Posts Tagged ‘arcade’

  • The Burd is coming.. sneak peek

    Developing games in your spare time is always troublesome when the real-life workload ramps up. And it’s no exception for me right now. But in between insane schedules and family commitments I am ploughing all of my free time into a new arcade action game.

    The gorgeous pixel artwork is by Ilija Melentijevic, and we’ve got big plans for a series of games featuring our feathered game hero “Burd Reynolds”. This first outing see’s him rescuing cute green blobs from alien critters. We’re not actually sure why yet, but it’s fun to play all the same πŸ™‚

    Here’s a sneak peak of the game, grabbed from the version I’ve just committed to svn:

    Burd Lazor is coming ...

    The Burd is coming… during 2009 hopefully, but I should know better than to ever quote dates in a public place πŸ™‚

  • Jack’s Beach Blitz

    Jack’s Beach Blitz is a new game from the fine folks at 8-bit Rocket. They have been posting about theΒ  development process for a few weeks now (you can read it all on their blog). Originally starting life as a Pacman styled game, it’s now much more of Gauntlet meets Wizard of Wor. You play Jack, a slightly cycedelic coloured orange who has to traverse each level, blasting the baddies, teleporting, picking up bonuses and ultimately trying to collect your girl before pegging it to the exit.

    Monster spawning generators can be shot (but take a lot of your limited ammo supply), you can also pick-up power-ups such as freeze or instant kill. But without taking out at least a few of the generators they just keep on coming! They also move pretty speedily (as do you), so you don’t really have time to run away from them. Thankfully they are pretty dumb, so more often that not you can evade them quickly, but if you don’t do something about the number of them you’ll soon get overwhelmed.

    Graphically it’s obvious the 8-bit Rocket team could do with a talented artist onboard (sorry guys!). The graphics are far from terrible, but do get cluttered on later levels and have that “grid like” look to them, which a skilled pixeller can avoid easily. In-game the animations are cute, and things move along at a very nippy pace. The main menu is a bit of a jumble though, with mixed visual cues. Some careful spacing here would do wonders. It was also really quite hard to visually differentiate between something that would do you damage, or do you good, so that was more trial and error.

    As for the audio – it’s great πŸ™‚ Lots of big sounds and rolling effects. Glad to see you got to use that music too guys!

    Aesthetics aside it’s the gameplay that counts, and JBB has in this in spades. There’s a nice puzzle element (unlock things that block your girl), there’s the solid arcade element (shoot, and shoot fast + avoid) and there’s the whole time aspect too. Take too long and you’ll be swamped.

    It’s nice to see a real solid arcade blaster out there. Give it a play!

  • New Game Release – Pumpkin Dash

    I wanted to create something quick and fun for Halloween, so I came up with Pumpkin Dash.

    You are a candy collecting pumpkin, and you must zoom around the graveyard collecting as many sweets as possible while avoiding everything else. Skulls, ghosts, bats and tomb stones are out to get you.

    The Witches Hats will give you either a trick or a treat when collected – so it’s up to you if you dare take them!

    I had fun writing this, definitely my fastest turn-around for a game yet (although I could still do better if I didn’t tinker so much!)

    Update: You can now play this game on Kongregate.

  • fMAME – It had to happen sooner or later :)

    Over on yvern.com they’ve released the first version of fMAME – a Flash port of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It doesn’t have any sound support yet, and in the debug Flash player is a little slow, but it’s still a damned fine piece of work! Several older games are supported (1943, Hyper Sports, Galaga, etc) but it’s great to see this classic emulator ported to AS3.

    Click the screenie to play.

    Press the 5 key to insert a coin, arrow keys = movement, A = fire button 1, S = fire button 2.

    fMAME

    fMAME

  • Cannon Fighter Released

    Today I released my first ever true retro remake: Cannon Fighter. It’s a remake of an old 8-bit MSX computer game. A very rare game infact, so rare that the overwhelming majority of people will have never heard of it, or played it. But that’s no bad thing! Everyone wants to widen their gaming horizons, right? πŸ˜‰

    You take on the role of a cannon protecting a supply dump in the desert, and must stave off the relentless tank attacks. You can retreat up to 3 times, but once you hit the base it’s all or nothing!

    This is a pixel perfect remake and bar a few exceptions it follows the original game to the core. I hope you enjoy it, and if not at least be pleased to know how much I used to love this game when I was a kid πŸ™‚