The Friday Project - Update 2

Games are like buses

Colour Cycling

The idea of keeping the game mostly monochrome, with a few different shades (light, medium, dark, black) seems to work quite well. It also makes it relatively easy to do the game art, because there isn't really any to speak of. However, I did make a simple change earlier in the week and added colour cycling. The idea was to keep the shades whilst changing the hue a little every frame. This didn't take a huge amount of time, because there are many examples of HSL to RGB code kicking around on the web, and I even discovered a Python module that I hadn't heard of.

I showed it to a few people at work, and they seemed to like it. Either that or they were humouring me to make me go away, in which case I didn't get the hint.

Mostly Invisible

Many of today's changes had no visible effect on the game, as they were just laying the groundwork for new features. For example, the level creation code has been pulled apart and restructured to allow for more than one path through a level. It should also be a little faster as I took the opportunity to rip out some redundant calculations.

Twist Pilot

I can't go much further without mentioning Twist Pilot. Games are like buses, in that you wait for one for ages, then all of a sudden a few come along at once. That certainly seems to be the case with games in the genre of guiding a spinning object through a landscape, as I discovered on Monday when a colleague told me about Twist Pilot. It was developed by CrashLabGames and published by Zynga.

Here's their promo on YouTube.



My view is that it certainly seems to be be nicely done, if a little slow. It's clearly their take on the genre and it has a distinct, colourful and friendly look. It has what must be a disappointingly low number of downloads, but to be fair it does only seem to have been out for a week on Google Play. Personally I hope it does really well, because my game is clearly in the same genre, and I'd like to think that there's a market for such things. In fact, I'm delighted to see that other developers like this genre.

Some Archaeology - PyWeek 3

Regular visitors to this blog will probably notice that I like to take part in game programming competitions, such as Ludum Dare. At one point I even combined this with my love of Python programming and took part in PyWeek 3. It wasn't my best piece of work by a long way, but the screenshot might look familiar.

Yes, it's another spinning object game. Clearly when I'm not programming games about deranged  robots, I'm programming games about spinning objects.

Dropbox

Today, I didn't start working on my main development PC as my wife was home and wanted to use two screens to study. Instead, I worked on a small HP netbook that we use mostly for going online and not a lot else. Fortunately, I have Eclipse installed on it for those times when I can't get to the main machine. The workspace for this project is stored on Dropbox, and the Eclipse environments are set up identically, so it's very easy to move between PCs.

In fact, most of my development now takes place on Dropbox because it is so incredibly useful to park my work from one computer and pick it up again on another computer somewhere else in the house. It also didn't hurt that I got an extra 50GB merely for switching on my new phone last week. But even if it was only 2GB, I would still find it useful.

Give it a Whirl

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for - the playable snapshot. As I already said, not much has changed superficially, but by all means give it a whirl. And don't come after me for making bad puns.


Scan the QR code, or click this link to download the latest build of Whirling Frenzy to your Android phone.

I'm always happy to hear what you think. Feedback is always good, even when it's bad.

Xbox 360 Batman Arkham City Game of the Year Edition (Google Affiliate Ad)