A blog post on how to become a game developer

http://jacklehamster.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/how-to-become-a-game-developer/

I was getting sick of looking at my NG profile, and it occured to me. It's that damn picture of Randy Quaid coming from my own post!

I need to find something to post, just anything so that I don't have to see Randy Quaid's face anymore.

That's it, I got a Tutorial for making multiplayer games in Flash. I will share that instead. You can find the tutorial on my blog right here: https://jacklehamster.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/tutorial-create-realtime-multiplayer-games-using-player-io-part-1-server/

Player.IO makes it really easy to produce multiplayer games. It's now own by Yahoo so it has a different name, but I find Player.IO more catchy and easy to remember.

• You can work with or without server implementation to produce a game.
• There's support for a database, where you can implement a leaderboard
• Clients supported are ActionScript, Objective-C, Unity, Java., C#
• Server implementation is all in C# (but you dont' actually need that, as the tutorial shows you).

Ok I hope it's a long enough post to push Randy Quaid out of the way. Damn what a dumb post that was....

So there was this #candyjam going on, which I didn't plan to participate at all. The idea is to protest against King.com for trademarking common words like "candy™" and "saga™" (and probably "crush™" too). Ironically, all the publicity around candyjam is probably benefiting King. Last weekend was the deadline, then I thought... f*k it, let's just do it.

First, I had to find an innovative game idea. I failed at that.

Then I had to find a word that rhymes with Candy. That's it, Randy!

Last but not least, I had to find a Randy... then it just dawn to me. Of course, Randy Quaid!

Play Randy Qurush Saga on newgrounds right here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/633432

And if you really love the game, also rate it here: http://itch.io/jam/candyjam/rate/1459

And if you can't resist the awesomeness of this game, might as well rate it here and here, retweet my announcement here, donate to my website here and be my fan :-) ... HERE!

My Champion Oliver

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/632991

Lately, I’ve had a few decisions to make in terms of the difficulty of the games I produced (Dragonworm Megablastard and upcoming My Champion). I made this soccer game, which was apparently insanely difficult. I did spend a lot of time trying to win a match, and felt pretty satisfied when I did. When it came to releasing a test run of that game, it turns not only nobody was able to beat it, but nobody could even get a draw! (ok I think one person managed to win). Still, I struggled before reducing the difficulty, because I felt that players should really try to beat the challenge. On the other hand, one thing to keep in mind is that a level of difficulty that’s too high really drives popularity down, because let’s face it, it’s no fun when you can’t win ;-/ I decided to tone down the difficulty so that winning a match now is as difficult as it was to get a draw, and now it’s still very difficult to win by more than one. (I’ll try to add more levels in practice mode to draw people in.). Okay, I had to cave in. It’s concerning though, have gamers become softer, are easy going games now becoming the standard?

read the rest on my blog entry

Good luck for anyone participating in LD28

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

Lately, things have been productive. Three new games got release, each part of a game jam.
- 0h maze: Made in 3h for 0h game jam
- Divine Techno Run: Made in a week for Game Jolt's Contest (Theme: Party)
- flo: Made for Charity Jam. Sometimes I skip jams, but I really didn't want to miss this one.

Interesting fact: To produce flo, I actually used pre-made art from the artist. (I had to cut out the characters from the image). So the art was actually not produced for the game. I also lack time so I basically hacked Divine Techno Run, which uses a semi-3d engine. I didn't use the Youtube API of Divine Techno Run, it actually slows things down a lot.

0h Maze (pronounced zero hour maze) was produced for 0h game jam. I didn't really understand the rules, but I guess I was supposed to produce the game in less than 1h, and during daylight saving time... whatever. Nobody's really anal about the rules for those jams.
Still, 3h is the shortest I've done to make a game. I was working on some other game and I needed a break, so I made that one. I was also planning to work on Shark Jam during that weekend but that one fell through (too bad).

Anyway, I've been working pretty intensively on a game engine (used in the last 2 games) which will allow me to make more performant games. The next project should be interesting.

So as you might know, Krapi Studio has released their first game:
Weedman
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/621157

Don't worry, I'm not committing myself to produce only Krapi Games. It's just that if I finish a game that looks a bit sub-standard, I'll stick the Krapi logo on it and pretend it's krapi on purpose. ;-P (j/k)

Anyway, with Krapi games, also comes krapi humor. So I started a comic about it:
http://www.dobuki.com/omgaf-comics.html

Cheers and enjoy!

Howdy,
So there was this silly project I started. At first, the idea was to make a game where a hitchhiker simply goes from planet to planet, looking for his dream planet. All he gets are clues from aliens on various planets.

The idea was ok, but to work, it needed a great story. Not sure why, but I really got writer's block on this one. I came up with dialogs but I have to admit I didn't really get inspired, and I'm almost feel shameful to admit I wrote them.

Anyway, I was going to just put the game up and not care much about it (we didn't really spend much time on it anyway), but I came up with another idea. I'll let you guys fill up the game with dialogs ;-P If nothing, I hope it can become an interesting social experiment. You can also change the look of the alien (see below, I added a stupid hat). You could actually redraw the alien completely, because all you do is upload a 90x90 png. It uses the Newgrounds API to store all those images.

This game will be released probably early next week. I don't plan to work much more on it, just get the project off my plate. However, if you do have a suggestion, feel free to let me know.

The game is here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/projects/games/681865/
preview

It's my birthday, so I think it's a good opportunity to share two news ;-P

#1 - New game: Mr. Fish (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/619322)
There was this fishing jam, which is a challenge to make a game in 7 days. So I just made a game for it. It was a good way to cool down, between some other more difficult projects. (I have to say, I didn't look hard for groundbreaking gameplay or originality). Gotta say I'm pretty satisfied with the result, and got the opportunity to work with a great composer. She's new on Newgrounds, so please support her: http://marbletonemedia.newgrounds.com/

#2 - Re-designed website: http://www.dobuki.com
I re-designed my website (looks much cleaner now). The website now features not only finished projects, but also the ones being worked on, and playable demos of some pending projects. There is a blog that I recently started, and a forum for game creators. (the forum is brand new, so it has nothing in it yet).