No Name Games

Ok, so my Arkanoid wannabe obviously isn’t anything fancy, but I had a little fun with it last night. I got a particle system functioning (somewhat) for when the blocks break, and added gravity to the particles and the ball.

Also added sound - although I’m recycling sounds at the moment. Maybe one of these times I’ll actually make the thing available, if I put in enough effort on it to make it more interesting anyway.

Seriously, I think I’ve been doing too much of it lately. Every day I’m feeling my brain expand a little bit more and a little bit more. Every day I’m reading hundreds of pages and every day I find myself wondering what to do when I run out of pages to read. Then I start going back and trying to write down tidbits of information from what I’ve been reading to use for later in… whatever.

Today I read a book about Ninjas (lossa nifty information). Yesterday I read the entire series of I Luv Halloween (in hardback edition - with a bonus comic). Day before that I read the entire Silent Hill series in an omnibus edition. Friday I killed off a 1062 page book, which was a collection of books written by Charles Fort that were release between 1919 and 1932 - so many awesome tales of bizarre happenings in real life, good times… Before all that I read a book called Energy Work that was all about raising your spiritual energy levels and crap like that, a book called ‘Your Inner Fish’ (details physical evidence of human evolution down to basically pond scum - though not everyone agrees of course), a book about plants and the various reasons people grow them along with how the plants seem to be manipulating us (it’s not as whacko as that makes it sound).

Seriously… I’m running out of stuff… tomorrow I’m gonna be killing off a book about ancient egyptian myths. I’m reading ghost stories on the side. If I don’t find more to read, I’ll be stuck with ghost stories and programming manuals from classes I took like 6 years ago.
So… anyone have any suggestions? I’m almost scared to think of what insanity I shall pick up next…

Btw - if anyone can stand a book that’s over a thousand pages, Charles Fort is DEFINITELY worth it. His theories are outlandish, and very outdated concepts by today’s standards (not to mention, kind of laughable sometimes) but the points he makes are absolutely spectacular, and the stuff he found through research is simply unbelievable. You will find no better collection of strange, inexplicable, sometimes macabre, events than that book. It’s called the Book of the Damned - the Collected Works of Charles Fort.

I’m hoping to get a book on XNA, so I have something to follow along with that I can have in my hand I guess. Maybe that’ll stall out my book binge for a bit. >.>

*sigh* Thank god Barnes and Noble keeps doing these weird massive price reductions on books they haven’t been able to sell…

I am pretty much addicted to podcasts, and a large portion of them deal with either game development or just games in general.  Thought id sure some of the ones I listen to

The Penny Arcade podcast
Cheap ass gamer
Gamers with jobs
Kropotkin uk gaming news
PC gamer podcast
Sacrcastic gamer podcast
Totally rad show
XBLA insider
Giant bombcast
Video gamer podcast
The geek box
All IGN gaming podcasts
Rebel FM radio
GDC radio
OXM podcast
Top seceret podcast
Bungie podcast
The hot spot
Gay gamer podcast
Blizzcast (Blizzards offical podcast)
Podcastle
Insomniac podcast
Indie game developers podcast
Not another gaming podcast (The gaming podcast I am the host of :-D)

I listen to more, but I believe this is a big enough list for now Enjoy, I know I do!

The creator of a bunch of really cool Indie games like Chalk, Noitu love and recently Noitu love 2 has created an arcade style game with a Zelda theme.  It’s pretty darn fun, full of lots of fast paced action tons  of explosions and has gamepad support (Xbox 360 controller!).

Download here

So make sure to check out the game and if you like this sort of stuff (can’t see how you wouldn’t) go to his website and check out all of his stuff.

Was looking around the internet for some free games to play, and came across these games…  It seems that you can make some pretty decent games using Javascript.  Interesting how this whole area of web game development is pretty much left in the dark thanks  to Flash.  Still pretty cool that you do not require any sort of plugin to play these games, just click and play

Ok, so as I think I alluded in the past, I’ve been practicing really crappy stuff, to make sure I’ve got the basics down. And there was one thing in particular I was playin around with making that was really… really crappy looking. I spent a little bit of time on it last night (probably a total of about a half-hour’s time, not including spacing out here and there) and it started to look semi-decent.

Mind you, this is, by no means, anything revolutionary, nor even interesting, of a game. In fact, I acknowledge fully this game has been built a million times over by god knows how many people, but I’m just practicing basic concepts, so gimme a break, eh?

Anyway, here’s how it looked after miniscule tweaking and actually becoming mildly playable for a minute or two. And I certainly hope you have no trouble recalling what this game is. It should be reeeeeally obvious.

Overly simple, no?

I was looking around the Away3D blog, seeing whats the latest for there 3D game engine and found a link to this very interesting game.  It seems to be a 3D game made in flash that runs pretty smooth.  The creators seem to have adopted the whole Animal Crossing scrolling world effect, interesting stuff.  The game is just about DS quality in the graphics, which is pretty good considering the limitations flash has when it comes to doing 3D stuff.  The company that made this game demo; Dangerous Rabbits seem to be putting there focus on doing 3D games in Flash, which is pretty cool…

I must admit Microsoft is doing pretty well in the game development scene these days…  With the birth of XNA, they have made it really easy for just about anyone with a little bit of basic programming knowledge to make a high quality video game pretty easily.  But it seems with there new project Kudo they are going to try and make it even easier for people to make games!  “Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input.”  So really with this new tool it will make it super easy for just about anyone to make a game.  In a sense it’s like RPG Maker but way more mainstream…  So yeah, *claps* bravo Microsoft, bravo.

How much do I really know about Adobe flash?………about two hours worth of joggling program tools around. Well, it’s not much, but I designed and put this animation together for my website: rezenstudio.com. I never thought I’d develop any animations, but I guess having a passion for art has driven me to expand in other areas. I do intend to learn and understand this program and hopefully develop more assets very soon.

I thought I would show off a bit more concept work done by one of our artists for our new game…  Enjoy!

This is just some of the new concept art, hope you like it!  Stay tuned, more to come