GMC Jam #6

Just informing everyone that the GMC Jam #6 started today and that I won't be entering it this time around.

This jam's theme is tranquility, it is not a terrible theme, but it doesn't inspire me to create a game about it. On the other hand, this jam introduced a constraint on submitted games. This jam's constraint was to "include one or more achievements to unlock within your game, separate from the main goal or objective."

I find this constraint to be hilarious, you can imagine games with pointless side quests or random achievements for the weirdest of things. I will be keeping an eye on this jam just to see what other ways this constraint can be used.

Aside from the theme, I am also stressed with aspects of my life. This is the main reason why I do not want to do this jam and why I have not updated this blog in a fortnight.

Information about the GMC Jam #6 can be found here.

Postmortem: Spencer Street

Spencer Street was made in October 2011 for the Game Maker Community Jam #4. It was made in 72 hours. I consider this game to be the first real lesson in game creation.

This game was inspired by one of entries from the previous jam, which was created by CoolGamrSms. This game came 2nd in the jam and featured high score arcade based game play. I designed Spencer Street to feature a similar game play.

The objective of the game is to kill commuters by making them run onto the train tracks (then hit by a train) anyway you can. Some of the methods are completely random, flooded drains, smelly people and turd are just a few examples. Your score is dependent on how many people your able to kill.

The game played well. It was fun, but no great. The graphics were alright. The idea did turned some people off from playing it. While others weren't able to read the instructions. This leads to a major lesson that came from this game; assume that everyone is an idiot. The bottom line is that the game was very 'meh', might be seen to be good to some people, but certainly not great.

Spencer Street came last (likely tied with another 20 games) out of 59 games and can be downloaded here.

Forever incomplete: Geometry 2

Geometry 2 was to be the natural successor to Geometry. I started development in January 2012, but within a month I scrapped the project.

I wanted Geometry 2 to take the good parts of the original and expand upon them. One major feature I wanted to include was a visual representation of the area that each player controlled. This is shown above, however the game never got past this point because it was scrapped. The reason being that the visual effect was just too much for some people.

The project was ultimately a failure, but on the other hand it is a good example of controlled exploration of game design and development. I did learn a lot from this project, it was the first time that I created an interactive mini map, a pie graph and other features. Even in light of this failure, I still would like to create a complete game that builds on Geometry but it will take a different name.

Zero hour games

For me, last night was the end of daylight savings. It also happens to be one of my favourite nights of the year, simply because you get another hour of sleep. However it also lets you do something in zero hours, because you can spend a hour doing something between 2am and 3am before the clocks are turned back a hour.

Naturally, I made a small but fun puzzle game in zero hours. The itself gave you a string which was encrypted with an key. The purpose of the game was to guess the key, so that the string could be recreated.

The encryption was done using XOR logic. The interesting thing about the XOR function is that:

orginalMessage XOR key = encryptedMessage
encryptedMessage XOR key = orginalMessage

This could make for an interesting puzzle that could be used in many games. Unfortunately, XOR logic is not really common knowledge.