Bloop bloop so much time so little updates so here's a new game:

AGwaK4: Herbert's Island Adventure

DOWNLOAD HERE (PC Version)

DOWNLOAD HERE (MAC OS XVersion)

It's a little platformer that plays kind of like my first Kitty game. What's different is the framework - Unity3D. Other than that it has 3D sprites on 2d tilesets. All in all a pretty interesting way to get to know Unity. It's kind of still a beta as always, but it shouldn't have any showstopper bugs anymore.

It also runs on mobiles so I guess I'll get that ready some time in the near future.

Screenshots:

It's time for some 3d! I've experimented with 3d platformers for a while and now I believe I can make something that's at least playable. The tacked-on extra dimension certainly causes me a few headaches. There are a lot of new problems to work around, like the camera system and a different kind of collisions. 3d modeling is quite an interesting experience, but I'm still not getting it quite right - it'll show.

Here's what it looks like so far:

Pipes. Just like at work.

Something's wrong with the road!

Now that my computer has died I gotta reinstall all my development enviroments again. Fun. Back your stuff up regularly, folks. All my projects have survived.

Yey! AGwaK Adventures is complete. So, what can you expect from this game?

• It's relatively short and not very difficult
• Herbert the Pond Hippo is a playable character
• Lots of nonsense
• Robots, Witches and Monsters
• Real useful advice so you'll grow into a dependable and hard-working adult person thing because that is so damn fun and everyone expects it of you
• What?!
• This is a RC release because. Just because. I tested it very thoroughly, but bugs can always slip through. Lemme know if you find any - Thanks!

That's it! Here's another pretty little screenshot:

He *IS* a pond hippo, you know.

So, yeah... Only one thing left to say:

GO DOWNLOAD HERE AND PLAY IT OKAY! (Windows Standalone)

Other versions will follow soon.

Thanks for playing!

Yes! Progress...!! The game itself is finished. A few things are still missing, like a menu, a bit of polishing, some ending animations, and the music. Once that's all done I'll release it. Here's a screenshot:

Is it a trap?! WHO KNOWS! (most likely)

I'm gonna work on that for the next few days. Until then!

Yeah! So, adventure games. Back in the 90s, the Germans had a crazy love for adventure games for some reason. They bought a lot of them. Nobody knows why! They're just like that, those funny Germans.

But they were right about adventure games being really cool! That's why I have a few of them in the works. One is AGwaK Adventures:

It's about 70% done, too! So rejoice, Germans! This'll probably be released in a few weeks or so. We'll see. I'm quite flakey and a super special snowflake so I hope I'll manage. (I probably will. But no promises.)

Back to adventure gaming in general: Adventure Game Studio is cool. It's a software thing for making adventures without too much trouble. Of course you can also go totally nuts with it if you know some programming. People have made platformers and rpgs with it, too. What I like about it is that every few weeks, you can find a few new games in their forums. So GO THERE and have a good, old retro adventure time!

See you!

OK! So, nothing much as been going on so I guess I'll release Kitty 3 for AIR now. It shouldn't have any showstopper bugs anymore. Gamepad support is still pending, and so is the soundtrack.

AGwaK3 1.0 for Windows

AGwaK3 1.0 for any platform with Adobe AIR (.air file)

There also is a demo for Android devices HERE or in the Android Market on your device.

By the way! This version has a few new secret levels the older versions didn't have.

Thanks for playing!!

I have erased a number of bugs in this game so far. Since I probably won't find them all just by myself, I'm releasing a beta version. I'd be grateful for bug reports. Right now this'll only work on Windows. Other versions will follow when most of the bugs are gone.

In the meantime, Sean Cameron is working on the soundtrack. At the moment, the game sports my own, uh, "music". I'm hoping that by the end of the beta phase, the soundtrack is complete and the game can be played by everyone properly on any OS Flash or AIR is available for.

Only download it if you don't mind suicidical save game files, inconsistent music, dead ends or showstopper bugs! Gam-X-plode!

Bug reports can go in that comment thing below or can be sent per e-mail. Thanks for your help, internet!

AGwaK3 BETA DOWNLOAD - don't distribute for now

05.04.2011: The beta got a small update. See changelog in the help file for more info.

Okay! The game is done. That was an interesting experience. It also was slightly more work than my other games. I had to code functions for animating tile sheets and drawing maps. Most game dev tools I've used so far take care of that themselves.

SO WHERE IS THE GAME?! Before releasing it, I still want to test it thoroughly so I won't have to update it too much later on.

BY THE WAY! The magnificient Sean Cameron has decided to make music for AGwaK3. He made the music for AGwaK 1 and 2, too! This is very very awesome. Thanks, Mr. Cameron!

Ooh! Arrows!

So, what do kitty bytes look like on the inside?!

If you make a game in Adobe AIR for a mobile platform, things must be horribly optimized or the game will be slow. (This game is already a wee bit slow, but it works.) So, in order to make this run reasonable, it's necessary to implement a bitmap tile engine (not the case when using vectors).

Basically, that means you get to use an array or something like that!

A 2d Array:

Wee! This is an array. You access it by using its x an y coordinates. The top left one is x0 y0 and equals 1! Fun. Like searching something in an atlas. The numbers repesent tiles. The game loops through these numbers and pastes the correct tile on your screen. Back in the goode olde days, they called this blitting, I think.

It's a good thing there are programs that create these tile arrays for you! One is called Mappy. You can create your tiles on a single image and it splits them into blocks and gives them a value. Pretty handy:

Yes, it's really fun!! I also made my objects into tiles. The game reads them at the beginning of a level and places them. There's still a bit of extra coding necessary. A few of my levels do something special which needs separate coding. Bosses are a good examples for that.

When coding in AIR, you'll use a C/Java-like language. Pretty handy:

Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?! Well, to me, it does. That's all that counts!! :3 That's some AI code up there. The act[x] array keeps track of my game objects. The [].xs value refers to the horizontal speed in pixels, for example. [].astart and [].aend are the start and ending frames of animations. But enough of that!

This my first time doing something with multi touch. It's pretty though business because I can't get it to work 100% correctly! The jump button is a bit laggy. Here's how it looks on a mobile thingie:

You can hide the control buttons. It also supports hardware keys, which is always better, anyway. I dislike touch controls for games like this. For adventures it's great, though!

Now, that was fun! See you some other time!!

And here's a Kitty game progress upate: ALMOST DONE. PHEW.

So, what is going on right now? Two things:

1. A platformer for PC and Android devices (possibly iPhone, too):

It's a bit like my very first game 'A Game with a Kitty' but was made in Adobe Air, so it should be fairly portable. On mobile devices it likes to be a bit slow, so a recent device is recommended. There's a slow mode that makes it play like an old DOS game with a low frame rate. It's about 80% finished.

2. An Adventure Game!! The one I have in the works is at 20%. More info follows some other time. :)

I updated the site to make my life a little easier. The old PHP comment code was a mess and making updates was complicated! So here's an easier page. The comments are now Flash-based and show up on-page. The content is the same as before, though!

I haven't tested the comment app too much, but it should work for now. Please let me know if there are any problems.

I'm having trouble deciding what to develop with. There are so many possibilities it boggles my mind. There's Unity3d, Adobe Flash, HTML5, AGS, Multimedia Fusion 2, Allegro, Blitzbasic and more. So far I've dabbled with all of these, including some NDS development on the side.

I've seen a lot of impressive things from all of these dev packages. In the case of Flash the Poo/Good ratio is about 1000:1, meaning you gotta wade through piles of shit to find the good stuff (such as Flixel and Fancy Pants Adventure). But still, all good.

So, what should I use for my next project? It's most likely going to be a point'n click adventure. I still love doing those. My developlent tool will probably be Flash. 'BUT WHY?!', you may wonder:

So far, I've made an adventure engine that runs decent on grandpa phones like the N95/N97 (and on a PC, of course). It's themed after the Lucas Arts - GUIs: 3rd person, multiple choice dialogues, inventory and so on. It looks like this at the moment:

Now if only mobile phone developers would stop making silly little finger football games and were to focus less on quantity, I'd be happy. But maybe that's not where the money is.

Anyway. Onwards!!

I shall let the following image speak for itself:

Oops indeed!