Greetings, @lace_fire here again with my fourth #1GAM! Due to the busyness of this month, I found that my game was reduced to a little over a week of implementation time. Nonetheless it was still pretty enjoyable and rewarding, though perhaps a little rushed. This month’s theme was “Fire”, and I decided to create a turn-based game in which the classical elements, controlled by the player, set forth to extinguish fire before it takes over all the land. Once again, GIMP was used for image manipulation and the original images were free online. Musink was used for the creation of the sound effects.

Hello, it’s @lace_fire with my third edition to #1GAM! This month’s theme was “Flags” and the name of my game is “Collect the Flags!”. Although at first this game was intended to be a runner, I enjoyed the collision detection enough to decide that it was to be a standard platformer instead. Testing proved to be a little difficult for me, as this game definitely seems to have a higher level of difficulty than my first two editions. The images were all taken from a 1902 classic movie called “A Trip to the Moon” by George Melies. An ambitious piece of cinema for its time, it is also thankfully in the public domain.

Hello, this is @lace_fire again and I’m hosting my second #1GAM entry here, courtesy of Lanatir. This month’s theme was “Doctor” and the name of my game is “Doctor with Heart”. I kept the graphics simple, using Microsoft Word’s shapes to create the characters and expressions. As with “Money Rush”, I tried to limit my hours to 24, but found that the graphics and sprite sheets took longer than the anticipated 8 hours to make. Hopefully as I become more accustomed to creating graphics, this aspect of the game creation will go by more quickly.  I have provided a screenshot of the Tin Man stage below:

Hello, I’m @lace_fire and I’m hosting my first #1GAM here, courtesy of Lanatir. In programming my first game, I tried to limit my hours in developing the game to 16 initially. Once I took into account that I was also going to compose music and modify images, I eventually decided to change my time limitation to 24. Since weekends tend to be fairly busy for me, it was a challenge trying to balance my time in such a way that I could program as well as appreciate my free time. Overall, I found the experience to be challenging yet enjoyable and look forward to the challenge next month as well!

My first game for #OneGameAMonth is called “Money Rush” and is found under Projects. I have provided a screenshot below:

So I had extra time to brain-storm this month due to being away from computers for two weekends and various other reasons. First there was the infinite runner with shooting instead of jumping. I started to question how to go about making it as simple as a jumping infinite runner (which uses just one button) and decided it might not be as simple as I had thought. Then I started thinking about the theme for the month.

The theme for April 2014 #1GAM is Water and I kept thinking about a platformer in the desert. But as I let that idea grow, it quickly became apparent that I didn’t want to do anything straight-forward enough given the time constraints. I was sort of discouraging myself for the April challenge and had to take a step back.

Simple, core idea, coriest of core (reference to corier core). Rain and fire. Rain puts out the fire. Let the player grab/fling the rain. I finished the majority of the game in about 6 hours, but there was no score or end condition. Here’s a screenshot:

You could try to keep the flame alive, or hasten to extinguish it. I was feeling I had gone too simple and that it was boring, but the month was nearly over! So, embrace the simplicity; collect time-based score for both things the player could do and add a nice rain background sound. Play the game here!

For future reference, the extra thinking time this month didn’t help me accomplish anything!

I have signed up for One Game a Month (#1GAM)! The basic premise is to publicly declare your participation and then follow through on it. Getting a game finished monthly forces you to follow through to the end of a project repeatedly, learning new things every month about the process of creating a game. The “rules” are pretty loose, but if you cannot be honest with yourself, you won’t be getting much out of it anyway.

Speaking of which, I sort of put off officially participating until I had already finished my first game… Oh well, gotta have your priorities straight, right? For now you can find it under the Projects Page in the Menu above and it is called EmoSine (<- or just follow the link). The elevator pitch on this game is “Flappybird but with a gravity mechanic.” So far, feedback includes “difficult” and “addictive”, so not bad so far! Of course it could use a few additions as briefly discussed over at my post on html5gamedevs, but I need to get started on April’s game first!

Continuing on with 1GAM, my intention is to follow through on some very simple game ideas. I currently have a list of 6 or 7 that I came up with during a meeting for my full-time job in which I had some spare time. Some of those ideas include: an alternate take on an endless runner, playing with crowd dynamics, learn about the physics engine capabilities of Phaser using a Lego-like building game, something to do with minions, and more!