Over the years the forum has run a number of game development challenges, each with a specific theme.  The themes are a great way to limit the scope of development, as the challenges are often only a few weeks long.  The emphasis is about trying new ideas rather than making a large complex game.

I’ve been slacking off on game development lately and trying to think of ways to get back into it, I think these themes are the key.  I’m going to go back over the themes of the challenges and try them myself.  Even though the challenges are long finished, I can still use the idea for each theme as a grounding point to get started.

Some of the themes/challenges that have been done:

• Horizontal scroller with a boss battle
• Options (ship options)
• Unconventional weaponry
• Supercharge weapons
• Player is not allowed to fire own projectiles
• Laser Mayhem
• Chain reaction
• Use you foes
• Air and land
• Multi-directional shooting
• Friendly units
• Evolution
• Tentacles
• Time
• Bullet cancelling

Some great ideas there, I can’t wait to get into it.

Launch the game via webstart.

• Tweaked enemy explosions
• Fixed the aliasing in the player graphic
• Played around with enemy shot patterns, making boss enemies harder but normal enemies a bit easier

Screenshots, click to enlarge:

As always, you can launch the game via webstart.

• Allowed the player to shoot in all directions.
• Tweaked the enemies straight shot.

As always, you can launch the game via webstart here.

In the future I plan to add much content to the game:

• More levels
• More enemies and more variety between them
• Some player powerups
• More music
• Some visually interesting backgrounds

My entry for this session is called “theta”.  I tried a few new things for this session:

1. Use a restricted color palette from the start
2. Design a mockup of how the game looks before coding

This differs from how I usually work.  I usually jump straight into the code and start moving things around.  I’ll create a new graphic and use it as I need to.  As a result, most of my small shmup projects tend to be disjointed and don’t really have a consistent theme.

Screenshot:

Launch the game via java webstart.

Controls:

• WASD to move your ship around
• Mouse 1 to fire
• Mouse to aim

The number in the bottom right of the screen is your health.  5 hits and it’s game over.

I’m very pleased with how this one turned out.  The graphics are still plain, but they are consistent so that adds something.  The music was created in Reason 4.

There are 10 levels.  Action really heats up around level 7 and I’m not sure level 10 is possible to beat!

Launch via webstart.

Controls:

e-s-d-f to move around.  Hold mouse1 to absorb bullets, release mouse1 to start shooting them.  They head towards your mouse pointer.

You get points for destroying a blue dot, the amount of points is larger depending on how long you shoot for.

The theme for this game comes from the first shmup-dev rapid prototype session. I didn’t participate at the time, but I’m going back to the old themes as they are a great creative and learning exercise.

The current test application for the engine is an endless shmup.  Waves of ships come at you, you shoot them down while dodging bullets.  It’s mindless simple fun!

Click here to play via webstart.

The 194x like ship graphics are from a GPL graphics pack long forgotten. Most of the other graphics are from the awesome and amazing classic Tyrian.

Click to launch invasion via webstart.

This game is the most unfinished of the bunch; It doesn’t feature sound/music or a numerical score.

In the game, the invaders don’t shoot, however once you shoot them a little helpless spaceman pops out and gravity takes over.  The falling spacemen slowly chip away at your bases and it’s also game over if one clips your ship.  It’s fairly comical to see the little spacemen splat for some reason, so this game is fun to play for a few minutes.

Launch planetesimal via Java web start.

I like how this one turned out for a number of reasons:

• It’s reasonably “complete” with music, high scores and a start/end
• It’s fun to play for a couple of minutes at least

Success!

My entry for the first game is warpball (A remake of Pong).  It’s written in Java and uses the lwjgl for OpenGL bindings.

Click to launch warpball via webstart.

Given that it’s constructed using Java, this should work on OSX, Windows and Linux.