I’ve released my Febuary game for #OneGameAMonth on Google Play. It’s only got a few (but challenging) levels and I plan to release more levels soon. If you play it please rate and review on Google Play.
The aim of the game is to find a way to collect all of the gems on each level and make your way to the exit. It may sound easy but these levels provide a challenge to even the best of puzzle solvers.
So, we are a week and a half into the February OneGameAMonth entry and I haven’t introduced our game yet. It’s a boulder dash clone called Rock Run, well actually it’s more of a Heartlight clone which was probably a boulder dash clone back in the day.
If you would like to try the first build of our game we have an early development release of the fist 10 levels.
Download here:
http://www.craftworkgames.com/downloads/CraftworkGames.RockRun.zip
If you are getting an OpenAL error you might also need to install this:
http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip
I made Toddler Memory Cards for the January entry of #OneGameAMonth. It’s up on Google Play for download now. Go and get it 
Thanks to everyone in the #OneGameAMonth community and for the MonoGame team for a great game library.
Toddler Memory Cards is a memory game for toddlers and kids. High quality graphics and sounds and a carefully thought out interface. No ads or other distractions.
The demo has the first 2 decks from the full version.
Animals – pig, lion, rabbit, bee, crab.
Vehicles – train, car, bus, balloon, bike, jet-ski.
Fruit – apple, tomato, grapes, peaches, watermelon, banana.
Food – cookie, pizza, popcorn, coffee, egg.
Shapes and Colours – yellow star, red circle, arrows, triangle, lightning bolt.
Sports – soccer, baseball, basketball, football, volleyball, golf.
no ads ever!
Here’s a really early screenshot of my next game for toddlers.
I’m using this project to build a core engine so that we can iterate faster on future projects. It’s going well so far, but there’s a lot of decisions to be made about how to structure the code and projects. That’s why I’m working on another smaller project before tackling something more advanced.
It’s a component based engine similar to something I’ve built in the past. The idea is that nearly everything in the game is a component and each component is made up of combinations of other smaller components. It’s a little tricky adapting this approach to MonoGame because I’ve also got to think about multiple platforms but in the project structure. The plan is to be able to build a few smaller games in a short period of time once their is a good library of reusable base code is in place.
I’ve had a really interesting week with my entry into #fuckthisjam and it’s not even over yet. As a result I’ve come up with a few different things I wanted to talk about on my blog. My first thought was to break them up into several different blog posts, but then I realised they are all intertwined in one way or another. Besides, after I write this summary I may expand on them later.
First up, I’d like to talk about the goals of Craftwork Games. We want to make some of the best indie games, apps and tools around. That’s kinda obvious, but this week it has become clear that it’s not enough to sum up our goals into a single sentence.
So this week I’ve been thinking more specifically about how to create better games, target a niche market, gather fans, iterate faster and many other aspects of our overall plan. I won’t go into detail about each of these goals right now, perhaps in a future blog post. Instead I’d like to share with you a simple goal setting strategy that I’m using. It’s nothing new, often described as “Beginning with the end in mind”, but I like to call it “Reverse Goaling”.
The idea is that you think of you’re ultimate goal, or at least some goal in the distant future. Then, you try to think of the previous thing that needs to happen before you reach your goal. Repeat this over and over until you have a better idea how to reach your ultimate goal like so:
And so on…
The above steps are very rough, but you can see how it becomes easier to think of the next goal in the list by working backwards. You can insert new goals in between each as you think of them and once the list is flipped around it becomes your to-do list.
The next thing I’ve been thinking about is game development tools. I’ve always enjoyed developing tools but sometimes wonder if it’s worth it or if it just takes away development time of actual games. Well, I’m here to boldly say I believe it’s the most important way to grow a company if you’re sensible about it. Yes, developing tools takes time, but in the medium to long term they also save a lot of time and help churn out games faster. What this does ultimately is make the business more scalable because better games can be created faster with less resources.
It’s also important to be sensible when creating tools. The first rule is to look for existing tools that do the job, many times there are already great tools that can be adapted in some way. Other times rolling you’re own isn’t that bad either.
Something I’ve discovered recently by entering game jams is that you can hack together a game very quickly. It’s great for prototyping ideas and meeting other developers and artists. But each time, I run into something that takes more time than it should. So when I finish the game jam I take the crazy mess of code I’ve got and see what code I can refactor into something reusable next time. Tools fall into a similar category because designing a GUI or creating a level is much faster with a visual designer.
I plan to enter more game jams in the future, each time improving on my last attempt by reusing code and tools. This will be a good measure of what’s working and what’s not as well as highlight things that are missing from the process.
I’ll admit that I was a sceptic of twitter for a long time. Truth told, I really just didn’t understand it so I avoided it like the plague. Entering game jams has created a need to take a more serious look at how twitter works and I’m fully converted. It’s a great way to build a network of developers, artists and fans. This fills a huge gap in marketing without a budget and getting early feedback on development.