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Space Transport Tycoon

And the game is done as of last night. I think this one went well, considering Justin didn't stop playing it for 4 hours after we finished.

It's a space economy simulation game. You the player must build a network of trading routes to move materials to factories and consumers.

Play in your browser!

Space Transport Tycoon

Dawn: Infinite Runner Game

Between the Ludum Dare, school, and everything else, I've been turning out a lot of small projects this month. I recently participated in a competition on The Game Creators. The competition, inspired by Flappy Bird, presented one goal: make the most addictive infinite game possible.

My entry, titled Dawn, also draws inspiration from the classic Canabalt. It's a sidescrolling runner in which you play a man who must jump, smash, and fly his way through a scrolling obstacle course as the days pass by.

This competition was focused on addictive potential, so I implemented a few different ideas in an attempt to grab the attention of players of the game:

• Online Highscores: they give the player something to shoot for. He can see what other people have done, know that it's possible, and attempt to prove himself better than them.
• Day/Night Cycles: My idea here was to give the player a concrete sense of progress - more visceral goals to shoot for than the elusive high score.
• Feel: Polish. If the game simply feels good to play, I reasoned, people will want to play it more! Key elements of this in Dawn include particles when smashing through walls and a good set of character animations that makes you feel awesome when you crash through those girders. At the suggestion of Justin Britch, I took a minute to implement a simple animation at the game end: quickly ticking up the user's score from 0, rather than just displaying it. This gives the score a sense of weight and grants the player extra satisfaction at his achievement.

It remains to be seen how effective these strategies were. Clearly Flappy Bird didn't need many of these things to become what it did!

What is Flatricide Pulgamitude Anyway?

I recently released a small game called Flatricide Pulgamitude. This game is an experiment for me in pseudo-multiplayer game development. By that, I mean "I really like games you can play with other people, but I don't want to have to manage a real-time game server". Therefore, I set out to make a game that you could play with others online with only some PHP scripts and a MySQL database.

The result of that is a game in which you wander a strange abstract world built by people who have come before you. You can't see other people in real-time, but you can explore their work and build your own for others to find.

So why the strange name? The other impetus behind this project is a class competition to get a page to the #1 spot in Google Search for the term "Flatricide Pulgamitude". To that end, I'd appreciate it if you could share a link on your own site!

You want to check it out? Just click on this pulgamitude (whatever that is):

New Game: Primeval

I just posted a small game I've been working on lightly since the Ludum Dare 24. The game, Primeval (not to be confused with Primeval Labs), is the second of the two ideas I was considering for the Ludum Dare. It's a rather mind-bending tile-swapper combining mechanics of Conway's Game of Life and Rock-Paper-Scissors. My goal in creating this game was to learn Flash and ActionScript 3 while experimenting with this idea. I had opted to create the more traditional and straightforward Primeval Labs for the Dare because I wasn't sure how well these mechanics would balance or whether the game would even be viable. After a few iterations in Flash, fortunately, it is, and now you can play it right here!

Here's a picture:

Music Island RELEASE

That's right, it's OUT! Music Island is finally through the XBox Live Indie Games review process, and was released just minutes ago on the same system.

I'm very excited to finally have been behind a truly published game. We're giving out the trial version of the game for free on the PC, and you can get it here as an installer that will take care of everything, or here as an executable if you already have the XNA and .NET frameworks. And, of course, you should buy it on XBox Live Indie Games!