Sorry for the long silence! I’ve had a handful of things on my plate, and haven’t actually been keeping you all posted on it. So, to catch up:
My Ludum Dare 24 game, Dragoncore Overdrive – an arcade-style game that’s sort of a spiritual kin to Dragondot.
My latest published game, Star Glaive – a huge, highly-polished expansion on my Stargrazing concept.
And lastly, something different: LegendGear, a Minecraft mod I’ve been working on.
Just wrapped up another exciting and exhausting Ludum Dare, and I’m pretty satisfied with the result. I think my pixeling skills are improving a little. The theme was “Tiny World”, and from there I went with a notion inspired by The Little Prince and Minecraft, expressed in 8×8 pixel blocks. Check it out!
A meditation on the physics of barrel cannons and Aristotle (as I recall, he was under the impression that things going sufficiently fast were unaffected by gravity. Not too far off from Sonic the hedgehog, for that matter, who has a tendency to run along flat ceilings). Disjoint Physics. In practice, it might be more effective to implement this sort of behavior with durations, rather than piecewise handling of velocity, but it’s an interesting effect either way.
I’ve been sick, hence the lack of prototype last week – I was pretty much sleeping and trying to recuperate all week, and still haven’t fully recovered. Sorry about that. Anyway, didn’t have a whole lot of ideas for this week’s prototype, but this one mechanism was rattling around in my head. I think it wants to be a game, but I honestly have no idea what to do with it. Maybe it would be happier with a mouse, or touchscreen? Feel free to offer any ideas in the comments. Circle Zap.
I started the evening with absolutely no idea what I was going to make. Now I still have no idea, but I also have an intriguing game mechanism that kinda hurts my brain. Push/Pull.
This week’s Friday Prototype turned out mostly not at all like what I expected it to be, but instead became something far trippier. Still, an interesting aesthetic effect, and I may make proper use of it at some point.
In other news, I contributed a few things to Ben Lehman’s Hourly Game Day project. I didn’t manage the full hourly pace, but it was certainly an interesting exercise.
Lastly, Andreas Illiger has credited Wavespark as an inspiration for his game Tiny Wings, which was pretty cool of him. 
(Also, I realized that I never linked to my Ludum Dare 22 game, Embers, which managed to rank 11th (out of 717) in the new Mood category.)
For the first of my weekly prototype projects, I’m trying out a mechanic that draws inspiration from Kingdom Hearts, Minicraft, and Skyward Sword. Basically, there’s an energy meter that regulates your attack combo. When it empties, you perform a more powerful attack, but then can’t attack for a little bit. Large enemies require the stronger attack to be finished off, though they still take damage from the weaker attacks. I’ve found that the feel of the system changes significantly when tweaking the timing parameters for the energy meter – how quickly it refills, how long it takes after an attack before starting to fill again, and how big a chunk of it each attack takes. Depending on the parameters, it can feel like a “traditional” combo system (with the result that the energy meter feels largely superfluous), or on the other end something more akin to a rhythm game. Try it out for yourself.
The updated and improved Flash version of Dragondot is now up on Newgrounds and Kongregate, and on our sponsor site Age of Games which has the exclusive Endless Survival mode! Enjoy!
So, a lot’s been keeping me busy lately – getting back into school, my computer croaking, Ludum Dare 21 (two days after my computer croaking), and getting some of my top games ported to Flash. The results of all of this:
