What’s Happening All the games here at The Pencil Farm were made in Flash and are played in the browser through the Flash Player browser plugin. Adobe will no longer support or distribute the Flash Player browser plugin after December...
I just listened to the Adam Saltsman (aka Adam Atomic) episode of the Debug podcast. Adam created the Flixel framework, which is one of the things that inspired me to make Pickle. He is also one of the guys behind...
My first iPad game, Zephyr Touch, was released on the App Store last week. I’ve wanted to make a game for the iPad since it was first announced. I’ve been learning bits of Objective-C development here and there for a...
I finally released an iPad game on the iTunes App Store! Zephyr Touch is an iOS port of my Ludum Dare 23 entry. I plan to write up some development notes soon. In the meantime you can download the...
For the past year or so I’ve been developing a pixel art and animation tool called Pickle. The idea for Pickle came about as I was working on a pixel art game using the Flixel engine. I was trying to...
The nice folks at GameDev Tuts+ asked me to write a tutorial on making retro games, based on my previous tutorial about my RGB shifting CRT effect. I cover a lot of stuff in the tutorial. Since the GameDev...
Keep reading “GameDev Tutorial: Making Games With a Retro Aesthetic” »
This was my third time participating in the Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition. Theme The theme this time was “evolution”. I had a really hard time coming up with an idea for this one. I actually came pretty...
I had a lot of fun making a game in 48 hours for my first Ludum Dare in December, so I decided to try again in LD #23. Theme The theme for this competition was ‘Tiny World’. I decided...
I participated in my first ever Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I’ve been wanting to try to do it and I had the weekend free, so I figured I’d give it...
Commander Cookie (in Space!) was one of my first games written in ActionScript 3. I wanted to do something simple to help me get up to speed with the new language. I figured making a clone of a classic arcade game Asteroids would let me focus on the programming without getting caught up in gameplay issues.
Codename: ULTRA is a game concept that I entered into the game design competition at SXSW this year. The game was selected as one of the casual game semifinalists, which means I won a free pass to SXSW Interactive....
I still get asked about what happened with the Olympics stealing my game last year. I'll try to bring everyone up to speed here.
Body Mailin’ is a game I made based on some jokes from a podcast I listen to called You Look Nice Today. It would be too difficult for me try to explain the nuances of the game concepts here,...
I recently had the pleasure of working with the nice people at Little Lives on a reskinned version of Witchcraft to celebrate the Singapore National Day Parade. In addition to all new graphics and sounds, we added a game...
The Olympics stole my game! They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own.
I posted a new game for Halloween called Witchcraft. Witchcraft is a Mastermind-style puzzle game. The object of the game is to discover the secret spell that will lift the witch's curse. You cast spells by placing your five cards on the table in a certain order. After you cast your spell the Spirit will give you hints by lighting candles next to your cards. An orange candle means one of your cards is right, but it is in the wrong position. A white candle means one of the cards is in the right position. Unfortunately, the Spirit cannot tell WHICH card is right. You have to deduce the correct pattern of cards by trying different spells. If you can find the right spell within ten guesses, you'll break the witch's curse.
The idea for Freeze Pop Frenzy came to me while riding the subway one day. I wanted to create a summer-themed game, and I thought it would be fun to make a Tapper-style game with you as the ice cream man, having to drop ice cream on the kids as they climb the side of your truck.
I've been meaning to write about Samorost 2 since way back before it won Best Web Browser Game at the Independent Games Festival. If you haven't seen this game yet, I recommend you go check it out right now. You should be warned, however, that it may take a good 30 minutes to complete the first chapter, and it's incredible hard to stop playing once you start. There are a number of things that I think make this game really great:
Tim Rylands is a teacher who uses video games in the classroom to teach his kids English and creative writing. I found some videos of his class. Pretty amazing:
I've got a new game coming out really soon. In Freeze Pop Frenzy you control an ice cream man who has to toss freeze-pops to the approaching kids before they reach your truck.
There has been a long-standing bug in my game The Lake that allowed people to get scores in the millions. I was pretty sure that it was a problem with the game itself and not just people hacking my high-score system. One reason is that this is the only game that was getting bogus scores. Also the scores were never round numbers (like 1,000,000) which is what I would suspect if people were simply sending bogus scores to my database.
Here's a preview of the pixel-art game I'm working on right now. Press the mouse button to make the bee fly (up), release to allow him to drop down. Collect flowers in your basket, and avoid the other bees. If your basket hits the ground or the other bees, you'll lose all your flowers. If your bee hits another bee you die.
All of my Flash games up until this point have been made using mostly vector graphics. While this looks really nice and keeps the file sizes low, it can also slow the games down quite a bit as Flash has to frequently redraw the images. For my next game I've decided to try using pixel graphics.
I've had a lot of people asking about the music tracks I used in Snow Day and [Love's Arrow](/games/loves_arrow/?id=1). I've been using Apple's [GarageBand](http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/) to create music for all of the games. It works really well for me, since I'm not particularly musically inclined.
Yesterday I stumbled across this poster visually depicting the names of bands. I thought it would fun to play the game for a while, so I set out to find the game online, which I was sure must exist in interactive form. It was much harder to find than I thought. The Virgin Digital site only has static wallpaper imagesto download and no links to the actual game. I finally found the actual game on Heavy.com.
I posted Snow Day and some new extras in time for the holiday season.
I've got a holiday/winter game in the works. You play as a kid who has to keep enough snow on the ground to make sure school doesn't reopen. You make it snow by throwing ice cubes up into the rain clouds. I'm hoping to have it ready to release just after Thanksgiving. Stay tuned.
Sunken Treasure has come a long way since my first prototype back in July.
I posted 'Sunken Treasure' today. The object of this game is to dive down to the ocean floor, find gems and bring them back to the surface without getting hit by any sea creatures.
A couple days ago I came across Google's Image Labeler. Essentially, the Image Labeler is a system to allow users to tag images with keywords, with the goal of providing more accurate image search results. The genius of Google's method is that rather than trying to convince users to give up some of their time to sift through and tag millions of images, they turn it into a game.
Recently, I came across a posting on the FlashKit forums asking for feedback on a game called Regeb. When I attempted to play the game I was confronted by this instruction screen:
I've been looking into getting some of my Flash games to run on the PSP. Sony released an update in April that allows Flash content to be played through the PSP's web browser. Unfortunately, there are some limitations that prevent this from being a great option for homebrew developers. Here are some of the fundamentals to getting started with Flash on the PSP:
I've been working on Sunken Treasure, mostly on the art and sounds. I haven't made a lot of progress because I can already tell that the game is fundamentally flawed. It's cute, but it's not fun to play. I believe the game needs an element of risk, so you can risk loss or damage to achieve a possible greater gain. This is the route I'm going to pursue:
As more people start to find this site, I find references to the games popping up on various blogs and forums from all over internet-land. The most interesting ones are the non-english sites because I have to run them through a translator to see what they say about the games.
I started working on my Sunken Treasure game idea. So far I've mostly been trying to figure out the game structure and goals.
Back to the Garden started out as an idea to make a series of games based on the music of Jason Webley.
I've begun noticing the small details in my favorite games that make me want to keep playing them. Here are a couple of my observations:
The June issue (#111) of PSM featured an article titled "WARNING: Games are Under Attack!". The article presents the riduculous and irresponsible argument that buying used games will bring the industry to its knees.
I'm working on a new Flash game that should be ready in a few days.
Some ideas for new games that I came up with--Pumpkin's Dream, Donut Factory, etc.
Roach Attack was the first complete computer game that I created. It began as a simple programming exercise to create a representation of a real-world relationship using only the mouse and a plain square. The program I wrote had a...
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