Blog for John Coyne at GarageGames.com

Random maps

John Coyne — 2008-06-24T12:42:03+00:00

I thought I'd take a break from bubble choo choo's and try a spot of 3d. The results are the beginnings of a random urban map generator, here is a screen:

Obviously my next task will be to put little houses in most of the blank concrete parts.

Another Bubble Choo Choos update

John Coyne — 2008-06-17T13:18:27+00:00

Well. Apart from a few small things, Bubble Choo Choos is looking pretty much finished. Now I just need to decide what I'm going to do with it!

Bubble Choo Choo's update

John Coyne — 2008-04-18T10:47:12+00:00

An update on the progress of Bubble Choo Choo's.

So far, everyone who has played it wants another shot, including myself, so thats promising! The core features of the game are done, the only thing missing are some pinball style bonuses and lots of polish.

I'm hoping to pin an installer on the current version today and get some friends and family trying it out during the weekend. If I get the bonuses added next week, I'll hopefully have some form of public beta in a week or two.

Bubble Choo Choo's

John Coyne — 2008-04-11T09:02:44+00:00

Another slightly off the wall idea of mine. Imagine pong crossbreed with pang and you get Bubble Choo Choo's. Bubble gum powered locomotives (told you it was off the wall!) chuff along the bottom of the screen, pumping out bubbles and polluting the atmosphere. The player cleans up the environment with 2 pong paddles and a ball, popping bubbles and raking in huge scores to impress his or her friends.
Like the abandoned Balloon Slide I'm hoping to get a pinball feel to this, unlike that other game, this one is quite fun to play on the prototype. No scoring atm or even lives, but its quite fun trying to hit a stack of bubbles in one flight of the ball.

Balloon Slide

John Coyne — 2006-04-26T18:06:18+00:00

Balloon Slide

Its a simple idea I'm working on just now, "whizz down a slide picking up balloons". The idea came to me at 3am during a severe bout of flu, which is probably why its simple and a bit silly. The user clicks the mouse to draw a slide, the player avatar appears at the top, slides down to the bottom, and any balloons hit on the way go pop and add to your score. Theres a few elements to the game i'd like to fit in:

1. Slides should be generated quickly, just one or two clicks.
2. Scores should be huge, pinball type scores, 1 million should be a BAD score.
3. The game should be fast and exciting.
4. It should be possible to get in big loops like a rollercoaster, probably through item drops, to keep in line with point 1.

I just finished a basic demo today and took some screens:

www.thewilderzone.co.uk/balloon/devshot.gif

GID j

John Coyne — 2006-04-08T22:29:37+00:00

Another GID! :)
What am i doing...

My reasoning

On seeing the theme of "extreme forces" I lept on a military game with a touch of stealth, a bit like top down metal gear. Then i realised I probably couldnt get it done in the allocated time. So i though about a side on stealth game where u leap/drop from platforms to avoid enemies, sneak up and perform an awesome death move. I was almost lured away from a military game to another sim type game, when I thought that weather can also be an extreme force. In this case, I was thinking of a power bar which grants weater summoning abilities so the player can ruin a new human colony being built on an alien grave yard. Then I realised it would require quite a lot of art and some nice animation, something I cant really do. So, i settled on a lightgun type game, only I didnt want to do something to much like operation wolf.

What I want

Well, like all lightgun type games things appear on screen and you click them to blow them up. I'd like to make it feel different somehow, maybe even build it into something involving more strategy (not this weekend though). So the idea is the player controls a satalite in space with a huge laser on it, the display shows an area the player is responsible for monitoring (or it will) and radioactive icons show rockets that have been launched. Click the rockets before they leave the screen (the earths atmosphere) and the disappear.

What I got
As was said in #gameinaday "oh, its a clickemup". Most importantly, I got something finished, which is what I really wanted to do, and thankfully, learned a lot too :) I would have liked to have done something a bit slower and tense. Maybe slow all the rockets down, and put in portable missile silo's you can scan for with the right mouse button. I really wanted to keep it simple enough to finish though.

Heres a screen of the final game Which can be downloaded here www.thewilderzone.co.uk/gid/atomic.zip

Saturday Sep 17 23:33

John Coyne — 2005-09-17T23:33:59+00:00

Game in a day, impaling

blobs - http://www.thewilderzone.co.uk/gid/blobs.zip

I've been rolling the idea of a management/social structure game around my head for a long time now, and when someone pointed out an alternative interpretation of impaling, something went "ding" in my head. I admire games like populous, where you have indirect control over the people and a few simple rules, so i was going for something like that, giving the player just a few things interesting things to do.

The idea is a management wargame, you have to manage the physical attributes of your units through selected breeding (it takes place in an alpha male society), and a single food source which an opposing colony will forage for food. A huge part of the game is selecting which lucky unit gets to be the alpha male. Also important is deciding which units to turn into soldiers, as soldiers consume food and kill opposing units, but they dont gather food for your people. (i'm not sure i've explained this very well, but i have been coding for pretty much most of the day now).

The GID entry is done now, sadly incomplete, but at least it does something without crashing or throwing up errors. So far you can cycle the males and females (using the arrow keys) and set a new alpha male (space bar). I did manage to get them breeding, but I commented that code out as they dont die properly and eventually the screen gets flooded with little red blobs :o I'm sure most people will agree this is a bad thing.

I think there are 2 main reasons I didnt get finished:
1. i dont know torque 2D well enough (bought it a few weeks earlier and pretty much only went through the basic tutorial).
2. I didnt plan my design thoroughly enough, and, when that became obvious, instead of going back to doing my thinking on paper, i thought i could hack away at it on the screen.

I still want to do a social structure/management game, so I intend to take a few days rest, go back to working on this, and plan it properly this time :D