supercheffing.com Blog

Been working on Dim Sum Robot #1.  I spent a bunch of time implementing enemies and then I decided it didn’t feel right at all, so I took them out.  Messing with menus, sound, and balancing now; will hopefully be finished by Friday.  I am so bad at writing music, I’ve been stumbling around all week hoping I hit something that sounds listenable.  I think I finally have something not horrible, we’ll see.
Here’s one of the former enemies.  I think part of the reason I didn’t like the feel was because all the little food carts were a bit too cute:

Maybe if the cart was perpetually on fire, and the guy inside was actually a werewolf that ate all his customers.  That’s a different game though!

That’s the NES palette with hardware restriction details, made by AdamAtomic.  There are a lot of resrictions on there, but I only pay attention to two of them: I try to keep my sprite sizes in powers of two, and I try to more-or-less stick to 3 colors per sprite.  If something looks better without the restrictions, though, I start to ignore them.

I just remembered this little fighting mockup thing I made a year or two ago, and it’s slightly relevant.  I was messing around with the idea of attacking and defending in fighting games, so I built a little prototype for it.  In this game, attacking and defending are two distinct types of play.  Arrows to move, Q, W, and E to attack.  You start off attacking, but if you get kicked, you switch to defending.  You then have to kick your opponent to begin attacking again.

This will probably just confuse the matter because it’s really hacked together.  I might build something like this into this new fighting engine, though, and I’ve never showed it to anyone, so I’m going to post it anyway.  You’ve been warned!  Link.

So I’ve almost finished this crazy banana-em-up.  I even have a title screen.  What I don’t have is a score screen, a game over screen, an instructions screen, etc, etc, etc.  I coded the game in a week and the interface has taken me a month.  Go figure!  Hopefully I’ll have it out to potential sponsors before I leave for school, though.  In the meantime, ogle at the title screen!

I was going for a chlidren’s storybook-type look, and I’m actually really pleased with it.  I also decided to keep going on the cat game past 3 hours because I have a few interesting ideas I’d like to mess with.  Since I haven’t posted anything playable (do I even post at all anymore?), here’s a little gameplay demo.  And I mean little.  Click to start, then arrows or wasd to move.

Link!  I think my best is around 106.  Have fun!

Also, Bootleg Demakes.  I’m ecstatic about this one.  Rock rock on.

Friday I was reading about some 3D Actionscript stuff and I had a really great idea for a game, right out of nowhere.  I wasn’t really even thinking about making a game before my Halloween project, which will be a bunch of fun hopefully, but inspiration struck and now I’m teeming with excitement about this new game.  I spend hours upon hours trying to come up with new game concepts, but they always hit me when I’m not really even thinking about them.  I guess that’s pretty common, but it’s one of the best feelings in the world.  I’ll have to squeeze this one in before September, but I think I’ll be able to, especially if I get some help.  Can’t wait to talk to some people about it!  Maybe I’ll be entering IGF this year after all.  I was going to stay away after the crash-and-burn that was last year’s attempt ;p

Last week I pixelled a monkey for the banana shmup.  Banana shoot-em up.  Banana-em-up.  It’s getting really close to finished now.  Hopefully everyone’ll be able to play it soon!

A gameplay shot.

This isn’t Flash but the Flash thing isn’t quite done yet, so I’ll put this animation here instead.  It’s for a game about a banana.  In Flash.  Maybe the game’ll be done this week.  It’s shooting banana, but that animation’s done with code, so here it looks like he’s being eaten by blue.

And here’s a walk cycle from a game I made that was no good because I ran out of time.  It’s not too hot, but oh well.

I guess the vampire could have gone here too but I wanted an excuse to make 2 posts because it makes me feel like a blogging phenom that really does use this site for more than just hosting my files.

With the pen tool and a mouse on a bad mouse pad.

Yesterday I got Top Spin 2, and it’s a whole lot of fun.  I’m playing the career mode, and right now I’m in the final of my first major!  I wish they still changed the music for each continent, though.  I enjoyed that.

This is a screen from Double Fault!, a game I coded in seven days a few weeks ago.  It’s the first game I’ve actually finished in two or three years, and I think it’s kind of fun.

Double Fault! page (link)