Holiday Cheer

Holy crap lots to talk about!

Site Redesign

As you can see, the site has undergone a redesign. I'm pretty happy with the new color scheme. If you have any suggestions on how I can improve it, feel free to drop them in the comments.

New Jumper

New Jumper! The title isn't final yet. The fourth game in the Jumper series will be played in your browser with the Flash Player.


Development is progressing smoothly. I'm currently writing myself an editor (also in Flash) for the game, but going a bit beyond the call of duty and making it more of a general-purpose editor. I'd like to make something I can reuse between projects. If what I come up with is polished enough, I might even release it for others to use for their projects.

FlashPunk

New Jumper is being programmed using Chevy Ray's FlashPunk engine. I'm helping him bug-test and offering suggestions as I work. The engine seems to be nearing completion, so hopefully that will see a public release soon and everyone can try it out! Trust me, it's really awesome!

Praise!

It's the time of year for top 10 lists and "best-of" lists and other miscellaneous lists! I've been fortunate this year: MoneySeize and RunMan have both made it onto a list each, with the latter even making it onto two.

Edmund McMillan: MoneySeize 5th best Flash game of 2009

Gamasutra: RunMan 5th best indie game of 2009

Play This Thing!: RunMan 4th best indie of the year

In Retrospect

I'm really blown away by the amount of exposure I've been getting this year! The friendliness of the indie community never ceases to amaze me.

I never expected people to flat-out volunteer their help (and contacts) with marketing and selling one of my games, but while working on MoneySeize I had Edmund McMillan approach me and offer to help me sell a Flash game. I really cannot thank him enough for this, and I've heard tell of him coaching a few other indies through the process as well. Really man, you're the best and I hope Super Meat Boy makes you filthy rich.

Later, I participated in Ludum Dare 15 and that was just a blast. I ended up winning second place with Broken Cave Robot, which was very cool.

And then finally: RunMan! Tom and I had been working on this beast for a loooooong time. I'm actually kind of shocked that we finished it at all. But the enthusiasm and support we've gotten from the indie community has been amazing and I'm super happy to see so many people enjoying it. For the curious, our download counter is sitting just below 35,000. We've also entered it in next year's IGF, so wish us luck!

Well, that's it! Merry Christmas everyone!

Broken Cave Map

click to view full map
Spoilers! Forum-member Maple has mapped out the entire cave of Broken Cave Robot down to the pixel. The map includes enemy, gem and power-up locations. He even shows you where and how the cave loops - quite an accomplishment.

Although... I strongly suspect some decompiling of the EXE was involved. And by "I strongly suspect," I mean "I'm absolutely certain." On the map, Maple lists the names I gave each room which are never actually displayed in-game, just used to identify rooms within the source. Really though, it's cool that someone went to the effort to map it all out once and for all, even if they did cheat a bit to do so.

Oh Yeah, And!

Oh yeah and in other news, Broken Cave Robot won 2nd place overall in Ludum Dare 15! It also got the highest average rating in the "fun" category, which I'm really pumped about. At the LD site you can view the results by overall top 10, or by category. Congrats are also in order for my friends Chevy Ray (1st place overall) and Chuchino (3rd overall)!

In other other news, I just set up a page on my site where you can grab all the game soundtracks I've released. Matt Makes Music. Enjoy!

Broken Cave Robot

Wow... I'm still shaking from the excitement of that final crunch. I worked on the game pretty much all day today only breaking for necessary bodily functions. Got it submitted less than one minute before the deadline. And I'm really pleased with how it came out! Yesterday I hated it, but today everything seemed to click together like a jigsaw puzzle.

And I had a BLAST making the music. I recorded and edited it all in Audacity. I performed it on a little quarter-size Denver acoustic guitar I bought a couple weeks ago for a camping trip ($100 CAD). I also used a Bluesband harmonica (just a cheap little thing). As for the microphone... it's just a crappy $40 Logitech thing from Future Shop I bought for voicechat in online games. I uploaded the soundtrack as a separate ZIP file as well, for anyone who's interested.

Overall I'm happy with all the weird little ideas I got to try out in this game. The first two days consisted of me dumping every idea I had into the game - today was me sewing it all together.

You can download the game on my games page.