When I posted the Super Hexagon soundtrack I hadn’t actually played the game itself, just heard the soundtrack. As such I didn’t talk about the music in the context of the gameplay, just imagined what it might be like. Since then I’ve played the game and can talk about the music properly.
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When I sleep I see shapes
Game music: Super Hexagon
Look! It’s Wednesday, and here’s some video game music right on time! Almost like a real site with a plan and deadlines and everything. Admittedly this week’s soundtrack is a short one, tiny even, but crammed full of pure chiptune goodness. If you liked PPPPPP then the Super Hexagon soundtrack is for you.
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Extraction: Map generation
This is the second post in my game design series. Last time I gave an overview of the game and its goals. Making the framework and playing with the AI were the main objectives, but first we’ll take a quick detour into the map generation system.
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Game design: spatially near, but temporally distant
I’ve been reading a lot recently about game design in the “early days” – the NES era. In those days games were real games, difficulty curves could be like brick walls and tutorials simply didn’t exist as a game design concept.
This post explores one particular element that comes up – the notion of the “spatially near, but temporally distant” objectives.
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Windows 8 Wifi Woes
The other morning I woke up to see that our house wifi connection was down. No big deal, happens all the time. Restart the router, problem solved.
Nearly.
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Kickstarter: Sparki funded
With two weeks to go, Sparki has been successfully funded. In fact they’ve surpassed their initial goal by over $40,000 and climbing.
Congratulations to ArcBotics, I look forward to playing with anything and everything they deliver. Now we just have to wait and see if they make it to $100,000 for the Android app stretch goal.
Game music: Shatter
OK, this “regular feature” concept. Ongoing and at a somewhat fixed interval. Right, Wednesdays. Wednesday shall be music day. And this Wednesday I bring to you the music of the greatest incarnation of Breakout ever created: Shatter.
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Making a game for fun and… that’s it
About a year ago I found myself with a couple of weeks worth of evenings free, so I decided to sit down and have a crack at making a game. Not because I had an amazing idea for a story or some mechanics, just to see if I could. A few hours a night for two weeks was enough to make some decent progress on the skeleton of the game, and one day I hope to go back and finish it off, at least to the point where my initial plans are all implemented.
This is the first in a series of posts describing the game (working-and-definitely-not-final title: Extraction), what I’ve done so far, and where I plan to go next, with a focus on the parts I personally found most interesting.
Game Music: Monaco
Although the video game soundtrack series was meant to be a regular feature, roughly once a week, here’s a bonus treat: the music to the delicious “Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine“.
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Detecting if another instance of an application is already running
Back in Alpha 1.3 of Picsie, one of the features I added was to have the windows position differently depending on if there were already Picise instances loading. This isn’t as simple as it sounds, and I ended up prostrating myself at the feet of Stack Overflow, begging for wisdom.
Here’s what I learned.