New game – old game: HyperGunner

I’ve been very busy this last few days turning Wizard Wars in to a vertical scrolling shooter. It was very easy. Some things cropped up en route that I thought were worth a mention. When I designed Wizard Wars I made sure that the pipeline was simple. That is, I define the images and animation [...]

Building a visual style

I’m very happy with the mechanics of the game just now. Although I still need to set aside some design time in terms of adding a few puzzle elements I’m happy that the game is behaving itself enough for me to go off and start drawing sprites and tiles. Art afterall is what I’m actually [...]

Writing custom characters to the canvas from a .png file and some frame rates

Firstly my apologies for the random theme change. I’m forever trying to find the perfect theme for this blog. FWIW I rather like this one so will stick with it for about a week or so :-) I added a feature whereby I could write numbers to screen based on my own character set. The [...]

Advanced level editor and some good Gauntlet progress

Well I’m calling it Gauntlet anyway ;) The best thing about a week away from the internet is the amount of quality time one can spend working out the mundane stuff. This last week I got the chance to spend a week next to the coast with the family. In rare moments of downtime I [...]

Animated wizard vs animated zombies + improved motion

Something dawned on me earlier. I love it when that happens. It was such a simple thing. So much so that I’m amazed I haven’t thought of it before. My movement and drawing code sit independent of one another. First I call the code to move a sprite with move(sprite), then I immediately call the [...]

Wizard test updated with ability to hurl magic

Well things moved at a bit more pace last night as I quickly introduced the fire button in to my simple canvas anim test. I love the ability to string animation frames together in to a single spritesheet and have the code logically step through to locate the frame to display. Reminds me of my [...]

Wizard sprite animated using HTML5/Canvas and rotate() method

Quickly following on from my previous post about using the rotate() method to save a ton of artwork I thought I’d knock up a quick wizard sprite with 2 frames in Photoshop. I think it’s interesting sometimes to peek in to people’s development environment so I thought I’d share a snapshot of my Photoshop session [...]

1970′s style magazine poster for Hoth Strike

Bored one afternoon flicking through an old magazine online. Loved the type and layout so thought I’d crank up Photoshop and have a go. Font is Delicious and Delicious Heavy.

Hoth Strike – development thoughts and notable points

No updates for a little while so I thought I’d offer some thoughts on the progress of the game (Hoth Strike). The last stuff to go in was the Pod / Pod Launcher stuff. Anyone familiar with Defender will know all about these little devils. The theory is simple: you shoot the pod launcher (carrier) [...]

Hoth Strike colour, composition and Ralph McQuarrie

   Like any other game designer I take my inspiration from all manner of sources. Hoth Strike is a fairly easy one to research since the movie The Empire Strikes Back is one of the top grossing movies of all time. There is literally a truck load of material out there. Obviously I also have [...]