snake, a zine, and some other fun things
Howdy! I write to you from the couch on a sunny Saturday morning. I come bearing some fun recently released projects.
Slither — Cute Snake
First up is Slither! It's like the old game Snake but with hand-drawn graphics. It's free and you can play it in your browser or on iOS. (I'm still waiting for my Google Developer account to be approved to get it in the Google Play Store. Soon! 🤞)
Here's a screenshot of how the game looks:
It may seem a bit basic to make a Snake game. It's pretty simplistic. For sure! But it was a really valuable exercise for me because I accomplished two goals: 1. explored the viability of drawing and scanning in game sprites (total pain in the butt to get them to align); 2. shipped a game on iOS (and have a working Android version)! I now know a lot more about coding games for touch screens and how to build a game that works on desktop, web, and mobile. Awesome! Those skills will transfer nicely to future projects.
You can even watch a lil trailer I made if playing games isn't your thing.
DragonRuby Zine Issue 1
As a follow up to Building Games with DragonRuby, the book I wrote about making games with the Ruby programming language, I thought it'd be fun to make a print zine with some more tutorials, interviews, and essays on making games. So I did! A bunch of fellow game developers who use the same game engine I do contributed.
It's 48 pages full of all kinds of good stuff. It even comes with a free sticker I drew!
The best part is that you can read the zine for free online. Or order a print copy!
I had a lot of fun making the zine, from writing articles to printing and binding it. People have been digging it too! I'm hoping to do two issues a year to spread it out. It was a great way to make some new friends by bugging people to contribute.
Little Stuff
- I got interviewed on the Ruby Rogues podcast about making video games with Ruby. That episode hasn't aired yet, but it was a lot of fun. I basically just rambled for an hour!
- I took a lot of the common code from the little games I've been making and created a framework called Scale. It makes it really easy to create the skeleton of a game by handling all the boring stuff like menus and settings. I'm excited to keep making it better and hopefully see others use it.
- Do you know the exquisite corpse exercise artists do? It's where one person starts a drawing and another person continues it. Any number of people can participate and it results in really silly and cool pieces of art. I thought, what if there was a game version of that where each developer spends a week with a game and passes it on? So I started that with some people! Well, 13 people! Week 5 just started, and it's been super cool to see how the game has evolved with each person. More to come in a few months there. 😄
What's Next
I'm not quite sure what my next little freeware game will be. I've got some ideas. Lots of ideas! (Maybe too many ideas.) But here are some of the things I'm thinking about:
- Daily Dungeon — a cute little dungeon crawler for phones where you get a different randomly generated dungeon each day; I want to try something radical where you can only play once per day!
- Destroy All Goblins on phones — could be neat and another learning experience. Destroy those gobbo on the go!
- Some of the past ideas I've shared like the fake operating system with a bunch of games on it and the mall game... Unsure! Gonna take a little time to see what's calling to me most.
I'm making steady progress on my goals for the year! Two freeware games released and one on mobile already. Woot woot. Working on small projects I can finish in less than a month has been extremely motivating, so I'll continue that as I'm getting my footing with all this game dev junk.
Anyway, take care, ttyl!!