Moving away from a hosted WordPress site to a new home

It has for a long time been my intention to move off of a hosted WordPress site to one that I have complete control over. I will still blog about my HTML5 game designs and other related work but it will now take place over at my new home page / blog / games hosting [...]

Ridge Racer Accelerated HD on iPad

I really am a hopeless iPad fanboy. Ever since I first got the blessed thing I’ve dumped game after game after game on to it and lord help me I play them all. Some titles really stand out: KickFlickFootball, Rage HD, RagDoll Shooter… all provide a great escape from reality for 10 minutes or so. [...]

In search of pleasure – again

Or.. “If it’s fun then please let me do it again”. I have for a long time been preoccupied with what you might call the hedonics of playing arcade games but have always failed to accurately articulate my thoughts. Games that sell have mass appeal and when we place them under the microscope we probably [...]

Ballblazer test using JavaScript and Canvas

I can’t tell you how proud I am of this. As a kid I spent hours in the arcades. I’ve written about it on here in spades. But when it came to more personal gaming thrills I had my beloved Atari 800XL. The king of Atari games for me was Lucasfilm’s stonking future sports title [...]

Some more thoughts on mobile browser based games

Ever since my first attempt at making games with JavaScript I’ve wanted to remake the games that I grew up with. Galaxians, Space Invaders, Defender, Scramble, Spy Hunter… These are the games that turned me on to video games and hold a special place in my heart. Using the newer HTML5 technologies I continue to [...]

Saving some frames by throwing a canvas at drawImage()

My next project is to be a maze game. I’d already ditched the idea of recreating a Gauntlet style romp through multiple dungeons because I wasn’t happy with the behaviour of the monsters. Getting stuck on walls and bunching up to block an open doorway was driving me mad. That’s when I started HyperGunner. Two [...]

A couple of quick bug fixes

Spy Chase had a couple of issues: > Missiles being reset to bullets following a spin and retaining missile delay times > Bonus score for destroyed vehicles not being added to m.player.score

Final changes to Spy Chase

A clear problem of being a one-man-band game developer is that I don’t get access to rich game testing resources. As much as I play the game to death whilst developing it I just don’t get the right kind of feedback to help push the game over the line. Indeed one of the issues is [...]

Spy Hunter homage almost complete

Spy Chase, my Spy Hunter inspired arcade game, is motoring along and very nearly complete. I finally got around to adding guns and missiles to the game which for me was a vital final piece of the game’s design. I think I balanced the action pretty well so that the player, with a little skill, [...]

Some more thoughts on building fun and challenging arcade games

I’ve written it before that I’m not a huge fan of design documents for small projects. I’d rather be coding. So please don’t consider this as a literal document it’s more my own thoughts on some pointers for creating cool arcade games. I guess it goes hand in hand with my previous thoughts on the [...]