Tag Archives: arcade

New Levels and Bug Fixes for Piggy Chase

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In preparation for submitting my game, Piggy Chase, for Magfest, I’ve been doing a bunch of work on the game. I’ve fixed some of the AI bugs (like animals floating up in the air on hills?!) and changed the control scheme to be more user friendly. Additionally, I added two new levels! I am hoping to have 10 levels — so only 6 more to go before I go for a release.

Now I have a tutorial level, a farm level, a city level, and a snow level. The farm level has the animals dodging tractors while the city involves lots of traffic. The Snow level has bad snow man that patrol perilously narrow ice platforms. I also have a Bowser’s Castle-style level in the works with lava and spikes–but it’s not ready yet so it isn’t in the video.

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At the moment it’s basically a deceptively simple looking happy silly animal frogger game that actually is a pretty hard timing/reflex based game underneath. It’s pretty unfair and unbalanced right now and I think one would have to be really skilled to get all the animals to survive in the end. Part of me thinks I should scale back the difficulty or add  in lives to allow players to sort of pick up where they die. I could also have animals respawn, so if you are really into completing a level you could go back and get everyone. I was also thinking about puzzle elements beyond the maze and timing elements, but I don’t want to spoil the formula that I have so far.

Piggy Chase Mobile Game Side Project!

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Sometimes you need a break from hardcore space combat simulation programming. As you might be able to tell from browsing Badger Head Games, while our roots can probably be traced back to the love of space games in many styles, I also like to create fun silly games as well. Over the summer I began working on a game that would star a pig – mostly because my son likes pigs and other farm animals. For awhile only a pig lived on Old McDonald’s farm when my son sang the song. Anyway, I had an idea for a ‘pig game’ that I thought would be great on mobile and I could build with some art I already had and some pretty simple programming. (haha simple programming…)

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Here is a sample video of my new side project game Piggy Chase. It’s a low poly-isometric frogger / marble madness / pacman like game with farm animals and crazy tractors. The goal is to help the pig and other farm animals escape the farm. More levels and hopefully cool stuff before release on PC / iOS / Android. I just demoed this for people to play at District Arcade in Washington, DC this last weekend. Players had a lot of fun!

Laser Star – 3D Voxel Space Shoot ‘Em Up for the #indiesvsgames GameJam

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Great productive game jam weekend! I really enjoyed making and playing Laser Star. The theme was ‘arcade’ and I think I captured that! It has a lot of challenge and style for something made over the course of three days (while still managing to hang with friends most of Friday night, and most of the day on Saturday.)

Premise: Galaga vs. Voxel Art Games vs. Infinite Runner

PLAY!

Play it here…  (WebGL version but it doesn’t have the score board)

Play in on GameJolt (compete for the top score and vote for me in the gamejam – uses FLASH….)

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An homage to Galaga with style that reflects some of today’s games. Obviously the graphics are made using the same tools as Crossy Road and its millions of copycats. The perspective of the game was shifted to an above and behind the ship which gives it an infinite runner feel. The alien patterns are inspired by Galaga, but I never did get to creating a large block formation where the enemy can be hit easier…

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Features:

The game is infinite as far as I can tell, I set it up to continue indefinitely and increase in speed for later iterations. Stage types will cycle as the speed increases.

There are about 7 stages with different make ups of enemies. There is an asteroid stage as well.

There are a number of enemies with unique patterns and abilities.

There are power ups which increase your lasers.

There are extra life bonuses for high score milestones up to 1,000,000 points.

Sounds were all made in BFXR.

3D models were all made in Qbicle.

Gameplay Video:

#1GAM Post-Mortem and November’s Game Vocab Stacker – Challenge Complete!!

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It’s been an entire year of making a game a month. I started on a snow day and made the Snowpacolypse snowball fight game and finally rounded it out with an educational project I am working on. I’ve delved into a number of spacey games, zombie shoot em ups, a 3rd person platformer, two somewhat abstract games, my first Android app that even sold some copies – Tap Invasion, 2 online multiplayer games, procedural generation maze game, and several (4!) Space Warfare demos.

Needless to say, I’ve experimented a lot and learned a lot. I feel happy about the things I’ve worked on and learned over the year and feel like a much better programmer! I am looking forward to the next year of focusing on just a few projects. Mainly my Space Warfare game and the educational games this months game is a sneak peak at. I have a lot of plans for Space Warfare and feel like it has come a long way. I hope to keep improving it and making it awesome after all the stuff I’ve learned.

Here is a link to the Badger Head Games One Game a Month Page…

 

The final game is part of a vocabulary game I am working on for my school. This is not the final version, just a demo version that is geared towards my Reading / English class. The final game is going to be focused on History vocab and will hopefully be released on school iPads!

Click here to play Vocab Stacker…

Plerion – an iPhone / Android game for August’s #1GAM

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Plerion is difficult to describe. Basically there is an energy source in the center of the screen that increasing sends energy burst fireballs off to the edges of the screen. The player must tap or click the edges of screen to send their own energy blast to stop the bursts from going past. It works best on a touch screen since you don’t have to move a mouse, but I am putting up a web version for fun. Also, I am still finishing this, so while the basics are there, its unbalanced and super difficult to go very far. I am thinking of having distinguishable levels, perhaps a more pattern based energy release, and eventually a sense that one can master the game. At the moment, I think it feels way too difficult and confusing. But… its pretty and there are explosions!! Here is a link to Plerion.

Space Wars Update – Video with Scores, Sound, Hit Points!

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I’ve added better(?) AI, explosions, sound effects as well as hit points and a score to the game. It might be getting too complex for the webplayer soon. We may need to switch to stand alone PC/Mac downloads. Here is a link to the web version of Space Wars…

Rewatching the video, I notice the AI is doing a lot of spinning. I am still trying to figure out how to make the AI better, I’ve tried a lot of things. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it does random silly things while it works out its rotation. I plan to implement a waypoint patrol ai, a search ai, a follow/guard ai and a defend area ai soon… Those will be sooner rather than later. Further on I’d like to have goal oriented AI and preferred targets where AI will assess enemy ships and decide what is the most important target. Fighters set to skirmish mode will rate other fighters highly as potential targets, but other fighters whose mission is to destroy a space station or carrier might skip other fighters to prioritize travel and attack their main target. This will be important as ships diversify, we can have capital ships chasing every little fighter buzzing around them if there is an enemy cap ship pumping them full of lasers…

Also up for the AI will be factions so that some AI bots can be on the player’s team. Then the real space war will commence…

 

Networked Space Wars: My May One Game A Month is Online #1GAM

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The month is just about over and my attempt at creating a multiplayer game has yielded some interesting results. First of all, I did make a multiplayer game where players can host and join a server and then fly space ships around and blow each other up. I haven’t tested it too excessively, but I know it works on multiple computers over my home wifi. I am not sure how many servers can be created or how many players can join!? Here is a link to the networked Space Wars Online – you will need a friend to join you to make it fun…

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Game controls:

WASD – Move and Rotate

Space – Fire weapon

-+ Zoom in and out

I couldn’t get points or multiple hits working in time. Every change you make to a networked game seems to break it and require lots of debugging. I hope to refine it in the future and make it more fun. I’d like to be able to show who you are targeting, have ships that can take more than one hit. Selectable types of weapons to use.

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The start page has a place for players to enter their names and also customize their ship color. While not mind blowing, since I am still learning, it took forever just to get these two simple pieces of information to be shared across the multiple players. Colors would not show up for the longest time. I think I am getting the hang of it, the names are an attempt at a larger player management system with a shared scoring system but I need to wrap my head around handling collisions of projectiles and giving credit to the player who shot them. One day!

I used a lot of references to make this thing work –

Paladin Studios Unity Networking Tutorial – helped me figure out RPCs the best…

Palladium Games Unity Networking Tutorial

Unity Cookie networking tutorial -its in Javascript though so I had to change it to C#

Unity Multiplayer Games book by Alan Stagner

Unity Networking book by Lawrence Grant

Thanks to all of you for doing your best to explain a super complicated topic. After going through all that stuff, I can see the need for a few more tutorials. Perhaps if I ever understand it well enough I will give it a try.

Dev Log: Updates on Tap Invasion, SpaceWars, Giant Pixelated Robots and GIFs

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#Screenshotsaturday Making gifs is an easier process than I thought! Enjoy this Tap Invasion action gif.

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Above is one of my students making an epic run in Tap Invasion.

Dev Log Updates:
My April game (Tap Invasion) has stretched far into May! While the game was mostly completed in May, I wanted to port it to the Android Google Play store and get it out to the mobile audience for which it was designed. In that I succeed by about mid-month. I still need to port it to iOS. It was really created with the iPad in mind.

With that being said, I still am making good on my #1GAM challenge. I originally had noted that my next big attempt would be multiplayer. This weekend I finally got something working! The basic game for May is a multiplayer player vs. player SpaceWars game. It may not be super polished by the end of the month, but my goal is to have a game 4 players can join with one player hosting the server, a bunch of obstacles to fly around and hide behind and a scoring system.

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Currently the game has been tested on the desktop and through the webplayer on a server and both work so far. I will be adding interpolation optimization to the game to make everything smoother  in the next few days and then I will probably publish for folks to try out. Maybe one day I will rig up one of my old computers as an always on server for folks to log on to.

One of my main frustrations has been loading new players with their own perspective camera so that they could all fly around a bigger area on their own. The problem seems to be something a lot of Unity programmers have to deal with. I have tabled it for now, but I am hoping to make the space wars concept a little more massively in the future once I figure this thing out. So in the spirit of completing things in a month, the game now just takes place arena style on one screen with really small players.

Additionally, I came up with a one screen game – sort of smash-brothers meets joust meets explosions. I’ve been calling it Robot Destruction Dome for short. I couldn’t really make it this month because it took me so long to launch Tap Invasion and then learn networking (still learning that!). The RDD would require lots of new pixel art and I want to do it right! Here is my drawing of the game…

robotbrainstorm The guys with the motorcycle helmets are player one and two. They fight an infinite army of procedurally configured robots.

Tap Invasion and Tap Invasion Lite Now on the Google Play store for Android devices

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At long last! Tap Invasion and Tap Invasion Lite Now on the Google Play store for Android devices! I’ve even sold a few games!

Free: Click here to go to the Tap Invasion Free Version on Google Play.

Full Game for only $0.99! Click here to go to the Tap Invasion Google Play page.

The store description goes something like this: Fast, addictive retro arcade action! Aliens are attacking Earth again! Tap the invaders as they attempt to destroy your city. How long can you keep the city alive?

Tap Invasion Lite is a DEMO version that gives you the feel for the game and a boss battle. The DEMO has a time limit and only a few of the bad guys. But it does have a boss!

DEMO Features:
– Retro arcade action
– Simple but addictive gameplay
– Power ups!
– 8-bit pixel art transports you back to the 80’s
– Chip tune sound track!

Try it out and then buy the FULL version to get all the cool features below…

Cool Features of the FULL GAME:
– More Retro arcade action
– Simple but addictive gameplay
– Infinite levels – if you can tap fast enough!
– Randomized levels with increasing speeds and difficulty
– 5 bosses to destroy
– Power ups!
– 8-bit pixel art transports you back to the 80’s
– Chip tune sound track!
– Top Score Board – Can you beat your friend’s score?
– No in-app purchases!

Please support indie games and me! I make games for fun, but its also fun to be paid for your creative works!

Tap Invasion Update! New enemies, bosses and power ups!

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We are getting closer to the finish I think! The game is balanced enough that it’s possible to get past the first 10 levels. There are two power ups now to help along the way and they appear more frequently. One rebuilds the city and the other destroys *almost* all the enemies on the board.

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Each bad guy has its own unique spin. The green ones are the standard but they move faster as the game goes on. Same with the reds but they go side to side. The orange are like the reds but tougher. The blue are slow but hard to kill. The gray ones are a like blues, but with a twist. The level 8 and 10 bosses are a bit of a surprise I think.

Here is the link to Tap Invasion…