I made a little game-like thing called “At Dawn” for the Boston Game Jams HTML5 game jam that ran this past weekend.

The theme for the jam was “Dawn.” I didn’t have time to attend for the whole weekend, so instead of making a game I just messed around with building a pixelated sunrise. I built most of the thing in GameMaker HTML5 (which incidentally now has the non-obfuscated debug mode I was asking for!). I say “most of” because I put the music in by hand.

The music, by the way, is from the amazing DoKashiteru, and from the amazing website CCMixter, which is where I find a lot of the Creative Commons licensed music I use in my stuff.

Building the sunrise was fun. I searched for images of sunrise and dawn until I found one that I liked. I poked around and extracted 15 different colors that I wanted to use and put them in a palette:

It’s an ordered palette — my sunrise generator basically says “if you’re X distance from the sun, fill in this area with a random choice of colors 0-2″ and has some special case rules for what happens when the sun starts to peek up over the horizon. This creates a banding and dithering effect.

The last bit of the experience, where the screen starts to fill up with light, just came from me messing around with the algorithm and deciding that I liked what that particular effect evoked.

In early 2010 I made my first plane jam game called AF 337. I loaded it into GameMaker HTML5, pressed a button, and it was working in the browser, no extra effort required! I think it’s running a little slower than the native version, but I’m pretty pleased with the performance of a completely unoptimized port!

Play the game here!

Granted, this is a VERY simple game. I tried the “one button port” approach with 9 of my GameMaker games, and only this one managed to be as simple as just pressing a button. I hope to report on more of the issues I’m having, but some of it so far has to do with Z-indexing and perhaps how it interrelates with code in the Draw event. I think. On the other hand, they’re fixing bugs daily, so maybe when I try again later it’ll work.

A really big issue I’m having right now is that sometimes a game will work in Windows, but in HTML5 it’ll just crash immediately. The problem is I have no way to really debug it when this happens. The code is all minified, so errors come back like “Undefined variable ‘kv’”, which isn’t helpful at all. What I’d like is a debug mode where I have access to the unminified JavaScript so I can use the great Webkit debug tools to track down issues. I spoke with Russell Kay of YoYoGames on Twitter about it and he said that there might be something coming soon to help with debugging.

(Note on 11/23/11: The above issue is now fixed in GameMaker HTML5. Woo!)

So the plane jam game I made the other day was made in GameMaker. Today, YoYo Games released GameMaker HTML5, which I purchased sight unseen because I’m that kinda guy.

Here’s the port, play it in your browser!

I was unable to do my background scrolling effect, but that’s because it was a horrible horrible hack that I put in because I was optimizing for speed of coding rather than good code (it being a plane jam and all). Overall I am very impressed with it so far! (For starters, check out the awesome texture packing it does to reduce http requests.) Of course, I love GameMaker in general, so I’m predisposed to like it, but it seems like they’re doing the right things as far as JavaScript and web dev is concerned.

It took me about 10 minutes of getting familiar with how the new tool works, and about 3o minutes of figuring out that the way I was abusing Views in GameMaker 8.1 wouldn’t fly with HTML5. But 40 minutes for a port is great!

It did take me a while to figure out where the game put the rendered HTML/JS files. I’m still not sure this is exactly where it was supposed to be, but when you compile to HTML5 on Windows 7 it’ll show you something like:

Saving HTML5 file... C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp\gm_ttt_97380\html5game\Project1.js

And then just head over to that location (you want the \gm_____\ folder and everything in it), grab it and upload it!

Never mind: just go to File->Create Application. It says you’re going to make an EXE but it actually makes an HTML app instead!

I’m proud to announce that I’m directing New Game Conference, an HTML5 conference for game developers. It’ll be in San Francisco on November 1st and 2nd. The conference is presented by Bocoup with Google as our major partner/sponsor. Please keep an eye on the website and our Twitter feed for more info in the coming weeks!

I was inspired by Ian Bogost’s article proclaiming that we should refer to “gamification” as “exploitationware” from here on out. I created a Chrome extension called Exploitify that replaces “gamification” with “exploitationware”, “gamify” with “exploit”, and “gamifies” with “exploits”.

This extension breaks shit — in particular, URLs on pages that contain one of the keywords will go to a dead link, since it’ll try to send you to “gamifies.html” instead of “exploits.html”, for example. But hey, I made this in 45 minutes on my lunch break today, and it’s my first Chrome extension. It’s still fun to install and browse stuff for a little while.

Click here to install Exploitify in Chrome.

Tonight is demo night at Boston Indies, and Scott Macmillan persuaded me to trot out a bunch of the random crap I’ve made in the last year. Stop by The Asgard in Cambridge, MA tonight (3/21) at 7PM if you want to try any of this stuff (or any of the other demos that will be there).

First off, I’m demoing A Scurvy of Wonders. It’s not crap. It’s actually awesome. It’s been played about 300 times in the last week, which I am told is pretty darn good for an interactive fiction release!

The rest of these games are random things that I did by myself.

• Helicopter — something I made on a red eye from Los Angeles to Boston on my way back from Indiecade. I couldn’t sleep. I made this. It shows. To play it right you need to either buy or already own a particular song, or just play it on my laptop tonight
• Toilet Tycoon (unreleased) — I was bored on a plane (see a pattern?) and I made a simulator where you’re placing urinals down in an empty men’s bathroom and trying to optimize customer satisfaction and time-to-relief.
• Last Person Shooter (unreleased) — this is a demo that I posted on this list back in February for a game about being a video game hero, but after the video game is over. You have to struggle every day to keep yourself from shooting everyone in the face. I did the initial work for this one on a plane too.
• B6631 — a weird little procedural platformer I made (on a plane) on the way to GDC 2010. It wins the award for “sound effects most likely to cause your hotelmates to want to murder you.”
• AWClone (unreleased) — made this for DinoJam, one of the first Boston Game Jams events. It is an attempt at an Advance Wars clone. I DID NOT MAKE THIS ON A PLANE.
• “The Turtle Game” (working title, unreleased) — I made this in early 2010 in an attempt to sum up how shitty my personal life was for most of 2009. I never got past the summer, which was the hardest part of the year for me. Fun fact: this project was my first attempt at Flixel before I decided I didn’t like it. That dislike led to my HTML5 work.
• the Meggy Jr Roguelike — older than the other stuff; from Feb 2009.

There’s tons more unfinished stuff in my Game Maker directory on my laptop at home. I… make a lot of games. If I find anything else of interest I’ll bring that too.

I made a new year’s resolution for 2010: make more games.

I made a game on Tuesday. It’s nothing super fancy, I just said to myself, “Hey, I’ll make a simple 8-way shooter like Robotron or Everyday Shooter.” So I did.

What’s weird is that I find this like 100 times more compelling to play than any of the stuff I set out to make that’s “supposed” to be good. Those projects I work on and I test and they’re not good enough and I never finish them. This was just… I pretty much knew what it was going to be. I made it. I tuned it. And it was done.

The game is called AF 337, named after the flight I was on when I made it. Click the image to download (Windows only).

screenshot of some frantic action from the game

I’m using Anna Anthropy’s Star Perv font, Atuun’s Assemblee compo song Nes1, and Shaktool’s (John Nesky’s) Assemblee sound fx (ouch_1 and yoink). All the art and programming is by me.

Sometimes I’m in a game store and I wish I could quickly look up a game’s average review score to help me decide if I should buy the game. So I just set up a service where you can send a game name over SMS from your phone and you can get its Metacritic scores. The short version is that you can text 265010 with a message formatted like this:

metagamebot: “name of game”

And you’ll get a text back with the top 3 Metacritic search results for that game, along with their dates of publication, their average scores, and platforms. See below for more detailed instructions.

How This Came About

So Jeff and I were in a video game store yesterday, and I said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a service I could text message and it would tell me the Metacritic score of a video game?” About three seconds later, we decided that we’d both try to implement it, although slightly differently.

Jeff didn’t want to use SMS, because his phone plan charges per message. Because he has a Windows Mobile Treo, he wanted to build an MSN bot to do it. But I say screw MSN.

I have an unlimited SMS plan, so I don’t care about text charges and it’s more convenient than signing on to the Internet. The easiest way to set up an SMS service is to write an AIM bot (be careful to use the OSCAR protocol and not TOC or TOC2). Then you can text the AIM bot from your phone by texting the number 265010 with a message formatted like

AIMScreenName: message goes here

So I modified a Perl AIM bot that uses OSCAR (BudgetBot). Of course, I had to learn some Perl first, but I already knew a lot about regular expressions in other languages, so I was pretty good to go.

Instructions For Use

All you have to do is text message the number 265010 with messages like

metagamebot: psychonauts
metagamebot: “advance wars dual strike”
metagamebot: “oblivion ps3″

What it does is search Metacritic Games using the string you provide, and then it gives you the top 3 search results. So for example,

metagamebot: oblivion

will give you

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The 2006 94 PC Games
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The 2006 94 Xbox 360
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The 2007 93 Playstation 3

But let’s say you were actually looking for the Turok game. You could then try

metagamebot: “oblivion turok”

which would give you

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion 2000 77 Nintendo 64

Pretty neat, huh? The important thing to note is that if your search term is longer than one word, you should put it in quotes. Also, nothing is case sensitive.

Now that I think about it, you could use this service on your computer by just IMing MetaGameBot. But… why would you do that?

Disclaimer

This is just running on a server of mine somewhere. It may crash and I won’t know about it. So, I make no claim that this thing will work forever, or at all!