One-game-a-month update
After a good start in January, I have to admit that not much has come of my plan to push out one new game each month. Shame on me!
February: I started work on a clone of Defender of the Crown (an Amiga classic), or at least the strategy portion of it. Alas, I got no further than the very basics:
The goal is to conquer all enemy territories by sending out your campaign army. You only have one army and you don’t know where the enemy armies are.
As far as strategy games go, this one is pretty simple. But as I’ve never made a turn-based strategy game before, starting with something simple won’t hurt. I do want to revisit this game at some point because I like the idea.
March: No work on a #1GAM game but I did give a 15-minute “blitz talk” at NSConference, which was really cool to do. The topic: why making 12 games in 12 months is a good idea.
My argument was that doing a challenge such as One Game a Month is good for learning to finish projects instead of just starting and abandoning them a week later. In addition, imposing constraints on yourself – such as an extreme time limit — help you become more creative.
If you’re into iOS development you should really buy the NSConference videos, they are great. And visit the conference next year!
April: I don’t know if this counts, but I did a remake of Juicy Breakout. This game is from a talk by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho titled Juice It or Lose It. They show how to take a boring breakout game and make it really awesome, not by changing the gameplay but by adding tons of cascading animations and other effects.
The original game was done in Flash and their presentation isn’t really about the actual code, so I thought it would be cool to remake the game in Objective-C and Cocos2D for the iPad.
Pssst, here’s a little secret: I’m making a tutorial video out of this for RayWenderlich.com. Stay tuned for that.






