
I Have Created 50 Games in 2014 - stepvhen
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/blog/2014/12/12/games-in-2014/
======
polm23
He also wrote up what he learned making these fifty games and I translated it
(with his permission & cooperation):

[https://gist.github.com/polm/05db396cf08b9ec2a81c](https://gist.github.com/polm/05db396cf08b9ec2a81c)

~~~
drewjaja
I'm working on my own minigames with spritekit and love these tips!

Does anyone know of any other blogs/books to read with handy tips on game
design?

~~~
polm23
Here's Ryan Clark (Crypt of the NecroDancer) writing about what makes a game
commercially viable:

[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/Wha...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/What_Makes_an_Indie_Hit_How_to_Choose_the_Right_Design.php)

Here's Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer discussing a large number of small
improvements that make games feel good:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U)

Here's Rami Ismail, also of Vlambeer, explaining how making a game a week
helps you develop an intuition for some parts of game making:

[http://ramiismail.com/2014/02/game-a-
week/](http://ramiismail.com/2014/02/game-a-week/)

Here's a talk by Sid Meier (Civilization) about Interesting Decisions:

[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015756/Interesting](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015756/Interesting)

~~~
emsy
Ryan also has a great Twitch stream every friday where he analyzes the current
Steam topsellers and Kickstarter projects.

~~~
samwestdev
Sounds interesting. Does he archive on youtube?

~~~
emsy
Sorry I only just saw this, hope it'll reach you. You can find previous
broadcasts at
[https://www.twitch.tv/ryan_clark/profile](https://www.twitch.tv/ryan_clark/profile)

------
mikekchar
Kenta Cho is someone I admire a lot. I have to admit that of the 50 browser
games, I didn't actually find a lot that I _really_ liked. However his Windows
games (most if not all have been ported to X) are incredible. Each one is a
gem. They aren't always polished, but the ideas in them are really, really
good. Of course you have to like retro style shooters ;-)

Thanks for posting this. I keep meaning to read his blog, but I always forget
:-)

~~~
gavanwoolery
His Windows game "Torus Trooper" ([http://www.asahi-
net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e.html](http://www.asahi-
net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e.html)) inspired one that I made:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr1zyE7ny5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr1zyE7ny5A)

~~~
david-given
Torus Trooper has been ported to Linux --- it's even in Debian! And it's
written in D. It's worth having a look at if you're interested in this sort of
thing; a lot of his shoot-em-ups use a markup language, BulletML, which
describes enemy behaviours in XML...

A job or two back I spent a lot of time buried deep inside noiz2sa
([http://www.asahi-
net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/noiz2sa_e.html](http://www.asahi-
net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/noiz2sa_e.html)), another of his BulletML games,
porting it to a mobile game platform as a demo. (This one's in C.) I'm not
really a fan of that sort of game but it's a _lot_ more subtle than it looks
at first glance. The overall game design and level layout is very carefully
done; the way the end-of-level bosses work is particularly clever (they're
just ordinary enemies with lots of hit points!). And the whole thing's only
3kloc.

Noiz2sa works well on small screens, but Torus Troopers looks fantastic on a
big screen. And both games sound fantastic. Anyone know who writes his music?

------
zappo2938
Here is a very good resource for learning how to write browser games in
Javascript, Code Incomplete[0]. I found it to be a very good source to learn
how to write vanilla Javascript also.

[0] [http://codeincomplete.com/games/](http://codeincomplete.com/games/)

------
euske
(shameless plug) Some folks in the Ludum Dare community are hosting One Hour
Game Jam, which is a weekly game jam to create a game within one (or possibly
a few more) hours. A different theme is chosen for each week by voting. I
would say most games are crappy (including mines) but that's a part of the
charm. cf. [http://onehourgamejam.com/](http://onehourgamejam.com/)

According to the host, this is mostly "a support group for those who have too
much creativity in their hand."

~~~
dkypyny
A 1-hour game jam is like a conceptual joke, and it doesn't get any funnier
the more it's repeated.

How about, for once, a game jam where there is actual competition and a strive
to make the most technically impressive + the most fun games?

~~~
pixelsyntax
Being able to create a small game within an hour is technically impressive.
Some of the entries are also fun. How about you try it before you have a
tantrum about it?

------
hemdawgz
I noticed that some of these 2014 games (in particular the first one) are
created in Flash, which to me suggests that there are still some purposes
within rich web media it suits better than the plain web html5/css/js stack
everyone is trying to kill it with. I really hope support for Flash isn't
widely dropped before we can replicate its utility for richly interactive
media in our new standards. (The web seems now just for websites and web
applications rather than more rich games and animations.)

~~~
larsiusprime
Apparently they're not made in Flash, they're made in Haxe[1] + OpenFL[2]!

Flash is just one of its export targets. Haxe + OpenFL also supports HTML5.

Here's the framework the person seems to be using:
[https://github.com/abagames/mgl](https://github.com/abagames/mgl)

[1] [http://haxe.org/](http://haxe.org/)

[2] [http://www.openfl.org/](http://www.openfl.org/)

~~~
hemdawgz
Thanks for pointing that out, I would have missed that important detail
otherwise. The majority of his games are indeed in HTML5, so I do wonder what
made him choose Flash as an export target for the one or two such games I've
seen.

------
andrewclunn
Cool, now wrap them all into a warioware style autoloader and you've got
yourself a marketable game.

------
stepvhen
I did not create these. Each game is MIT licensed, and the source is included.

------
jdonaldson
Good to see Haxe in here. You can do way more sophisticated things in Haxe
(and target js, cpp, java, etc.), but it looks like the author intentionally
keeps things simple:
[https://github.com/abagames/mgl](https://github.com/abagames/mgl)

------
ilitirit
I've been playing Kenta Cho's games since forever. I've sunk countless hours
into Noiz2sa, rRootage, Parsec47 and Tumiki Fighters. His games are usually
very minimal, creative and stylish with a nice techno soundtrack.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k2yhmvdSkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k2yhmvdSkU)

He is the reason I spent several years writing shmups.

He is one of the first devs I knew about that switched from C++ to D.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_Games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_Games)

~~~
S4M
Oh, he's the guy who made Tumiki Fighters? that game is awesome, I used to be
addicted to it for a while.

------
hellbanner
ABA does fantastic work.

"Defeat Me" has you fighting clone copies of yourself. The original link at
[http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ](http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ) no longer works (JS
errors), unfortunately.

I took that idea and ran with it, creating www.quantumpilot.me (ES6/electron
app, source included)

He also created Bullet Markup Language: [http://www.asahi-
net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/bulletml/index_e.html](http://www.asahi-
net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/bulletml/index_e.html) for describing SHMUP bullet
patterns.

You can find the same in Unity: [http://pixelnest.io/work/bulletml-for-
unity/](http://pixelnest.io/work/bulletml-for-unity/)

------
amelius
50 games of 1 level and 50 levels of a single game can actually mean the same
thing, effortwise.

~~~
fredrb
I would disagree if you reuse graphics and game logic for the other 49 levels.

~~~
darpa_escapee
This rings true having grown up in the era of "50 games in 1!!!"

------
ohyes
I love that there's a visual theme throughout the games, you can see that it
is the same person behind all of these. Somehow looking at this diagram makes
me feel very soulful. I'm not sure why.

------
taranw85
It takes such discipline to do something like this. Wonder what keeps you
going after week 25.

------
bbcbasic
Prolific. Well done!

------
george_soros
How hard is it to make html 5 games portable across different devices with
different screens ? Do "html5" game devs mainly use game maker studios that
handle the export for different devices or is it better to do that "by hand",
if latter, does anyone know for a good resource on that ?

~~~
i336_
That's pretty tricky to do at the moment sadly, JS isn't quite there yet.

As you can see with the HTML5 games in this collection, raw JS is quite
unpolished.

If you ask me, I think handling all the little things manually is probably
best at this point; JavaScript is actually quite a slow language, so
frameworks do introduce noteworthy overhead. For example my old computers do
NOT like Unity's HTML5 export at _all_ , and current smartphones can be easily
bogged down by bad code too. So hand-optimizing it is the way to go at this
exact moment.

I think this is why people are investing so heavily in WebAssembly: it'll
allow the actual language primitives to be abstracted out in different
directions, and provide higher performance to boot. At least if they get the
implementation right :P

~~~
wavefunction
You might be surprised:
[https://playcanvas.com/explore](https://playcanvas.com/explore)

~~~
i336_
Ah, my old Intel HD 2000 is on Chrome's hardware render blacklist (for good
reason, disabling it is hilarious).

WebGL is amazing though, I agree; [http://acko.net/](http://acko.net/) is how
all websites should work. :D

There are also well-polished JS games like [http://zty.pe/](http://zty.pe/)
(that don't require WebGL); that game in particular is built on a nonfree JS
game engine, but it's a good demo of what's possible with efficient coding.

~~~
wavefunction
Thanks for the links, I love seeing people pushing the boundaries of
JavaScript and software via the web in general.

I've got some similar things I work on for fun but what you've posted is
pretty remarkable!

~~~
i336_
I got hooked on ZType for a while... then I went full crazy and discovered
that there's _just enough_ game state left accessible in the global scope in
order to be able to make the game... um, play itself.

It looks absolutely ridiculous at level 60+. :D

EDIT: Doh, I completely forgot to ask - what litle side things are you working
on? I'm curious.

