Fledgling Videogame Developer

Edit 14.3.2019: gamaan.com website will be discontinued in Autumn 2019, so links pointine there are removed from this article.  Very small percentage of our game ideas are completed and published. Most of projects are suspended (or even killed) during the early phases of game development, and only few are really published in form or another. But what happens to the ones which are not completed? In the past we have just left them to the corner of a hard disk, but now we decided to give them a second change. So we decided to create a site called gamaan.com  that is filled with unpublished game prototypes by   WestSloth Games . We wanted to give wide audience an opportunity to play and test these immature pieces of digital art and provide feedback about them. The maturity level of games varies a lot: some prototypes are in quite finished condition, but some of them can be very rough mechanics trials. We are collecting feedback on some parameters of game. If y...

Friend of mine sent me a question how to create a local leaderboard for Top10 scores/times/results/whatever in Construct 2. I want to introduce one simple way to implement leaderboard locally (no server required). Solution can be seen in this screenshot: Brief description of the method used: Save new score to variable for further use (in this case  inputScore ) Check if new score is greater than the lowest value in current array => If it is greater, replace lowest value with new score ( inputScore ) Sort array contents to descending order using this simple algorithm: => Take two consecutive elements from the array, starting from bottom, and compare them => If two consecutive elements are not in correct order, swap them Basically, this is very simple to do if you understand how to access arrays in C2. Have fun! -Jussi.

Edit 20.5.2020: Del Gibbon's Mad Math was suspended from Google Play Store about one year because of outdated API. However, just about a month ago we uploaded new version created with Unity3D to Play Store. So original Construct2/Crosswalk version does now exist anymore.  Greetings after a long time! This blog has been quiet for a long time and there has been only few updates during this year. I have been extremely busy in my day job, so I have not been able to use enough time for my game development activities. Anyways, during my summer vacation I started two totally new mobile game projects. The first one was released to Google Play couple of days ago, and it is called " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths ". This game is aimed to test and develop player's mental calculation skills. Concept is very simple: the answer is shown on top of the screen, and player has to select two or more numbers that totals are same than the answer shown on screen. There is a time lim...

Our first Android game "Swing Rocket Dash" was developed using Construct 2 and the Android native build was done with Crosswalk. As promised in the previous article, I listed some experiences using Crosswalk to build Android application from Construct 2 HTML5 export. There is a great  tutorial for using Crosswalk flow  at Scirra's webpage. However, there are few things I'd like to add: On Build Settings (under Cordova 3.x settings) you have to define App ID field. That is used as package name at Google Play, and it is using reverse domain name notation, e.g.  com.myhost.myappname.  This name is unique for each app, and for "Swing Rocket Dash" we were using com.gamaan.swingrockets (gamaan.com is our own domain).  It is important to increment App Version Code field every time you create new version. Google Play wont't accept you new APK if it has same version number than any previously loaded package of your game You should also check the Plugins...

It's quite long time from my latest blog article, so I try to catch up what has happened lately.  First of all, we got "Dualball" flash game released to both Newgrounds and Kongregate . For some unkonwn reason, this game was extremely hard to get ready and published. And to be honest, there were some planned features we dropped out from the released version. We just had no motivation to implement those. Also, at summertime we planned to have Android version too, but that is not on our plans at the moment. There has been some queries from flash version players for us to create mobile version, but at this point I don't promise anything. Another change has been the slow migration from Stencyl to Construct 2. The reason for this has simply been the HTML5 capability of the latter one. Exported game can be played on almost any platform you can imagine, and the HTML5 output can be converted to some kind of "native" application e.g. for Android, iOS, WP, etc....

Apparently, I had a need to create a scene where the X position of consecutive objects was determined with sine function. Simultaneously, objects were moving from top to bottom, keeping their X position all the time until they exit the screen. Please see  sine wave demo (html5)  to get an idea what I was trying to do.  ( not available anymore ) The ready-made "Sine" function of Construct 2 was not suitable in this case, because I did not want to make the series of objects to look like a worm. :) Task is not too complicated and math it pretty easy, but anyways I decided to create an example showing my solution. If you are not willing to download .capx from my own server, the screenshot below shows the most critical points to implement this behavior: Basically, you will need following events and variables to make things working: xPosDelta determines the "steps" in which the objects are created. You can try to change the value o...

While getting familiar with the Construct 2, I started to wonder would it be possible somehow detect what kind of a device is used as an input device for HTML5 game. In principle, HTML5 will run on almost all platforms, so it would be very useful to see whether the player is using mouse or touch screen as a input device. I created a simple Breakout game clone to find out how the control method could be detected easily. Breakout clone Game is very simple one, and it has no extra features included. I also tried to add some comments to ease up understanding what has been done and why. I am not too sure if everything is done "correct" way, but anyways this example is working somehow with my own devices (Android tablet, Lumia phone, Linux and windows computers). Game events 2-4 are the most interesting ones from this article point of view. Please see the .capx or the picture below to see how detection was done in this case. Detect whether mouse or touc...

Do you have an idea how to implement IF-THEN-ELSEIF-ELSE statement with Construct 2? At least I had to think for a while how to do it. It seems that this basic structure is not so straightforward to implement in C2. I was creating a very simple game where boxes were moving from left to right. See example below: The color of each box is chosen randomly, so it required the usage of random() function and if-then-else statement. There are probably several ways to do this, but I wanted to make this as simple as possible inside one single event and action box.  Normally I would create a if-then-elseif-else structure like this to select color for the box (pseudo-code just for an example): if randomNumber == 0       set colorOfBox = "red" else if randomNumber == 1       set colorOfBox = "yellow" else if randomNumber == 2       set colorOfBox = "green" else       set colorOfBox = "blue" end if But ...

Most of the negative feedback on our games has been related to the poor quality of graphics and/or animation. I have to admit that these comments are appropriate: Our gamedev "team" currently has no artist at all, and actually all graphics are so far been drawn by me. And I'm really bad at drawing. Anyways, there has been a need for graphics and animation in our games. So I have tried learn to draw at least something using Gimp, Inkscape or Aseprite. Tools itself are not an issue here: there are plenty of tutorials and online manuals available. But even if you could use all tool features perfectly, it does not help a lot if you have no eye for art. I thought at some point that pixel-art would be a solution for me, and I dug out this tutorial:  Pixel Joint forum: Creating Pixel Art . Basically this tutorial was fine and everything was understandable, but I did not have enough perseverance to follow the guidelines. The theory of anti-aliasing and dithering was qu...

As most of you may know, Unity3D is a kind of "industry standard" game creation tool at the moment. I have the impression that it is versatile, reliable and generally works for people making games. And there seems to be very large and active user base for that.  But on the other hand it seems more complex to use than most of the 2D game creation tools I have tried so far. So there might be a little bit higher threshold for starting gamedev activities with Unity than with some simpler development platform. However, My own experience on Unity3D is very limited: I have implemented just few demos for almost two years ago. At that time my gamedev efforts were just starting and I had no clear idea what I was doing. But somehow I managed to get something game-like up and running with Unity. :) So far Stencyl has been my number one tool for developing games. All my released titles have been relatively small and simple, and the target platform has been flash (just to keep things s...

It is hard to know without prototyping how game concept would work. So during the past week I have built several prototypes to find out if I have something useful in my mind. This process takes some time, but at least for me it is important to get some kind of a visualization how things work on the screen. Static modeling with paper models, sketch drawing, or even using Lego bricks may also help to visualize game mechanics or rules, but I need to have something more dynamic to see the full picture. At this point, few ideas seem to be better than others, so they probably are worth further development. Although we are planning to move gradually out from flash games, it seems that we will still create at least one new game for that domain. The reason for this is that we know the tool (Stencyl) quite well and we are also familiar publishing flash games through Newgrounds and Kongregate. Publishing games to mobile and/or HTML5 is mostly unknown territory to us, so why not try to sta...

First part of my summer vacations is over, and tomorrow it is time go back to work. Luckily, I have still one week vacation left in the beginning of August. :) My game development activities have also been quite minimal for last couple of weeks. However, there is a small exception: I've been discussing with my brother how our gamedev activities should be continued for the rest of the year. And as a part of this process we have tried to sketch a roadmap for upcoming game releases. I work full-time in large telecommunications company and all my game development is done in leisure time, so there is a clear need for some kind of a rough plan to keep things progressing smoothly. First of all, we have a plan to release three html5 games in the next six months: Two smaller ones and one large one. Smaller games are planned to have relatively simple graphics and gameplay, so we are able to finish them ourselves quite smoothly. There are already technology demos up and running for both ...

I decided to write some kind of a post-mortem analysis for " Soccer Breakthrough " flash game we released around 21st of June to Newgrounds (and Kongregate). Overall rating for the game has been 3+ stars at Newgrounds and 2+ stars at Kongregate. But there has been huge variation in ratings from different players: Some players have liked game a lot because of it's simplified gameplay and medal system. They even have encouraged us to continue same way with future games. But then there have been several comments concerning the lack of realism, the fact that game gets boring quick, most of the sounds are irritating (in fact, they are), and so on. I have even received direct requirements to change literally everything in the game. Yippee. Soccer Breakthrough was originally intended to be a HTML5 game with very simple gameplay and simplified graphics. However, we had very tight schedule because of my holiday trip, and we decided to make this release with Stencyl because ...

As mentioned in previous blog article, my target was to attend FGL's "week long game jam" with one idea. However, after four days of work I realized that I am not able to make the game as playable as I wanted to. So I decided to freeze development work, and quickly drafted a new concept that was possible to get to up and running in less than one day.  In practice it was ~7 hours before deadline when I started creating the game. But the development work went quite smoothly without any problems, and in the end I got the game ready in 5 hours. So there were still some margin left. :) It works best with some touch-screen device supporting HTML5, but you can try it also with computer+mouse combination. You can find game also from FGL, if you have account there.  Next step would be to polish the graphics and make some improvements to the gameplay. Edit 7.6.2014: No special success in jam, but got some valuable feedback how game could be improved. The most important t...

I started sketching a game for FGL's "week long game jam" , and noticed quite soon that I have a game idea that would need smoke animation. I did not have previous experience how to create one, so it was time for few trials. One of them proved to be useful for me, and here is description how it was done with Construct2 . First of all, I tried different styles of "particles" or objects for a smoke. My target was to create something like volcano-style smoke, meaning that it will appear in certain point and starts ascending slowly to the sky. Simultaneously, this puff of smoke expands and gets thinner (=opacity decreases), and at some point it disappears totally. Just like in the still picture below: I tested couple of options for creating a smoke object, and ended up something like described in the picture below: Somehow, round shapes looked the best, but I tried cloud-like objects also. The background was light blue, so dark colors were better in this...

I started evaluating new game development tools for a few weeks ago. My target was to find out which kind of tools are available for creating games for e.g. HTML5, Android, facebook etc. During the search I happened to find out that there was a Construct 2 jam ongoing at Newgrounds, and realized I did not know anything about the tool. So I installed it to my windows desktop and started to find out how it works.  Tool itself is quite easy to use, and so far I have created couple of demo HTML5 games that can be run on almost any platform. Tests have been run without problems on linux and windows PCs (using browsers), Nokia Lumia (Windows 8 phone), and couple of Android phones. Earlier I was skeptical about the performance of HTML5 games, but to my surprise at least these specific demos were running smoothly on all tested devices. Even if I have not much experience on developing game for multiple platforms, I have at least one guideline to share: Keep in mind what input devi...

Many things must be taken into account when starting new game project from the scratch. First of all, you have to decide what kind of a game you are planning and what would be the feasible target platform (or platforms) for that. You must understand the limitations of each platform, e.g. available screen resolutions, computing power, input devices, etc. When target platform is decided, it is time to think about what development tools can be used for this project. There are plenty of tools available for hobby game developer and each of them has pros and cons. So it is sometimes bit hard to make selection, and in case of hobby developer the "zero budget" drives to use free (or very cheap) software. I have tried at least following game engines or frameworks: - Unity3D - Blender Game Engine (BGE) - GameMaker - Adobe Flash (CS6) - Löve2D - Stencyl Personnally, I want to promote the usage of open-source software. So my favorites from the list above are Blender and Löve2...