One. it is the first day (that I am aware of) in which an application with cheesy ascii graphics have appeared on the iPodTouch.
Which brings us to: Two, iPodTouch JetLag (a.k.a. JetLag 2008) is making good progress, and will basically be a clone of JetLag 2003 (minus one or two lucky charms).
Three. The controls for JL2k8 shall be the accelerometer to change direction, and touches will use bombs. I have the direction part working. I still need to implement lucky charms.
For a second time and a second handheld platform(former platform was Cybiko, for those interested), I’m once again stealing a game idea from John Hattan. The original game is called Black Box Chess, where the goal is to guess what chess pieces go where on a chess board, with the ability to get hints from selecting empty square and seeing how many of the pieces on the board “threaten” that square.
Also, if you are a iconbuffeter or a person who has ever gone to molotov.nu, you will recognize the icons I have taken from those sources (the chessboards came from molotov.nu).
JetLag on the iPhone (at least, on the iPhone simulator and written in Objective-C).
This brings the number of languages in which JetLag has been written to 8(I think – BASIC, Pascal, Assembly, C++, C#, Scratch, and Objective-C).
As of today, I am the owner of a mac mini. I am posting this to you from it.
I’m still coming to terms with the close button being on the “wrong” side of the window, but overall it has been a positive experience so far.
At the moment I am downloading the iPhone SDK, which is much the entire point of my foray into mac-ness.
Wish me luck.
HamQuest is getting slowly better. I’ve begun working on the save/load mechanism and am mainly concerned with the “save” aspect at the moment. I decided on an xml save format. Yes, this makes the game incredibly easy to hack. No, I don’t really care. You’re playing the game, so go ahead and cheat if you want.
I must admit that I’ve had to fight myself to keep feature creep under control on this game. I let traps and teleportation portals sneak in because they were relatively easy, but I’m still fighting myself on a number of additions, like making poison traps and antidote potions, trap disarming, invisible monsters, ranged weapons, and so on.
I am about to get my mac mini (it’ll be here tomorrow), so likely hamquest will have to take a back seat to learning iphone/ipod development, unless of course I decide to port hamquest to the iphone. one never knows.
I need help playtesting and balancing HamQuest.
You can find details at:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=504447
It has been some time now since I have updated. Usually, this means one of two things. One, I might be too busy to do any game development. Two, I might be busy doing a lot of game development, but I might not be in the “look, I drew a new pixel in the corner” sort of posting mood. It has been mostly the former, with a little bit of the latter.
I attempted once more to create one of the “big three” games that I’ve always wanted to make. This time it was Dungeon Delver, and I finally have gotten it to a point where it looks like it might actually get finished, so I figured I’d share a screen shot with you.
The name has been modified slightly. The title, instead of simply being “Dungeon Delver”, now has a tag like “Hamquest”, so given because my wife, upon first seeing my game, noticed the heavy density of ham icons (food), and suggested calling the game “I like ham”. I was able to compromise to “Hamquest”, and so there it is.
Dungeon Delver – Hamquest (Chapter One of the Hamseeker Saga) is a rogue-alike where the player explores a maze of rooms and passageways, fighting monsters and picking up treasures and other items. The combat system and the creatures are based in large part on the Games Workshop boardgame Heroquest.
The game is actually turn-based, and not “real-time”. The player moves, and then monsters move (there are mechanisms that allow for faster and slower movement of monsters).
I decided to minimize controls, and almost everything is done by simply using the arrow keys. Moving into an item picks it up. Moving into a door unlocks it (with the right key, of courses). Moving into a monster attacks it. Weapons and armor automatically are equipped. The only part that the player needs to control regarding equipment is whether to regard defense higher or lower than attack strength (a two handed sword, which is the best weapon in the game, cannot be used at the same time as a shield, for instance).
My wife suggested the diablo-esque light radius thing, which you can see in the screen shot. This is my first pass at it, just to see if I liked it or not. As it turns out, I like it and I’m going to keep it, but I may extend it so that torches and lanterns can modify the radius.
I added traps today into the item system. It was relatively easy to do so. All of the features are starting to mature. Once they finally do, I’ll be 90% done, and ready to start on the second 90$, where the goal is to achieve some sort of game balance regarding the strength and frequency of items and monsters.
In any case, I am quite happy to have come as far as I have with this one.
