I recognise your art style from the indiegamer forums (I think it was from there anyway). You've improved a lot. Wasteland one is awesome.

Have an idea. Throw a prototype together to see if the mechanics work. Then ideas usually just spawn from playing the prototype. At least that's how it works for me.

Yep, it's all about the money.

I just posted the capx to my game.. pretty much complete but just needs a hiscore, polished graphics, sounds, music and some more levels It's probably not the best way to do a game though, but to learn level design, it helped me..

It might be useful for you in some way.. I dunno

Simple for me... an apocalyptic game like Stalker but with more survival and stealth for sneaking around (ala Far Cry1).

As mentioned, BUGS! Especially when you're "in the zone" and some stupid twathead of a bug presents itself. Then your creativity is drained away every half hour spent trying to find it. Then you find it's the most idiotic thing ever. Like you left in some debug code that changes a variable every tick yet you're left wondering wtf that variable that you're setting elsewhere isn't working the way it should! Thank god for debug mode though or I'd have spent 5 times as long finding them..

Menus yeah, they can be boring to implement, but depends what you're doing with them. You can make them like any other part of the game and animate them, flashy effects and so on. They're probably boring to do because you're making them boring ;p You're being creative with the rest of the game... why not with the menus too?

I think for me though, it's feature creep. No matter how hard I resist or do small docs with my ideas.. it always seems to make my dev time much longer. Even if I've set in stone what the game is going to have and what it's not, I'll always think of new ideas that I just HAVE to put in.. ;p

EDIT> How could I forget this..... I f*cking HATE all the different device hardware, screen sizes / resolutions.. then there's browser quirks... If I had one wish, I'd wish for 3 more, and use one of those to wish that every damn device and browser worked the same way!

Kids love things loud so I doubt a volume control will matter hahah

THE GAME: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666 ... index.html

THE CAPX: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666 ... _0423.capx

So... I didn't have the internet from December 2013 until earlier this month. So as you can imagine, boredom set in, and to keep myself sane, I worked on this during the month of April. I'd managed to get to my bro's and use his internet for an hour or so and downloaded the C2 update that had the tilemap plugin implemented. So I got home and started messing around with it, but having no docs, I was going at it blind but I learned a lot.. probably the hard way, but it probably meant it sunk in more.

Earlier I was going through my old stuff and found this and realised I'll never finish it. So I present to you the capx. I learned a lot from doing it, and I hope it's useful for someone. Comments are there but were mostly for myself to remind me what did what. I usually don't comment when doing prototypes.. too lazy ;p I'm actually surprised that the code is that tidy actually, as I'm usually pretty lazy with that too.

There are 2 fully designed challenging levels. Play it enough and you'll know what to do and how to do it, but you'll need a good memory to know where stuff is (best played with keyboard btw). And yes, fatboy does indeed hover over boulders when he should in fact be behind them, and that was deliberate to show the player they COULD collide with the boulders AFTER they passed them a little <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink"> I tried it with fatboy being behind the boulders and it just didn't feel the same..

A brief explanation of the methods used to display the levels... I seem to recall loading in a json file I'd exported from PyxelEdit (I think) in the beginning, but soon realised that wasn't really an efficient way to design and test levels, so I used the tilemap object to visually design levels within C2. I started to find limitations when I wanted tiles to animate but the plugin didn't have that functionality. So I used an array to load the level from the tilemap and then spawned the tiles dynamically from sprite objects.. animation of tiles was sorted. I put each tilemap'd level onto their own layer so I could easily edit each level separately. There are a few things in the events that I can't recall why I did them that way but ah well.. .it worked ;p

Uses LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys (which is best if you really want to master the levels). I implemented touch without having a device to test on at the time, but thought.. just in case.. but honestly, it doesn't work that well now that I've tested it on my samsung galaxy. Don't know if it's me, but I can't tap the screen faster than I can tap the keyboard ;p

Oh and I'd just started on the hiscores at the time of abandoning it, but never got much further than creating the layout and ON START OF LAYOUT event... ;p and yes, some things are still very rough *cough the immi text warning cough*

Also, the name changed as you'll see on the main menu ;p It went through quite a few name changes actually, but thought Fatty Fast Food was better.. and less offensive.. ;p and since fast food is fattening, it just seemed to fit.

jeez... I can ramble a bit....

Ugh nope. Still hard as hell. I WILL beat that mofo! Think I'm getting a strategy going

bsimser thanks for testing! Good to know another device is on the good list hahah The main reason it's 480x320 was so it basically worked for more devices, as I'd read that's the best resolution for pixelled style games, and it seemed good enough to get what I needed on screen at once. Not sure if that applies nowadays or not. I'm very new to actual mobile dev but you know how it is, you read articles and store some of that info but nothing beats practical experience. I'll mess about with widescreen at some point then, 'cause when testing it on my samsung using cocoonjs launcher, there's a huge white bar on the right side (you can even see the offscreen enemies being created there so I think I f*cked up somewhere ;p).. dunno why there isn't 2 black bars either side but I've grown used to it anyway.

Also, as far as increasing the difficulty, it does actually increase but not sure it's enough. On my PC it's almost like it's not increasing.. seems pretty easy, but on the samsung it does get hard very fast.. guess there's timing issues to sort. Good idea about the fences. tbh I did those first and was too busy "introducing" the enemies gradually that I didn't even give those a second thought. Something always seemed off to me but never could figure out what while too busy tweaking enemies etc. Maybe it was the fences!

In the very beginning it was very hard. You'd be lucky to get 3 points, but I guess I tweaked too much somewhere. I've added a new feature to the points system, and testing that out atm before I release the update. If it works, then people will have to have good reflexes for hiscores ;p but nothing like 3 points hiscores "hard". Although it'd be quite easy (but not sure if it'd be fun) to make that new system hard enough where people can barely get 5 points hahah

As for the Flappy Bird reference. I'm not offended so don't worry. tbh if it wasn't for Flappy Bird I wouldn't have come up with this. I've never been a "simple game" designer. Always had tonnes of ideas to throw in prototypes. I'd start simple then throw in powerups, upgrades, shops, story etc etc and seeing Flappy Bird, made me step back and try to think with a KISS mindset (which was HARD for me ;p).. and Sheepish was born. I'm still fighting with myself to stop adding all these grand ideas to it..

newt haha I find it easy ;p but not as easy as your game.. which reminds me.. will try shortly.. gotta eat according to my rumbling gut! Thanks for trying!

I tried again today, seems it was probably lag from loading from the first time - I only tried the once. Tried again today and it's just slow and jerky. Probably running at 20fps or something. Should add FPS debug text to check that but it's low priority for me since it works on my samsung smoothly ;p

As for ScrollX suggestion.. I'm not actually scrolling through the layout (layout is 480x320). I'm creating the illusion of scrolling by creating the objects just offscreen and using the bullet behaviour to move them across the layout

You've mastered it! Will give it another go tomorrow when I'm not so tired. I'll blame my tiredness for my suckiness