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The Three Game Challenge – Part 3 – The Family Jewels

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Well this is it! I have completed the third game in my three game prototype challenge. (first game, second game)

With this one I wanted to try my hand at a very popular game genre at the moment, match-three. Because this is a rather simple style of game I thought it would be really easy and fast to make. Wrong. I spent hours without touching a keyboard trying to come up with some novel twist on the genre.

I toyed around with a gem dropping mechanic but that didn’t work so well, then I thought about how someone interacts with match-three games on mobile, by dragging the icons around. So I decided to base my game play on dragging gems around until they make a match.

I originally wanted a “mindless” match-three game like Montezuma, one where you play it as fast as you can without thinking too much about the moves. As I started developing the game play for this one however it seemed to fit a puzzle like game better so that’s what I ended up with.

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Anyways give it a go and let me know what you think:

Play The Family Jewels

This one took a little less time at the others at 31hours over 7 days, as per the other two I recorded my time spent:

17th April
11:00 – 12:00
15:00-18:00

20th April
10:00-12:00

21st April
13:00-17:00

22nd April
11:00-13:00
14:00-16:00
20:00-21:00

23rd April
11:00-16:00

24th April
11:00-16:00
18:00-21:00

25th April
11:00-12:00

Well that’s the end of my challenge! Im surprised I managed to do it. A little over a week per game seems like hardly any time at all but having that time restriction really is good as it helps to limit your scope, preventing the game from ballooning out into something that could otherwise have taken months and still not have been any fun to play.

As for the tools I used. I used Richard Lord’s excellent Ash Game Framework to develop them all alongside Starling with Feathers on top of Flash for the rendering. For rapidly prototyping games they have been excellent. Now im more familiar with Ash I may write a post or two about how to go about structuring certain parts of a game in an enitity-component like manner.

But for the next week or so I need to finish my packing before my mammoth trip to Central and South America.

 

The Three Game Challenge – Part 1 – Latesha’s Crib

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Well I have just finished off the first of my three prototype games challenge (part two, part three) that I set myself last week.

For this one I started off with an idea that I wanted to make a time-based puzzle game. Well it didn’t turn out that way, also somewhere along the way I discovered an Ebonics Translator so I decided I would incorporate that for a giggle.

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Anyways see what you think:

Play Latesha’s Crib

In total I spent 31 hours over the last week making this over the past week:

26th March
3pm – 5pm

27th March
10am – 12pm
1pm – 5pm

28th March
10am – 11:30am
3pm – 8pm

29th March
2pm – 5pm

1st April
2pm – 6pm

2nd April
8am – 12pm
2pm – 3pm
5pm – 8pm

3rd April
9:30am – 10:30am
12:pm – 1pm

It was good fun tho I reached a point where I think I had sufficiently prototype the game play so it was time to move onto the next game :)

Let me know what you think. If people really like it then I may turn it into a full-blown mobile game!

Ectoplasm, a Game Made in 24 hours (ish)

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Just before leaving Playdemic we had a company-wide ship-it-day. If you haven’t done one of these before they are great and work very similar to game jams like Ludum Dare. Basically you have 24 hours to create something related to the company then you have to present it.

I decided to team up with Laura Whyte a rather excellent artist colleague I have have worked with for years. I knew I wanted to make a quick mobile game using Adobe AIR and Richard Lord’s Ash framework but I didn’t really have any idea of what game specifically I wanted to make. She had the brilliant idea of making a clone of the classic “helicopter” game that you control with your voice.

So that’s what we made. Check out a video of my playing it below:

You will have to excuse the fact I do sound a little like a drunk owl at some points in there.

By the end of the 8-hour day we pretty much had a working game. Since then I have spent a few more evenings here and there tidying up the source code and fixing a few bugs and submitting a build to Apple and Google. In total I would say that 24-hours is a fair time frame for the development of the game.

As previously mentioned we developed the game using Adobe AIR and Ash. The reason being was that I had previously experimented with cross-platform game development with Mr Nibbles which was coded in Haxe and NME and I was keen to see how AIR would compare.

Im pleased to say it held up very well. Where I had a little difficulty was with the Ash Framework. Its a great framework however its still rather new and there aren’t many examples out there for how to do certain parts of the game development such as menus and event handling. For this reason I have decided to open source the game so that others can have a look at how I went about constructing parts of the game in Ash.

Ectoplasm source: https://github.com/mikecann/Ectoplasm

I plan on refining the source as I have discussions with others on the Ash Mailing List about how best to go about implementing some of the features, so I suspect that source code may change over the coming weeks.

Because the game is cross-platform that means that it will be accessible on the Apple App Store and Google Play store as soon as it gets approved, for now however you can play the web version over at: http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/ectoplasm/

You may want to toggle your microphone settings (or disable the microphone entirely ;) )

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