Week 134: Tiny Tetris Classic and Blast Flock (Patreon)

This week I worked on a Tiny Tetris Classic, I made a (temporary) webpage for SUGAR, I wrote and published the transcription of my talk about limitations, and I started working again on Blast Flock for Castle!

This was the biggest part of my week! I have to say, I completely underestimated how long this would take me. I thought it wouldn't take long because, you might remember, last Ludum Dare I made a Tetris clone in under 2 hours.

But the difference with then is that now I'm trying to make something very loyal to the original Tetris games, and in particular the NES version. That means I want the exact same scoring, leveling and speed mechanics, but also the same rotation system, controls, weird things called DAS and ARE, basically anything I could find in the Tetris Wikia. So it took a lot of time, first to make the research and find reliable info, and then implementing it, in a not-30-fps-bound context. (because the NES version counts time as frames)

But I'm on a good track now! Pretty much all the mechanics are there, I just have to make a menu for the game, implement alternative controls (otherwise I'll get told the controls I implemented are not right, again), sound effects, maybe music, and also an alternative look!

I don't know when it will be finished exactly, but I'm hoping some time in the next two weeks. As I said last week, a standalone version will be released on Patreon for 5$+ supporters, and another version will be integrated to the Tiny Clock project.

I finally made a webpage for SUGAR, and a logo! Except both are temporary! But still, I have something to link people to now!

For the webpage, it'll move to something prettier as we get closer to release. The logo just needs some more work but I don't think it will change too much. It will probably get brighter and the colors will get reworked a little. I also need to do the animation for it, the one you'll see when starting a game made with SUGAR!

Anyway, this is not much but it really makes it feel more official, to me at least! It's very exciting!

I finally did the transcription for my talk "Helpful Limitations: Constrain Your Game Development"! It may not be quite as complete as the spoken version, but all the main arguments are there!

As announced previously, it is available to all 8$+ Patreon supporters! I'm hoping to write some more things for you guys soon-ish!

Remember this game? I made it in March 2017. It's a game about controlling an army of warplanes, destroying armies of warplanes, and saving the not-so-destroyed warplanes so that they join your army of warplanes!

Well, I'm getting back on this game to make a new version with a very interesting turn! It's gonna be online! With everyone controlling their own army!

Best part yet, this is the contract I was telling you about last week!

Alright, backing up now... Let me tell you about Castle. "Castle is a place to discover, play, and create games", that's what it says on its website. It's a software based off the game engine Love2D, and it lets you load and play games directly on it. You can already try it with Blast Flock here.

Castle is actually just starting out. It doesn't have much content yet, nor much of a community. And that's exactly why they contracted me and a few other devs to make games for it! To get the ball rolling!

And so we started talking ideas, and they told me they liked Blast Flock and wondered if it would be possible to make it multiplayer, kind of like games like slither.io or agar.io.

Now, I don't have any experience with online multiplayer at all, but it so happens that the Castle team is also working on integrating a user-friendly network library! So the idea is that we do a lot of back and forth so that I can get help to use it, and they can make the library better for future users.

I hope you find all this as exciting as I do! I'll have more to say about this project next week. This week I'm looking into their network library as it is currently, and getting a start on the new game structure around multiplayer.

I have four weeks to complete this project, so it should be available to play mid-December! But maybe there'll be early versions available before that!

As usual I want to thank all my Patreon supporters for their invaluable continued support! You're just the best! Here are the names of all the 3$+ supporters:

☆Joseph White, ☆Spaceling, ☆Ryan Malm, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, Wojciech Rak, HJS, slono, Austin East, Zachary Cook, Jefff, Meru, Bitzawolf, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Christian Östman, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Andreas Bretteville, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Giles Graham, Flo Devaux, Cole Smith, Thomas Wright, HERVAN, berkfrei, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Jearl, Chris McCluskey, Sam Loeschen, Pat LaBine, Collin Caldwell, Andrew Reitano, Qristy Overton, Finn Ellis, Giovan, amy, Jakub Wasilewski, Brent Werness, yunowadidis-musik, Max Cahill, hushcoil, Jacel the Thing, Gruber, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Andrew Reist, vaporstack

This week I'm working full time on Blast Flock for Castle! Hopefully next week I should already have something that vaguely resembles online play! I will also keep working on the Tetris in my free time and I might generate a new batch of wallpapers too!

Have a great week!

Take care!

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