Make a Game September 2013

[Stephen Roantree]

I'm late! And very sorry! It was great to see people on Friday at the meetup, but without further ado the theme for September is:

Fiction

Noun

1. Prose literature, esp. short stories and novels, about imaginary events and people.
   
2. Invention or fabrication as opposed to fact.
   

Maybe it's something inspired by a book or film, or a game about constructing good stories (Game Dev Story, I'm lookin at you), or it's about a more abstract interpretation of what is real and what are fantasies, what parts of your perception can be trusted. Or it can be about none of the above because as always the theme is 100% optional.

I can't wait to see what people put together this month, the last few months there's been some amazing engagement with the theme and 1GAM in general. It's an great little thing we have going here.

Good luck! And do post any ideas you're mulling over here, that was good reading last month.

--

Stephen

[John Kelly]

I'm tired of half-making lots of things because I over-extend myself and/or pick a ridiculous theme for my games. Honestly, my first thought for this theme was a meta-fiction game half-based on Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller. Seriously?

This month, I want to try and make an actual complete game. So my idea for this month is going to be called just 'Fiction'. You know those fridge magnets with words on them? I want to make a multiplayer game of that where each player gets, say, 30 random words (and maybe some random punctuation too). Each player takes their turn and plays one word. The goal is to make the story as long as possible. To encourage playing, there'll be other bonuses. After your tenth word or something, you'll get an option to completely re-roll your word collection. And I was thinking that instead of just a score based on words played (and to stop people cheating and putting down 2000 gibberish words in a row and getting the high score), you'd also get in-game bonuses for rating other people's stories. The 'high score' would then be based on both the number of words played and the number of votes it gets from other players.

I was thinking about doing this in OpenFL (previously nme). This will be my first time using anything AS-based for game programming. Anyone got any good pointers?

[Colm Larkin]

Been a bit slow to get started this month, but I too have been trying OpenFL. In particular I went for HaxeFlixel which is OpenFL + a port of flixel written in haxe. It was extremely simple to install everything (good instructions here http://www.haxeflixel.com/ ) and within a couple of hours I had a nice snowing particle effect going on.

By the end of the month I'm going to try and have a little snow-effect platformer game..