Now on Xbox Live

Playing With Humans was approved and now available on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel. Go get it for a dollar (80 MS Points)!

Click here to add it to your download queue.

Roach Puppy now on Game Jolt

Game Jolt is a new ad-revenue sharing games portal for freeware. Several such sites exist for flash games such as Newgrounds and Kongregate, but this site allows most types of content including downloadable games.

Check out the Roach Puppy Games page on Game Jolt now!

Pinky and the Cave Done!

It felt good to make the final check-in on this! After a slow final phase of the project and a burst of motivated work this weekend I'm calling Pinky and the Cave done. There have been some changes since the last screenshots and video including a scaling down of the characters to allow for a larger playing field, powerups, and new enemies.

But enough talk, go download the game. Here are the instructions followed by the latest screenshot and a new video!

Swing/Climb: WASD or Left analog
Fire: Mouse or Right analog
Shield: Space or Right trigger
Pause/Quit: Escape or Start

Power ups:
Vial = Increase magic range and damage
Shield = Flame shield that kills enemies on contact
Gold Pinky = Extra life

Back to work on Pinky

With the competition behind me it's time to finish up Pinky. I integrated some of the performance and lighting fixes I made to my codebase back to the Pinky project and made the blur on the glow effect smoother. Also played with the lighting a bit with the main light coming from above (besides the "magical" rim lighting) and a dark blue ambient component to give it more of a subtle night-time feel.  That's probably one the last of the graphical changes, then I need to add more enemies and a proper level and it's good to go.  Here are some screenshots (click for super-large image):

The Churn Continues

Nothing terribly flashy to report. I've mainly been busy with small infrastructure work and the big ticket item of a robust UI system. I think that's finally to the point where it can be used is almost any future project so I am excited about that. Once I had it done it was extremely easy to add menus, HUDs, etc. throughout the game. I am a fan of keeping things data driven so, like most of the components in my engine, it's controlled through XML. There are XML elements and attributes that specify the type of UI control, font, position, alignment, etc. along with any children with an arbitrary nested depth. All that means is that from the XML file I can define menus and sub-menus and any changes appear in game without having to change or recompile code. The XML file also defines actions for buttons, which are delegates that are defined per game at the moment. However, these actions can be changed like anything else so a button can go from resuming the game to quitting it by just changing one word in the XML file.

As far as release date goes, I know I said I'd have something to download around now but I want to make sure this game is polished before I do that. I'll keep you guys up to date on that front, but for now I'll just say "when it's done".