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!

Blog Broken!

Yes, the blog is completely broken right now, as I shift over to a new site design. It should be back (and better than ever!) sometime tonight or tomorrow, thanks for your patience.

I'm Back!

I'm sure some of you have noticed that I haven't been very productive on the game development front lately. I've been taking a bit of a break from serious game development for a while, exploring other media and dealing with school.

It's Christmas break now and I have time to get serious about a game project. I'm also planning on participating in Ludum Dare 16, which is taking place December 11-13. Last time I did a Ludum Dare, Broken Cave Robot was the result. So if all goes well, I'll release two new games within the next little while. I'm also working on a redesign of my site, which should be finished sometime soon as well. Lots of progress ahead!

Meanwhile, Raocow has started a Let's Play of RunMan: Race Around the World! He previously did an LP of An Untitled Story and it was a blast to watch.

Elsewhere in the indie world, exciting things are happening! Shaltif's Sill, a C++ 2D game engine, is inches away from an alpha release. And Chevy Ray's FlashPunk engine is a Flash raster-game engine which is also close to a first release. Oh, and Unity is free now for indies (!!!).

PSR (Project Status Report)

Whoa, it's been five days since my last post already? Well, I've been hard at work on several projects the whole time. I'm dedicating around 6-9 hours a day to game development lately! (Woo unemployment!)

To someone following my projects, it may seem like I have a lot going on right now, but I'm actually very focused on two things at the moment. My first Flash platformer is my primary concern, and RunMan: Race Around the World is coming in at second place. This might be confusing to some, seeing as I just teased Jumper 3D in my last post. It gets even more bewildering when I reveal that my first Flash platformer is not, in fact, Islands.

Here's the skinny on Jumper 3D: It does exist, but it is in a very early stage of development and I am not working on it yet. It is a collaboration with my friend Chevy Ray, and he is handling the early programming while I will be jumping in to do design work later. We're just experimenting with the third dimension and exploring the possibilities for Jumper-style gameplay right now. Hopefully it will turn into a full-size game (and hopefully one that is quite fun to play as well)!

Meanwhile, Islands is on hold for various reasons. Mostly because I need to finish a game soon. Islands is a bit too ambitious to finish quickly and I must release a Flash game this month to pay the bills. So Islands is completely off my plate for now - sorry I jumped the gun with teasing it only to take it away, but these things happen.

Also meanwhile, Runman: Race Around the World is slowly nearing the finish line. I don't have much else to say here except that yes, we are still working on it and yes, it rocks.

And finally, that brings us to my mystery Flash platformer. I don't want to reveal much, because a lot of it may change. All I will say is that it isn't a Jumper game and that I hope to have it done by the end of May.

Whew. The tangled webs we weave...

Birthday Randomness

It's my birthday! I am now officially allowed to gamble in Vegas, though I've been of age here in Alberta for three years already. Gotta say... 21 feels suspiciously similar to 20.

Anyways, I've just got a bunch of random things to talk about...

Really Old Games

Some people thought I'd taken these games off my site after the redesign. They may be embarrassingly bad, but I wouldn't be able to stomach just throwing them out like that. Here's download links for all of my pre-The Encryption games. Note that before clicking any of the below links, it is recommended you remove any expectations you may have - I made all these games before my 16th birthday.

• Pixel Racer


• Flashing Arrows


• Soccer Golf


• Hold Off


• Super Stickman Escape


• Stickman Escape


• Mission 99


• Paper Runner 2


• Paper Runner DX

Insanity

MorEvilREIKEN, a member at the MMGF forum, actually beat Insanity mode in An Untitled Story with 100% completion. For the uninitiated, Insanity mode is the exact same as Masterful mode, except everything kills you in one hit. To demonstrate just how much of an accomplishment this is, he even posted a video of his crazy skillz on Facebook (with a funny choice of music).

Honestly, I added Insanity mode as a sort of unreachable holy grail in the game - a challenge so hard no one could possibly beat it. Well, I guess I'll just have to try harder next time.

TIGSource Cockpit Compo

TIGSource is holding another of their famous game dev competitions. I've meant to prepare an entry for each and every TIGS compo, and this one is no different! I'm working on a really simple little time-waster (in Game Maker), which I will hopefully finish by the end of the weekend.

Regardless of whether this weekend proves productive for me, the deadline is March 29th. Hopefully I can get my act together by then at the very least.

Monkeys and Bananas

I've received some emails asking what my next project is/will be, so I thought I'd explain the situation.

I just finished up An Untitled Story v1.1x, which was a really small, fast project.  I'd like to do more of those (small, fast projects).  Since school is interrupting my game development so often lately, I'm finding it harder to commit to large games and I've decided to keep things simple.  That's not to say I don't have plans for big projects.  I just don't have to ability to follow through with those plans right now.

Here's a couple things I'm planning to put together sometime soon:

• A Hold Off Black update (fix the font and some other bugs), and then releasing Hold Off Black to major portals such as Kongregate.
• A quick Flash version of Jumper.  The game will likely be very sparse in features - similar to the original Jumper game.  In fact, it may just be a remake of the original Jumper with new level designs, visuals and physics.
• Finish redesigning my site (the frontpage is done, but the games page is still stuck in the past).

As well, I have a slightly larger (but still pretty small in a sense), super-secret project I'm going to slowly work on.  Some hints as to what it is?  Well, the engine I develop for the Jumper Flash game will be partially reused with this new game.  I also hinted at some of my plans for this new project in my previous post.