Robo Racer is out!

Yay!  Another Game Jam, another actual game release!

I've added it to the game page for the blog.  If you are super excited to play it, or super lazy, or can't find the page link cause it's glorious blue on blue at the top right of every single blog page, you can click below to get there.

http://gawaingames.blogspot.com/p/games-ive-made.html

I think I'll let the game speak for itself really.  It's been a blast making it, and my mind is still in a flurry of thoughts and design concepts, so anything I write about it won't make much sense for now.  Plus I've been promoting and repackaging the promotion material so much over the last 2 days, I don't really feel like spouting it all twice just for this blog post.

Not Robo Racer related news after the break.  If you are just here to check out my games, you can stop reading here. ;)

Robo Racer - My PlayCanvas Work in Progress Game

https://playcanvas.com/project/375628/overview/robo-racer

Wondering what I've been up to the last few weeks? Wonder no more! Go press play and try the last mostly stable build I pushed as I make them.

Or just use this below permalink to the game and skip all my efforts to keep a development blog on the project. The below link will open the latest "stable" build directly:

http://playcanv.as/p/XtUBSVpS

It's still very much a work in progress and has no help menu, so here are the controls: Arrow keys to steer, hold spacebar down to charge up a jump. On mobile: touch the sides to steer, and HOLD the middle of the screen to charge a jump. On both devices: press and hold both left and right at the same time to boost.

Feel free to follow my dev log on playcanvas and watch the game take shape. The playcanvas project is also set public (cause I'm broke and they charge for private projects), so you can poke around and learn from it as well. Though keep in mind anything you see in code is also from me learning and on a contest deadline, and thus may not be the "best" way to accomplish the task.

Enjoy!

My PlayCanvas Contest Project Link

Here is the url for the contest entry project I am working on for PlayHack:

https://playcanvas.com/project/375628/overview/robo-racer

That will land you on the project page, allowing you to play it, view it in the editor, and read all my exciting (or not) posts as I progress!

It's keeping me pretty busy, so I won't have much time to keep up with here during the contest.  So follow that URL above and keep checking it for updates as I get further.  And while you are there, browse around Play Canvas and watch some of the other devs too.

PlayCanvas Competition - I'm in!

One day late to post this, shame on me.

PLAYHACK with PlayJam competition link:

http://blog.playcanvas.com/playhack-with-playjam-starts-today/

So this is quite a distraction, and will delay Chapter 2 of Mothrina.  I had gone back and fourth yesterday about it, since I really want to get the more polished engine done.  But I think I'll try for it.

The publicity and practice will certainly help, and the pressure of the contest will help me to "break in" my new home's "office" space.  The prize would be nice but I think I need to be a bit realistic and say that with no mobile games under my belt yet, I doubt I can really pull off a winning entry.  Hey, I can dream. :p

Mothrina Chapter 2 is currently in a bit of a bog down while I try getting an editor built using Multimedia Fusion 2.5 and the Mothrina Engine v2 "talking" in the same file structures.  When I get that all working, I'll have a guide to setting it all up here on the blog.  I actually have a draft but it's not ready for publishing as I have since discovered several better ways of doing things along the way.

PlayCanvas in general seems like a pretty fun tool so far.  Not sure how it stacks up professionally, but I've been having fun building the basics of my contest game concept today.  Nothing ready for publishing just yet on my contest entry.  I intend to publish a Work In Progress on PlayCanvas as soon as I have something remotely playable.

Part of the contest is to keep a regular dev blog on PlayCanvas during the development of your game, so the actual game updates will be over there.  I don't want to keep up with cross posting here.  The dev blog will be open as soon as I publish a version of the game, so for now there is no link I can hand you.  But I will be sure to post the link to this blog once I've got that started.

Anyway, super excited to be attempting this and learning yet another toolkit.  I'm sure I'll have a much better idea how PlayCanvas all works after the contest deadline passes.

Wish me luck!  And if you are entering as well, I wish you the same! :D

Delay of Game: Developer has Moving Issues

Mothrina Chapters is not dead.  Just wanted to get this out there for my blog followers.

My family is moving in a land called Real Life.  This means things are getting cleaned up, packed away, and shipped to a new house.  The majority of my stuff being packed is also the stuff I use while developing games(or to de-stress while doing so).  Also, packing is very time consuming and seems to zap one's energy.  Must be those real life motion controls.

I'll just keep this short.  I have lots of ideas and plans, but all of them are on hold while I move.  The moving date is the 6th, but of course unpacking will happen over the next weeks following that.  There's also some Real Life MMO events called holidays somewhere in there.

So everything in Mothrina or other game development land is on hold for the next month or so while I piece together my/our new life.

It will live again, eventually, but for now I really need to take a step back and breath.  Expect silence followed by an opening report on the development once I get my new "office" up sometime mid/end of next month.  Stay warm!

Mothrina Chapters - Control Update Patch

I'll keep this one short.  I have resolved a control issue with Mothrina Chapters: The Ruins of Death.

For all people interested in playing the game, instead of downloading directly from the contest version, please download from the updated version link in the contest description.  Hopefully this fixes the "controls not responding" problems for good.  (It's pretty much a raw reading of the input at this point, so there really is not much more I could do then this.)

Here's the link again to the contest page:

http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/384

Thanks!

Dev log: Mothrina Engine Version 2, planning phase

First off, I'm really beginning to wonder if anyone even played my little adventure.  

In case you missed the link the first post, I'll plug it here again.  I'm starting to sound like a broken record at this point, but hey, I'm really desperate for players.

Mothrina Chapters: The Ruins of Death

http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/384

I have posted it just about everywhere I can think of over the last few days, and have not heard back from anyone.  Not even a little piece of "that was fun" or "your game sux!111".

Well, ok.  One person mentioned the controls were broken on the AGK steam forums and tweaked the code to support their (strange) keyboard.  And a few other users there complemented me on releasing the source code with the game, as they could poke around and learn how to better structure a larger project.

That's all I really got though.  None of those things really let me know if the game itself is good or just tedious or makes people angry or sad or just bored.  No idea how anyone reacted to the story, no idea if I was too vague with the clues and what happens or if there was "just enough" for a thinker to piece what happened to the Ruins of Death.

Some say "Silence is Golden", but for this instance, I don't think that applies. :/

Info on version 2 if you view the full blog post.  Cut time.