“How to Make a Game in 48 Hours” – MAGFest 13 Panel

Posted on 02.15.15 by Frank

We did a panel about game jams at MAGFest 13 and the video just went up today!  There were some super talented and experienced panelists and we covered a lot of ground. There was a lot of audience interaction and interest. We talked about all aspects of the 48 game jam, from sleep schedules to art styles.

MAGFest was really fun too! I recommend checking it out. I was also on another panel: What’s in a Name: Video Games as the Next Great Sport, that was very interesting. They put up nearly all the panels and a lot of the music on The MAGFest YouTube Page.

Here are links to our panelist’s Ludum Dare pages and dev blogs…

Link to the slides because they are kind of hard to see in the video.

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“Scan Lines” – Ludum Dare 31

Posted on 12.09.14 by Frank

Ludum Dare 31 was last weekend, the theme was “Entire Game on One Screen”. My entry is called “Scan Lines”. This was my 6th official Ludum Dare entry. It placed 47th overall out of 1365 entries and 15th in the innovation category. Postmortem and download after the jump.

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“Chop Chop” – Barfcade Game Jam

Posted on 09.15.14 by Frank

I made a little game for the Barfcade game jam called “Chop Chop”. It is possibly the most realistic virtual chopstick all you can eat shrimp simulator available! Postmortem and download after the jump.

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Corridors of Uncertainty

Posted on 03.10.14 by Frank

Corridors of Uncertainty is a top down action rogue-like, that I’ve been working on for a few months. I’ve been keeping it under wraps but now it’s time to share what I have so far and get feedback from players. The core gameplay finally starting to feel fun and polished. The next step is to add much more stuff like enemies, weapons, upgrades, art, story, music, more areas, etc. For more info check out the page I started up with a link to download the latest build. 

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Self Destruction – One Game A Month Prototype

Posted on 02.02.14 by Frank

“Self Destruction” is a game about being trapped  in a time travel loop and needing to kill all previous versions of yourself to progress. Each wave you’re actions from all previous waves are layered on top of each other but instead of helping you, they are the enemies that you need to kill. This prototype was made in about 2 days.

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One Year Going Indie

Posted on 01.09.14 by Frank

It’s been a little over a year now since I finished up working on Starhawk for PS3 but it seems like so long ago. Despite being a pretty fun multi-player game it flopped and most of the team was let go after the second DLC update. Sometimes that’s how things can go in this industry, but I saw it as a great opportunity to focus on building an indie career and it’s been a crazy year. In the past 12 months I was contracted by Sifteo to develop an original game for Sifteo Cubes, won Indie Speed Run, showed a game at MAGFest indie showcase, released several freeware games, and made major improvements to my game engine. Despite some success I’ve netted only about $13,000 in income while having many setbacks and working constantly. In this post I will review my experiences from the past year and outline my plan for moving ahead.

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Secret Formula – Indie Speed Run 2013 Winner

Posted on 11.27.13 by Frank

Secret Formula has been chosen as winner of Indie Speed Run 2013. This is especially unbelievable because there were so many amazingly fun and polished games. I just wanted to say thanks to the judges, players, participants, my team members, and of course Yahtzee who choose us as winner!

Also, here’s a link to the most recent version of Secret Formula that contains some tweaks, bug fixes, and other improvements.

Secret Formula Was Created By:

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“A very tight little game combining fun easy to learn hard to master mechanics with an elegant virtually dialogue free short story with an intriguing turn at the end. - Yahtzee

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Secret Formula – Postmortem

Posted on 10.03.13 by Frank

Last weekend I participated in Indie Speed Run 2013 a 48 hour game making competition for teams of up to 4 people. For our team I was focused on programming while Saam handled art/design and Jerry worked on sound/music. This was the first time we were working together and also my first game jam working on a team.

Sometime around 7 PM we hit the magic button to begin the jam and receive our 2 random game elements that must be featured prominently in the game. Our theme was “Secret” and our element was “Vines”. We brainstormed for about an hour and came up with the rough plan to make a platformer where the character swings from vines inside a secret lab, working as a secret agent to get past traps and find a “Secret Formula”.

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Squaresville 8×8 Sifteo Font

Posted on 06.04.13 by Frank

I packaged up the 3 tone 8×8 font I was using for Squaresville for other people to use. It is based on a font I found in an old forum post by an artist known as red_Marvin. I moved a few pixels to make it more consistent and reorganized it to work with the Sifteo SDK’s text rendering.

SquaresvilleFont_8x8

SquaresvilleFont_16x16

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How to make animated GIFs of your Sifteo game

Posted on 05.18.13 by Frank

I figured out an easy way to save animated GIFs from the Siftulator! Here are some nice ones of Squaresville, the puzzle platforming game I’m developing. More technical info about how my method works after the jump.


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(R,G,B) – Postmortem

Posted on 05.02.13 by Frank

This was my 5th Ludum Dare, I was well prepared with a beefed up Frank Engine, my open sourced game engine that I’ve used for previous Dares. During the warm-up weekend I added some nice tile sheet support so I was planning to make a pixel art game to test out that tech. I ended up throwing that idea out the window to go with a cleaner un-textured look. I was able to use a debug display for the lighting system to create the unique visual aesthetic. Looking back I would have done a few things differently but overall I’m satisfied with the final result.

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Building a Better Animated GIF

Posted on 05.01.13 by Frank

Creating animated GIFs is a great way to show your game in motion without requiring viewers to click on anything. I was having a few issues with both file size and image artifacts. Here’s what I learned about how to make better animated GIFs for when you want to put in a little more effort to make it look as good as possible.

Using the improved method

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