addition to the post-competition version of Ninjural Selection – a spotlight! That way you can see where you are. And the punch and kick animations should stand out a little bit better too.

More updates coming – I just wanted to try this out really quick.

If you haven’t rated Ninjural Selection yet, here’s your chance to do it right now! 😀

Thank you all so much for all the feedback you’ve given me on Ninjural Selection!

By far the most common complaint has been the lack of a goal. So that’s what I’m giving you now!

Play the updated version of Ninjural Selection!

Now there is a randomly generated “goal” invader, which you must try to get the actual invaders to look like. The game keeps track of the current “best” invader, the one that most closely matches the goal, and shows you how close it matches (for example, 75%) and highlights it with a spotlight.

There’s not much strategy – just find the best invader, pound eggs out of it in the hopes of mutating something even better, and kill the others to make room for them.

With the current invader size (8×8) it takes a long time to actually reach 100% of the goal. And right now, nothing happens when you reach it, other than a congratulatory message. But my plan is to have multiple randomly generated levels, where the invaders start small and get bigger with each level you complete.

The game is still far from done! We’ll see if this goal can be made fun. It would certainly help if the environment was laid out better, and if it were easier to kill invaders that you choose and make eggs for the invaders you choose. I’ll probably have to adjust the way shooting works and how the invaders separate from each other, among other things…

Let me know if you have any ideas. Suggestions are welcome! 😀

Just a quick note to say that SineRider has just released a chiptune album that includes the music for my LD24 game Ninjural Selection!

You can get it here: Bleepy Bloopy EP – Ninjural Selection

Enjoy!

I added a quick debug feature to the post-competition version of Ninjural Selection – now you can edit the level as you play!

Hold down the space bar and a cursor will appear – you can drag to draw and erase tiles.

I added this in so I can experiment with level layout quickly, and hopefully figure out what sort of arrangement works best for this gameplay. It will be tricky – as I’ve written about here – but hopefully it will be possible.

Eventually I’d like to get some procedural level generation going!

Oh, and if you haven’t rated the game yet, you can do so here! 😉

This time I’m making a game with Pat Kemp (my collaborator on The Love Letter) and newcomer Jim Burner. We’ve also got Teo Acosta, the composer for The Love Letter, making the music.

My Flixel skills are a bit rusty, so we’re off to a slow start, but I just finished the obligatory prototype-with-colored-boxes phase:

Stay tuned.

I replaced all the colored boxes with final art, thanks to my artistically inclined collaborators. The game is feeling a lot more fun and gets our idea across to some extent, but there’s still a ton of stuff to add.

Fortunately, I’ll have a lot of time tomorrow to work on this. I’m hoping to add multiple enemy types, player upgrades, health, scoring, particle effects, a scrolling background, sound effects, a title screen, a lose screen, a win screen, a tutorial…

With a few hours left until the 72-hour jam deadline, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Most notably, there are six different types of enemies, each colored to stand out in its own delicious way. Right now they all behave exactly the same, but I’ll be implementing different enemy behaviors next.

Back to work!

Well, the game is online now. Here, try it.

I managed to add different enemy behaviors, stars in the background, and a title screen and game over screen (thanks to Jim Burner). Pat Kemp added sounds, and we put Teo Acosta’s music in the game too.

Still, there’s a lot missing. The player doesn’t level up, the numbers are not tuned at all, and there is no communication about what happened when you lose or finish the game. I expect we’ll continue to add these things in a post-competition version of the game…

For now, time to rest.

I already decided I wasn’t going to do Ludum Dare this weekend.  I’m way too busy trying to finish up Space Lord, and more incontrovertibly I will be entertaining visiting relatives all weekend, so there’s obviously no way I can compete.

So yeah. Definitely not doing LD26. Yep.

…

Gah! That theme! It has my heart clutched tight within its iron fist.

If it were any other theme I would realize that I have no hope of accomplishing anything in the realm of game development this weekend. But now I have hope. False hope. Treacherous false hope!

Somehow I believe that I could come up with something really simple and quick to make.

Yeah right.

You know, Canabalt was made for the theme of “Bare Minimum“. I remember the idea I had for that theme, an audio-only shooter. I still haven’t got around to making it.

No, I’m not going to try making that idea this weekend.

…

Hmm, minimalism…

Searching for minimalism in Google images brings up some common themes. I see a lot of monochrome black and white, a lot of stark geometric shapes, a lot of open space, whether that is actual architectural space or white space in a graphic design sense. Basically a white open space with a few things in it.

It’s a similar scene on deviantART, though with a bit more color.

As you may notice from some of my own work, this is a style that I am very comfortable with.

So, games…

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep there were two ideas sticking in my head for this “minimalism” theme.

One is an idea I’ve been musing over for the last couple weeks, a game about my struggle to work on my game projects in the evenings and weekends outside of my full-time job, while balancing my sleep and energy and all that. I had already been thinking about how to make that as minimal as possible, both so I can actually finish the project in a reasonable amount of time, and also so people can easily understand what’s going on when they play. However, it didn’t seem minimal enough, so last night I spent a lot of time visualizing the game as an abstract geometric arrangement of circles and rectangles and such. But I’m not sure I really want to make it that abstract – because I want you to feel like a person when you’re playing it, and not just any person, but a person like me.

The other was a more formal exploration of the “minimalism” theme, thinking about what the most minimal game could be. FarmVille is an example of a very minimal game. In terms of systems, all you do is invest some resources into an asset, and then after some amount of time, you can liquidate that asset in exchange for more resources than you originally put in. And you can have a portfolio of a bunch of assets going at one time. So why not build a game around that? Except sped up really fast, instead of stretched out over hours and days.

Keeping with the “minimalism” theme, everything could be very simply depicted, with even your resources represented by a pile of pixels on the screen instead of a number. But what if you went further, where your goal in the game is actually to simplify and reduce clutter toward the aim of minimalism? Maybe your resource is actually empty screen space, blank pixels, and the screen starts out almost full. But you can invest screen space into assets that temporarily take up space until their time is up and they erase an even wider area of pixels than they initially displaced?

That sounds really boring. But then again, so does FarmVille.

In any case, it’s an interesting start, and I really like the way it incorporates the theme in multiple ways at once. The idea of empty space as a resource is intriguing to me.

Maybe if the empty space is also a venue for another aspect of gameplay, like an action game where you move around and need open space in order to do well…

But there are a lot of ways to take this theme beyond the two ideas my mind was obsessing over last night.

For one, I think it would be great to try taking a common game genre and distill it to its essence, kind of like what Sophie Houlden did with The Linear RPG. I am still really inspired by that game. And personally, I’m looking forward to seeing some interesting takes on a minimal RTS this weekend, as strategy games have always been close to my heart. The first game I really got into was Civilization II, and almost all of my early game ideas as a kid were strategy game ideas. Of course, I’ve never made a strategy game because they’re so much work! But I have a few ideas for minimal strategy games and I would really enjoy the chance to make an entire RTS in a single weekend. Could I do for the RTS genre what Divekick does for the fighting game genre? That would be awesome.

Another approach would be to make a game within the constraints of a very limited hardware platform, like the TI-83 Plus graphing calculator. As you may or may not know, the TI-83 Plus was where I really got my start in terms of game development. I made a lot of games. And so, how about a game with a 96×64 monochrome display, and no sound? Similar constraints produced the gem that was the original Triple Town – maybe I can do something similarly brilliant here. At the very least, it could be a fun nostalgia trip for me to revisit my game development roots.

Or how about making a physics game with very simple rules, but with a lot of nuance because of physical interactions between objects, like Particles? I’ve got a few ideas to explore there. The only thing is I don’t have a physics engine all ready to go at the moment, and while it probably wouldn’t be hard to learn to use an existing one or reuse some of my old code, I’m a bit wary of going that route. Lessons learned.

I’ve also been thinking about a game that tells a story in as minimal a way as possible. I read this talk by the creator of Amnesia yesterday, and found it very inspiring. I have an idea I’d like to explore along these lines, and it may be simple enough to qualify for “minimalism”.

So, there we have six different directions to take the “minimalism” theme. I’m sure there are many others. Now it’s time for a break! I want to do this so badly, but I still don’t see it actually happening this weekend. Well, I’ll be there in the back of my mind, searching ceaselessly for a crack in my schedule like water in a wooden box. We’ll see if anything seeps through…

Did you know that Canabalt was originally made for the theme of “Bare Minimum” at the Experimental Gameplay Project? Okay, yeah, I said that already.

But I think it could be a good angle to approach the theme of “minimalism”, by thinking about the bare minimum that you can scrape by with in developing your game [wow, three prepositions in a row!].

What’s the bare minimum in terms of input? That would be one button, right?

How about in terms of output? Could you make a game with only sound and no graphics? Or how about using as few pixels as possible, to maximize data-ink ratio? Could you represent a 3D space with only a few moving dots? Or lines?

Or could you use as few rules as possible? Could you keep your game systems to a bare minimum?

Maybe I’ll just make my game as quickly as I can.

As stated earlier, I did not have time to make a game this weekend. But of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the theme, and actually the last idea I posted about seemed to get quite a bit of interest, for some reason.

And now, I finally have a bit of freedom, before I go to sleep and then go to work tomorrow, and so it’s entirely possible that I could make something in this last hour or two in time for the jam, as long as it’s… minimal.

Or maybe I should just go to sleep. I am very tired… 😉

As predicted, I didn’t end up making a game for Ludum Dare this past weekend.

But I just realized that one of my old ideas actually fits the theme perfectly. It’s called Freetrace. Basically a game where you erase drawings.

So maybe I’ll make it. I just contacted some of my artist friends about it. It would be cool to use some drawings like these:

I was scrambling to come up with a suitably minimal idea to make tonight, so I could have a game out for April and keep to my #onegameamonth challenge.

After playing Bladeless and Potato Dungeon, I realized how much I liked the idea of a minimal swordfighting game, and spent most of my evening trying to figure out how I could do that without resorting to ragdoll physics.

I didn’t come up with anything, so I ended up thinking about the simplest possible game design I could imagine, where all you do is press a button at the right time to win, and otherwise you’d lose. It could be a sort of meditation game, where you just have to sit there attentively and wait for the signal to press the button. If you succeed, you move on to the next level. The time before the signal appears is random, but the maximum time keeps increasing with every level, so you have to be more and more patient to progress further.

I remembered that the word “ninja” means “one who waits”, and I thought it could be fun to theme this as a ninja game, where you have to wait for a long time for the right moment to strike.  But I was having trouble thinking of how this would actually look on the screen, especially if I was going to make this happen tonight.

Of course, then I realized this could simply be a samurai dueling game like Bladeless, where you stand facing your opponent, and you must press the button to draw your sword immediately after your opponent does. Or maybe it would make a bit more sense as a cowboy duel, but I like swords better. Still, it would have to be samurai, as no self-respecting ninja would stand around in the open, waiting to strike second.

So I tried drawing a person holding a sword.

…

Okay, yeah. This isn’t going to happen. I give up. I’m way too tired, I feel terrible, and there is no creativity left in my body.

So much for one game a month.

Space Lord is now on Kongregate! Finally! 😛

I’ll be curious to see what people think of it. 😉 Kongregate can be a tough audience to please.

Last time I mentioned that I was working on a major new feature for Space Lord. Well, now it’s time for the big reveal!

*drumroll*

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you… Space Hero!

I thought it would be cool to be able to play as the hero ship, against all the shmup levels that people design by playing Space Lord. So now you can! When you beat Space Lord, you can submit your score to the Hall of Fame, and then anyone can click on it to play against it as Space Hero! Cool, huh?

Here, try it!

Space Lord is now on Newgrounds!

I haven’t added any Newgrounds medals for the game, since it hasn’t been doing too well on Kongregate…

We’ll see how the players on Newgrounds like it – I’m hopeful that it will do a bit better than it did on Kongregate. Doesn’t look like Space Lord is going to get any front page features, in any case. 😛

Well, here – want to check it out?

Now that Space Lord has made its little splash on the internet (featured on the Newgrounds front page, yay!) I figured it was time to put Space Hero out into the world.

Space Hero is what happens when you take a game about being the villain, and then make it about being the hero again. 😉 In other words, people design levels by playing Space Lord, submit them to the Hall of Fame, and then you can test out the levels they’ve designed by playing Space Hero. I won’t pretend this is the best shmup game ever made – it’s mostly just a fun little experiment.

And now it’s on deviantART.

And on Kongregate.

And on Newgrounds.

I wonder how it will do!

While we wait for the game to emerge from its judgment period on the portals, you might enjoy reading this detailed blog post I wrote to announce the release of Space Lord.

Good luck to everyone participating in 7dRTS, by the way! I wish I could have joined you. 😀 Looking forward to playing all the games you come up with!