initials

LD18

Picking Up Chicks is Hard When Your Car is a BMX

This was my first entry into a Ludum dare and I’ve got to say I had a blast, and most of all I learned a lot.

It started with a Friday afternoon pixel sketch of a guy on a BMX. And with that I went full steam ahead and created a game with a wry sense of humour. The game has generally been panned as not being fun, and I have to agree. It’s hard to take creative criticism seriously, even harder when it comes from 4chan, but the fans will be your harshest critics, so you should listen when they speak.

Hit the jump for the specifics and nitty gritty of the game.

To make this game I went with Flixel and FlashDevelop. Firstly, I’m a huge Canabalt and Gravity Hook fan, so it made sense to use what they use. I’m still pretty astounded that Flash gives away their whole deal for free! You can make Flash games without paying Adobe a cent. I chose to take advantage of this.

I used Photoshop CS5 at work to make some of the pixel art, and they have made some great improvements if you are a pixel artist. If you zoom in the pixels are shown with grid lines automatically. I thought that was a great move by Adobe.

I coded using Actionscript, and I highly recommend the book Flash Game University by Gary Rosenweig if you’ve never coded games in Actionscript before. Or if you are a pro, dive right in, it’s not hard at all, and Flixel has made it super easy.

High scores and ads are by MochiMedia. These weren’t as easy to implement using FlashDevelop as it was when I did earlier games using Flash CS3. But I got them working. I am thinking of doing a tutorial for getting them working, but I want to try out getting Social elements of Mochi’s API first. If anyone really wants these tutorials let me know.

And now the game!

Picking Up Chicks is Hard When Your Car is a BMX

I tried to troll 4chan with my own advertising campaign but no one took the bait.

And yes, I did earn a dollar! $2.04 so far, making a grand total of $55.05 over my game making career at Mochi.

LD20

Their Finest Space Pixel

I took a break from iPhone development to release a game for Ludum Dare is called Their Finest Space Pixel.

It’s a straight up shmup. I didn’t have the time to integrate Catmull-Rom waypoint movement for the enemies, but that is in my iPhone game. If you are interested in seeing this as an iPhone game, please contact me.

Play the game here!

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LD26

Soul Harvester: The Haunting

paladin harvester corsair vampire_3x

Soul Harvester: The Haunting has been a long time coming. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’ve had the animations sitting around for quite a while, never knowing how to piece them together.

I used Phaser, which is a new HTML5 framework based on Flixel. It was super easy to get running. In 24 hours I had my game.

I’m using a MySQL database to keep track of high scores, and total souls harvested.

See the entry page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2840

Play the game here:  http://initialsgames.com/soul/index.php?f=haunting.js&d=haunting