Games

Idea: Four simultaneously controlled characters on four screens.

This is a cross between a rhythm game and a puzzle platformer. I was the lead programmer and co-designer for the project, and I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Idea: Top-down shooter set inside a nuclear power station.

This was my first real attempt at making a game, and I was fortunate to have Sam on my team to teach me the ropes. I learnt an awful lot about game design and game-related programming techniques thanks to him, and also managed to teach myself how to do graphics in Java.

In hindsight, it was an excellent introduction to making games - a 2D top-down game has no gravity or complicated physics, and most game objects can be either circles or squares.

Idea: Make Hennell a terrible game for his birthday present as part of KnP Pirate Kart 2.

Made in about two hours! Featuring 23 amazing levels!

Idea: Talk to a bear on Twitter and make it either happy or sad.

Collaboration between V21, BorisTheBrave, Jimbob and me.

Idea: Get bigger in the sun's rays; shrink without them. Don't touch the walls or get too small.

Made for a three hour competition, with about an hour of extra debugging at the end. Graphics by Lifesnoozer and code by me.

Idea: Two-player deathmatch game where both players are invisible.

A single-computer real-time multiplayer game: Stealth Cat is controlled with the keyboard and Invisible Mouse is controlled with the mouse.

Idea: Simple two-player dueling game with one button per player.

I want to add some music and a menu, but realistically this is as complete as it's going to get.

Idea: What could be more evil than making babies cry in a variety of ways?

Idea: Defeat enemies using two tentacles controlled by analog sticks.

I developed a prototype in Java during the week leading up to the competition, to see if it was a viable control mechanic. I decided that not only was it feasible, it was also damn cool.

Unfortunately, due to the competition being right in the middle of my exams, my participation in the competition itself was limited to porting my prototype to C# and helping to integrate it with the game.

Idea: Puzzle platformer where you can only see your reflection.

Made for Global Game Jam 2010. Needs more levels really.

Idea: Control two characters who move in opposite directions simultaneously.

Made in the final hours of TIGJam UK2. Graphics by Lifesnoozer and code by me.

Idea: Throw brightly coloured balls around with physics.

Not particularly innovative, but fairly addictive.

Idea: Platformer with a wall of death that only moves when you're not looking at it.

This was my first time taking part in a solo competition, and knowing that I had to create all the game assets myself meant I went a bit crazy with my priorities.

I spent a very long time learning to create background music, but victory conditions and level loading were only added in the last hour of the competition.

Idea: One-button platformer with gravity switching.

The core mechanic here is strong I think, but it needs a better goal than "collect all these arbitrary collectables".

Idea: Zero-gravity cave exploration game with gratuitous rotation.

I like this control scheme, but clearly I need to spend a lot more effort introducing it before adding a ridiculous number of enemies.

Idea: Interactive terrain deformation.

I used my Large Polygon Collider engine for the physics (with many modifications). It would have been much quicker/better to just use Bullet, but this was more interesting. But this came at a cost of once again focusing on the technology over the gameplay.

Idea: An "advanced natural language text parser" that actually just ignores everything you say.

A very poor implementation of an idea that wasn't amazing in the first place.

Idea: Explore a procedurally generated cave with only a dim torch to light your way.

Once again, the technology was developed before the gameplay. This at least has some gameplay, though.

Idea: Each of the moving buttons plays a different sound. They create ripples to the rhythm of the music they generate.

Unfortunately, the sounds provided are rather dischordant when played together. I had hoped it would be something more like this.

Idea: First person shooter where the walls are made out of dominoes. The dots of the dominoes are bombs.

Too much time spent on tech; not enough on gameplay.

Idea: Real-time Worms in a level made out of trampolines.

For this competition, instead of having a preselected theme, we instead had to create a game suggested by the Random Video Game Name Generator.

Our potentially awesome deathmatch game with trampoline physics, however, was troubled by one elusive and far-reaching bug in the C++ library - a bug that wasn't found until weeks after the competition ended.

Idea: Bounce the pineapple to the goal while avoiding the dinosaur.

Not particularly happy with the chosen theme of transport, we decided to integrate all five candidates for the theme into our game. The result was something that focused on pineapples perhaps a bit more than on transport.

Idea: Platformer where all the platforms are moving cogs or swinging pendulums.

I learnt an important lesson from this game: if there's some optional component that may or may not get included, you should design the game as though it will be.

Idea: Platformer with upgradeable limbs for added speed/strength/jump height.

This was a classic case of not focusing on the right areas and making things more complicated than they needed to be.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was to be the start of my interest in physics simulation. It was probably a fitting start - a bug-filled project that went horribly wrong for unknown reasons.