As time has passed, I’ve worked on a number of small games of my own. Below you’ll find details on the ones on which I am currently working, as well as some that were a little before their time.
Current Projects
Cell
Cell is a 2D puzzle game similar to a cross between sudoku and minesweeper. At the start of the game, the player is shown a grid of coloured squares. The objective of the game is to change the colours of the squares such that each square has adjacent colouring to the squares around it. Doing so reveals extra squares around the previous ones, and the game continues until the screen fills up and is solved. Each game is different and guaranteed to be solvable.
Snake and Ladders
Snake, but in 2.5 dimensions! It’s the classic game, but now there are ladders across the map which lift or descend the snake to different coloured plains. The snake will not collide with anything on a different plane to it, which leads to more convoluted gameplay.
Fuse-Breaker
A burglary game of two parts. First, the
circuit mode, where the player is shown the layout of the area they must infiltrate. They are also given access to the electronic circuit layout. If you’re caught in the light, it’s an immediate game over, so you must plan your approach carefully. Electricity in this game propagates slowly. The main fuse box holds it for five seconds and lights will hold it for 3 second each.
Next is the game mode. The fuse box begins
counting down immediately, so the player must act fast. They have to seek out and open enough safes to meet the target for the level. They must also make sure they can get out of the building in time. If you can do that, level complete!nds and each light delays it by 3 seconds, Additionally you can drag and drop extra delays called “fuses”, which allow the player to control the flow of light.
You can play the current version of Fuse-Breaker in your browser by following this link.
Unnamed Space Game
This one’s under wraps for now. Look out for articles in the future as I continue working on it.
It’s a space game. I can tell you that much.
Abandoned / Shelved Projects
Drop
Drop isn’t abandoned, it’s just on hold until I can get some physics kinks with Box2D sorted out in my head. Drop is a physics puzzle where the player has no direct control of the character – a ball – which simply falls through the level. All players can do is tap the screen (or hold space) to slow time, and release to speed it up. Some objects are affected by time changes, some are not. The player must synchronise the slowable and non-slowable objects such that the ball can continue falling and reach the end goal.
Noodle Jump
This was my first Javascript and HMTL5 Canvas game. It’s basically a doodle jump style game with incredibly basic graphics and mechanics. This was mostly about getting things going.
Noodle Shoot
My second Javascript and HTML5 Canvas game was a little more ambitious. I had enemies, shooting, different weapons. in fact, some of the methodology I picked up here wound up in my unnamed space game, so it was definitely a useful exercise. This is also where I properly learned javascript inheritance.
Fun fact: The Javascript book I had available didn’t cover prototypal inheritance. So that was fun.
Untitled Cube World
My first full project where I made my own engine. Towards the end things were getting fairly substantial. I had an infinitely generating perlin 3D world of caverns. There were shaders everywhere (bloom, HDR, SSAO, etc) and even proper shadowing. I got stymied by a few engine bugs that required a major rewrite and decided I would move to a different framework from the discontinued Managed DirectX.