Experimental
experimentalgameplay.com hosts monthly programming challenges, which I have recently been participating in.Every month a theme is chosen. Some time during that month, participants create a game within that theme, taking no more than 7 days to do so.
It's kind of like the Iron Chef of game programming. Kind of... >_>
March/April: Cheap Clone
Cheap clone! Fantastic, as I happen to love old-school video games :)
I thought about doing a Mario rip-off, but that'd be rather time-consuming, so settled instead for a Space Invaders clone.
But it's not enough to simply clone, of course! This needs to be a cheap clone! I therefore present...
There's definitely more I could have done for this game (lives, high-score, etc), but there are other projects I'm itching to get started on, so I submitted this as-is. It's the proof of concept we're aiming for here, anyway! ... [keeps telling himself that]
October: Boys & Girls
The theme this month was for male developers to make a "girl game" and female developers to make a "boy game".
Too bad PsyPets is 6 years in the making, not 1 week :P
My entry this month is "Small World". In it you play as a cat named Zack, and that's all I can tell you, because the game focuses on exploration!
What's the story? How do you win? These are things you will learn by exploring the game's (small) world.
Small World was created using RPG Maker 2003.
To install, extract the ZIP to some location on your hard drive.
June/July: Casual Addiction
My entry is Archipelago Maze, a maze game. It generates mazes of various sizes, each containing a series of islands littered with treasures, keys, and locked doors.
You receive points for exploring the maze and picking up treasure, with a summary at the end of each level.
Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could finish implementing two key features that would really seal this entry as "casual addiction":
- The ability to choose the seed for the maze generation's random number generator, allowing you to replay previous levels. High score tables for each level you play, for later viewing and challenging.
I may decide to work on Archipelago Maze, outside of experimentalgameplay.com, to add these features, and others.
April: Repeat
My entry this month bears the same name as the theme: REPEAT.
In REPEAT you try to escape a run-and-jump, side-scrolling level. However, whenever you change something in the level, it resets to its original state in a fixed amount of time, and your character is no exception.
You must repeat the level over and over again, gaining new powers from a mysterious entity as you do so, until you finally have the tools necessary to escape.