I’ve always had a passion for game design, and always had a problem getting personal projects finished. This is an endeavor largely inspired by a similar undertaking by Jonathan Coulton – once a week, no exceptions, make something and post it.
I’ve always had a passion for game design, and always had a problem getting personal projects finished. This is an endeavor largely inspired by a similar undertaking by Jonathan Coulton – once a week, no exceptions, make something and post it.
Hey, I’m an engineer at Yelp, and I’m browsing the web for good engineers. I’m really impressed by your ability to churn out a playable game each week.
Are you by any chance in the market for jobs in the Bay Area?
Hey Nathan,
I’m a composer from Toronto, Canada. I spent a day or two going through your 24 games. Very cool. add special instruction, Much Worse, and One to Tango were personal favorites of mine.
I was wondering: could I contribute music to an upcoming game? The games I’ve written for in the past were never completed and I wanted to have my music on a finished game. Here’s my demo-reel: http://soundcloud.com/john-axon/sets/demo-reel. It’s not quite Atari, but it still sounds pretty good. Send me an email and maybe we can come up with something.
Thanks for entertaining me and making me think every Sunday!
Peace,
-John
Love the concept, love the games! And it’s beyond impressive that you actually crank one of these out every week.
It doesn’t appear that your app launcher deals with Chrome, though. It claims I have no Java (I do – other Processing apps work fine), and I have to use IE.
Hey man, I’m really impressed with your games. If you ever plan go commercial I can help with illustration/design part.
Could you please contact me?
Cheers,
Ron.
I deeply respect and enjoy what you’re doing here. Please, keep up the great work!
Hi,
I’ve known you through the tiny wings articles and I just read that you wanted to go commercial.
I’m the creator of Talking Carl and iPhone that sold quite well in 2010 and a few other games albeit less popular. I’m mostly a designer and I rely on independent programmer for the code.
I guess we could team up with great success if we agree on a gameplay to push forward.
Let me know what you think,
best regards,
yann.
Hi,
I just wanted to say, “Thanks!” … for sharing your code … as well as the games themselves. Playing around with the code in Processing is a great learning experience. I’m curious about where you learned some of the techniques that you use (I’m thinking of something as simple as the colorful checkpoint bars, reminiscent of classic arcade games for me, in wavespark at the moment, but there are any number of little things like that). Are you just very good at thinking up how to do things!? Any good resources (books or other websites) that you can recommend? Apologies if you have answered this elsewhere …
Joel
You’re very welcome! I’m delighted to hear that you’re learning by tinkering with my code (and a little embarrassed about the quality of it; don’t look to it as examples of good coding practices!) I got my start in game programming by tinkering with the classic GORILLA.BAS QBasic game.
A lot of the techniques I use for effects (like the Wavespark checkpoints, indeed inspired by classic arcade games) are influenced by my own gaming background. I have a fondness for particle effects, and I tend to do “adding shiny” as a way of staying motivated and having fun when a game gets bogged down in technical drudgery. Typically, I go about it by envisioning what I want it to look like, then figuring out how to represent it with code, though there’s a fair amount of serendipity involved as well. Snake Oil is a good example of a game with very deliberately designed effects, while Drawn Inward was much more of a tinker-until-it’s-pretty game.
I can’t really recommend any specific resources, off the top of my head. Just experiment, tinker, and try to reverse-engineer any particularly cool trick you see in order to discover if you can replicate it. Even if you can’t, maybe you’ll make something cool-looking anyway!