Silver Ball Cafe

My latest game, Apple Basket, is now live on the Google Play Store!

Help Quetch, a young bloboid, collect fruits that fall from the Tree of All!

With background graphics by @musicgeekstress and music by @alexmmusic1!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasonwesley.AppleBasket_Demo

Silver Ball Cafe's TOJam 2018 game, "Chased By Yeti", will be shown at the TOJam Arcade tomorrow night (Saturday, September 15th)!

The Arcade runs from 7:00pm to 11:00pm, but "Chased By Yeti" will be shown from 7:30pm to 8:00pm!

The TOJam Arcade is being held at the Toronto Media Arts Centre, at 32 Lisgar Street: https://www.tomediaarts.org/location

My latest game, Race to Sparklepop is now available (and has been available for a while) on the Google Play Store!

I completely forgot about posting this here, and I had intended to post this prior to TOJam13, so obviously I kinda forgot about it -- better late than never! I felt that I should talk about this one as this game started as part of TOJam 12 last year, and my very first Game Jam.  The prompt was "Prepare for Disappointment" and I designed a difficult racing game with balloons.  Over three days I created a three-player, crowd-around-the-laptop game, but wanted to expand upon it a bit.

Since I had Game Maker Studio and Android export abilities, I thought about developing it for mobile phones.  Looking at Spaceteam as an inspiration, I set about to recreating the race, but allowing everyone access to their own screen, complete with a map and "ghost balloons" (like Mario Kart) so you could see where your friends were!

The music was made by Alex Maletich.  He was the musician for the original TOJam version, and he was also the inspiration on making this release, as he wanted to make a better version of his music and created three original tracks for the Android version!

What I'm incredibly proud of is the networking code's auto-connecting function. Game Maker offers mobile networking options, but typically you need to know the Server's IP address.  Now, I didn't want to make the user input IP addresses or anything like that -- the less complications the better!  So I set about trying to find a solution.

Here's what my networking code does:

- When you start a Multiplayer game, it opens a Listener and starts looking for a Server Signal for 3 seconds.

- If it finds a Server Signal, it can get the IP address from the signal and sets up the game as a Client to that Server.  It then shuts down the Listener.

- If it doesn't find a Server Signal in 3 seconds, it assumes that there are no Servers around, and creates one itself.

- The Server sends out "Server Signals" every half-second for any other players who wish to connect, until the player running the Server starts the game.

If there was anything that I would change about this, I probably would have added the ability to add more than 4 players at once (because I wanted to see a game with 20 balloons flying about the screen) -- but I deliberately put a restriction on it because I would likely burn out a phone or two if a lot of people were playing at once!

My latest Game Jam game, Chased By Yeti, is now available to play in your browser!

This game is a result of the 3-day game jam known as TOJam, where this year’s theme is “Winning is for Losers”.  Thanks to @ravenworks, his suggestion of mountain climbers got stuck in my head and wouldn’t let go :)

It is a game where you can have up to four players work together, but if they’re feeling up to it, one person can control all four climbers simultaneously. (I seem to like to develop unusual control schemes.)

There are three objectives to this game: Make it to the top of the mountain, Do not let the tethers holding everyone together break, and oh yeah, Avoid the Yeti!

This is the final week that Space Shooty 2016 will be up on the iOS Store.  If you want to keep this game on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll need to download it before January 30th, 2017.

Why is it disappearing?  It’s simple.  I wanted to learn the entire process from start to finish of making a game, and while making Space Shooty 2016, I got the opportunity to port to iOS and I also got an Apple Developer License.  However, the Apple Developer License is on a yearly renewal, and I’ve decided that I’ve learned what I needed from the process, and so I’m letting it lapse.

The whole of learning game development and even the iOS infrastructure was confusing, but it was a learning process!  I’m glad that I decided to go forward and see just what goes into the development of a mobile game.

Android players do not need to worry -- my Developer Account for the Google Play Store is still running, so it’ll stay up there for as long as I can support it!

there are some great project ideas here :D How far along is Munchie Mix?

So I wanted to show you all some of the games that I started working on while I was also developing Space Shooty 2016.  As with all game creation, there's a gathering of ideas, and sometimes you have to just stop working on the main project for a little while and see what sparks the imagination!

Some of these games might be further developed, some of them have been stalled for quite some time.  But I've had a long run of games just percolating in my brain and each one has its challenges.  Sometimes it's a solution that's so simple that the function is already hard-coded into the program (as I discovered so frequently when making Space Shooty 2016).  Sometimes, though, it just requires a little digging and Googling to find the solution - or at least something relatively similar that you can figure out the rest.

When I first got the Game Maker software, one of the first games I actually wanted to emulate was a game similar to Manic Miner.  I used to play a game on the Commodore 64 called The Dark Tower, and while it shares the same title as a Steven King novel, there is no relation.  In that game, your character is turned into an egg-like creature and is forced to collect gems in a number of stages.  I have never completed more than 10 of these stages as I was never good with the game but I liked the music.

I decided to try my hand at designing something in that vein.  I simply called the game "64Walker" and tried my hand at making a Manic Miner-type game.  I got as far as building a character, controlling him, and creating some unique monsters that simply walked back and forth.  I looked to @davidxn's creatures in Crystal Towers 2 at this time to see how they managed to have so much variety over the varying terrain and yet never walked off the edges.

I built a Crab Race game that I created over the course of a weekend.  Based on an actual Crab Race and created based on the memories of creating a similar program back in the days of the Commodore 64 (and yes, I'm dating myself!) It technically does not rely on any user input, it is a decision maker or friendship-breaker as I define it.  I want to work on this one and offer a one-time purchase so that you can add more crabs and change the names, so that you can go from a 2-crab yes/no decision, all the way up to a 12-crab decision with custom names of who should be picking up the dinner bill.

Firefighter was another design that I just wanted to see how much I could build into a small codeset.  Fires randomly explode on the screen and you tap your finger to spray some water on them.  You can also spray water just onto the ground and puddles would form.  It was a simple collision engine that looked at every object and determined if water touched fire, and if so, both decreased in size.  But, like real fires, they could spread and multiply if they weren’t dealt with quickly...

Munchie Mix was a experimental project.  I wanted it to be a Curiosity piece, where it would not have any instructions but let people discover things along the way.  I built this one in a night when my wife was munching on ...well, Munchies so that's where the sprites (munchies and the bowl) and concept came from.  I don't want to say too much to spoil the discovery of the program :)

I also tried my hand at a little Procedural Generation.  However it's not "perfect" and the code is rather lengthy (and looking at it now, it doesn’t really work at ALL), but what I have is that each block looks to the other blocks immediately to the north/south/east/west and determines if a path is possible.  If I wanted to I could probably remake this one fairly cleanly, but I need a reason to build something procedurally-generated.

Morning Ritual was a game that came from me doing a "Ludum Dare" on a weekend when I was just getting settled into Game Maker.  I stayed at home and focused on making a game around the concept "Ritual", and I went with "making coffee" -- I never entirely finished it but I intended the game to get faster and faster the more cups you played, and it would get more and more jittery as you imbibed the caffeine.  Yes, that was supposed to be a coffee maker.  XD

Robot Rebel was another project I'd like to revisit in the future.  I wanted to create something for my nephews and niece who are enraptured by Space Shooty 2016.  I wanted to make a game where you had to control a robot, LOGO-style ("Forward, Forward, Turn Right, Forward, Pick Up Ball") and therefore had to set up a Programming scheme.  I realize that programming a Programming Language is HARD.  I also make it more complex by introducing a Robot that would willingly ignore steps and you had to work around his self-destructive tendencies!

Shooty Idle is a followup in the Space Shooty universe where the Shooty Ship goes and mines asteroids.  You can use the metals refined from the asteroids to build new components to your home base, which would include additional storage, additional fuel tanks, and even additional spaceships to help you mine more asteroids.  As you can probably tell from the name, it's an "Idle Clicker".  I've run into two roadblocks with this one: How do you test a game like this which is dependant on waiting, and furthermore, how do you handle numbers higher than the 64-bit integer that is restrictive of modern-day computers?  These are questions that I continue to work on during my downtime.

(I also just found a Game Maker extension built for solving the 64-bit question.)

And finally, Wander About came about from an idea that @ravenworks had.  It's an exploration game with no end goal but with a very intricate and detailed environment.  Your character could walk outside into the backyard and just by kneeling, might find a worm, or a trail of ants, or even a dung beetle.  Or they could climb a tree and find a bird's nest.  Or maybe they'd look at the fence and notice that they could peel the old paint.  Stuff like that.  It's hard to build a game that involves every possible possibility, however, but it would be a nice, relaxing exercise to just add more and more things to do based on user suggestions.

My current projects, Race to Sparklepop and Project Apple Basket, are still being made/reworked.  Race to Sparklepop's current challenge is to get multiple mobile phones to see each other (I'm learning the netcode function of Game Maker), and Apple Basket... well, I have a lot of little things going on with that one, and I don't want to speak about it too much until I have something more concrete.  But here's a cute little critter I recently made for the game!  Can you guess his purpose?

You might notice that on those four windows, A couple of balloons appear to be missing.

I am unable to figure out why.

Today, I have been working a little bit more on “Race to Sparklepop” in a different manner.  As I managed to create a game in three days, I’m also trying to see if I can adapt this game for mobile in a short time frame.  It’s definitely not a 3-day race here, but I have been working on network code for about three more days beyond the scope of TOJam, off-and-on.

Today, I went downtown to a cafe, sat in front of my laptop, and for roughly three hours I spent time learning how netcode works in Game Maker. It’s a tricky system when you don’t understand how Buffers even work.

This evening, I returned back to the laptop and spent another three hours looking at code and examples.  One of the real troubles of having to figure out netcode is how to get mobile phones to locate each other as they will have different IP addresses.  However, before I get to that point, I wanted to just figure out how it works on one computer with multiple running instances.  Once I have that comfortably correct, the next step will be adding the code to find other mobile devices, and that should be... easy?  Maybe?

I have programmed “Host” and “Join” buttons.  This is fairly straightforward when thinking about multiplayer experiences -- one player Hosts the game and the others all Join to that Host.  On both sides, though, the code looks different.  The Server does not state an IP address, but the Client needs to know where the Server is located (and as of right now, is locked to one IP - my laptop - and even then, it’s just the default “self”: 127.0.0.1.  I’ll need to figure out how to determine that dynamically.)  Both sides have Buffers, which is their set of information that feeds back and forth amongst each other.  All I’ll be using the Buffers for, aside from initialization variables (Random Seed, Player #, Starting Time), is for a simple Map so that each player is aware of where the other players are in the race.  The Clients will feed their x/y positions to the Server who will just report all the locations to all the Clients.  I’m not dealing with collision issues as that would likely bring up a number of unusual situations that I’m not ready to bug-hunt just yet (Sparklepop didn’t have Balloon collisions, anyway).

What I really wanted to do was simplify the process for the end-user so that all they have to do is click “multiplayer” and the system would automatically know if there was a server already running and connect to it, and otherwise set up a server for the others to connect to.  In theory, I would have the system automatically searching in the background before even getting to the Multiplayer page.  However, this is beyond my scope of knowledge for now and I’ll revisit it in the future when I feel comfortable with networking and have a firmer grasp on how it might work.

Furthermore, I was having issues trying to figure out why, when a Client joins the Server, that it doesn’t get the same Random Seed that I feed into the Server’s Buffer.  (As my game has a lot of randomization, making a room unique every time, I wanted to ensure that the playing field is fair.) What I ultimately realized was that while I was feeding the information into the Server’s Buffer, I wasn’t sending the Buffer out to the other Clients!  So when they connected, the Server connects to them, loads the Random Seed... and then did nothing.  After 20 different iterations and compilations, I realized the missing part (network_send_packet) and suddenly, everything fell into place!

And then, after getting my “Ah-Ha!” moment, I then went on and three more compiles later, had the system successfully reporting which Player they are (which will determine their balloon colour).

Next up on the docket is to figure out how to use “tilt” controls to move the balloons.  I already have implemented a “tap” function which essentially maps the four directional keys to different parts of the screen, but I want to continue to challenge myself and make a tilt based on the starting position of the phone (so you’re not restricted to holding the phone exactly vertical, for example -- not a natural holding pose).

This past weekend, I spent my time making a brand new game as part of TOJam 12!

The theme for this year’s Game Jam was “Prepare for Disappointment”.  When I was thinking of an idea, I initially was thinking of a simple one-button game where you simply mashed a button over and over, only to pop a balloon, like something out of Bishi Bashi Champ.  However, as the week leading up to the Jam started, I decided that I wanted to try something a little more eager than that.  I wanted to make a racing game!

The concept of TOJam is simple: you get registered, find your spot in the building, and start working!  If you’re a Team, everyone can work together, but if you’re a Solo Superstar (as I was labelled), I can request “Floaters” to help me with different parts.  As such, I had an Audio Floater helping me, Alex Maletich.  I told him my idea, showing him the graphical elements that I had gathered together in preparation for the Jam (as internet was bound to be spotty with 400 people on 400 computers!).

My concept was fairly simple -- have a “safe” zone to learn the controls, then start slowly introducing sharp objects to the area, and then have nothing but sharp objects in a final dash to the finish line.  I built it in three stages: The Toy Block area, which allows for experimentation, the Push Pin area, where I programmed a “slalom”-type system that randomly generated a path but never allowed the path to be completely impassable (and added obstacles in the path if it was wide open), and then finally a final dash in the Staples area where it slowly narrowed down the path.

One of the biggest challenges that I had when making this game was that I never had worked with multiple viewpoints before!  I wanted to experiment a bit and try some features that I never had done before with Game Maker Studio and within the first couple of hours of arriving on Friday, I had managed to make a four-player split-screen racer, with each “port” on the screen following one balloon, and each balloon was transparent on the other player’s viewpoints, so that they could see their opponents, but not get totally distracted by them!

One of the downsides of making a game from scratch is that in order to see any of your work’s results, you have to compile the game and test.  I would say that at least a third of my entire time spent at TOJam was compiling and testing.  Another bug I had to hunt down was the “twinkle” at the tips of sharp edges, I had forgotten a single variable and so the twinkles were all over the map.  I had to create a separate room in Game Maker, and create some scripts to just rotate the sprites and observe where the twinkles would appear.  Within an hour of building the test room, I had figured out the answer. :)

TOJam is a fascinating beast in itself.  over 400 people come together to George Brown College, and people just work on their games, without any distractions, and all the input they would like.  Some days, we got breakfast (this year, we had bagels and cereal) and on both Saturday and Sunday night, we got Chinese food and Pizza -- plus, most of the day there is a “Candy Stand” where you can go and just grab yourself a bag of chips, a Ring Pop, and a Coke!  All of it was graciously possible by the sponsors of the Jam!

At the end of the rush, on Sunday evening, everyone mingles and takes a look at everyone else’s projects.  The problem I faced is that since I was a solo programmer, I couldn’t hang around my laptop to see how it was received and see all the awesome games that were created.  I had to wander about and make little loops to see how the game was doing (and find a particular bug being unfortunately repeated in the process -- I fixed it the next day).

You can download Race to Sparklepop over on itch.io, and while you’re there, check out all the other fabulous games that were created in a short span of 3 days at TOJam!

Some of my favourites that I got to play:

- A Match-Three Cats-in-Giant-Fighting-Mech game from some team members of Capy Games (still not on the site as of this writing but definitely worth it, if you can find it!)

- The Best Worst Gift, a combination game where you take garbage items (hairball, old sponge, dirty underwear) and combine them to give the Garbage Prince an awesome gift! 

 - Death on the Catwalk, a game that feels like OctoDad in that you have to move Death’s feet so as to not kill the ADORABLE KITTENS

- Kill Yourself, a game where you use the corpses of your dead clones to solve puzzles.  All weekend I kept hearing odd phrases from this team like “if you land on the spikes just right, the corpse will slide off”...

- Palatable Pizza, a game of anxiety, amazingly, but it is a really nice analogy and clever use of writing to make you feel better despite your worries in life.

- Beat Cube, a surprisingly fun rhythm-action game that was so hyper-colourful that you couldn’t help but stare!

- Snackoil Salesman, where you travel from town to town and convince people to buy your product, and avoid the rage that builds when they discover you’re ripping them off!

- There’s a Zombie in my Closet!, another Game Maker Studio game where you maneuver around a dark apartment and take out zombies.  A lot of randomness in this game makes a very high replayability!

Hi everyone!

I will be attending "TOJam" this coming weekend!  It's a 3-day "Game-Making Binge" as the website puts it.  I may be working alone, or I may be working as part of a team to design a game from the ground up!

This year’s theme appears to be “Prepare for disappointment”!

While I'm at TOJam this weekend, please remember that I also collect donations for Extra Life all-year-round!  Any donations that I get this weekend (or any time, really!) will go towards my November Stream where the more I raise, the longer I play!  In the past three years I've raised $1000 for Sick Kids Hospital and my goal this year is $500.

When I first got into the idea of game creation, I read a lot of tutorials.  One of the tutorials that even came with Game Maker Studio was a vertical scrolling shooter, as they claimed that was one of the easiest games that could be made with the software.

I had a vision of the game that I wanted to create, but I know that I'm not someone who can create everything.  My spritework is fairly simplistic at this point, but it's definitely inspired by the simplicity of the NES and Commodore 64's limitations.  My programming skills were lacking at the time, but I had a rudimentary knowledge of BASIC, again from the age of the Commodore 64, and I Googled whenever I wanted to determine how to figure out something (and then discovering that most of the things I wanted to do were built into the software).  The other major piece of the puzzle that I never worked on was music and sound effects, so I had to find some music to use in the background.