New Games, making a comeback

I've got four titles currently in the works, but I'm not ready to create blogs on them yet.

I normally spend night time around 9-11PM playing around with my computer and notebook, creating the blueprint and debating whether to make them for a "dead" system, with a downloadable sandbox, or using Game Maker.

One is a puzzle.
Two are platform.
The fourth is an action/third person shooter.

Indeed past arcade, TI 83 Plus, and early Mac titles have been a major influence in how I want to make these new games.

These are the devices and tools I have collected over time to get cracking:

Teach Yourself C book
Game Maker books
Yamaha keyboard YPT-300
Noteworthy Composer 2
freeware sandbox tool
Sega CD tools (just in case)
my 2008 "dream PC" with XP SP3 (still got it!)
lots of paper

Am I missing anything?

As always, all input and feedback are welcome.

Assembly language for classic consoles. The PS1 was the first console to us C.

Sheesh, I've got the design down, but writing a program to make it all work is going to be the ultimate challenge- more than doing the rest of it (music, graphics, etc.)

Here's what I've done so far:

I have made this a puzzle game first. The other games are "subgames" within the puzzle game- like modes.

So this game has an original puzzle one or two player mode with platform and shooters to supplement it. I think that would be a better arrangement than listing them individually.

As for the platform, I'm still wrestling with that, becuase I don't have a dev kit, just some downloaded "tools" that are supposed to act as dev kit parts. I'm holding my breath on that.

Two hours a night working on this may end up taking longer to get this done than I hoped. We'll see how it all pans out.

good luck, and post some videos on youtube when you have a semi-working demo!

I want to do that, but how did people get video games on YouTube with perfect picture?

I mean for instance, the Revenge of Shinobi Boss Run No Magic thing?

The guy who made it got the footage to play on YouTube perfectly. Do you need a special connection to play game footage on YouTube?

Most people use emulators and just have a program to capture everything on the computer screen or in a certain window. Others use either a video capture card on the PC or a dvd or dvr recorder to capture the video and then edit them on the PC.

I'm not going to give the projects a deadline, but right now, I'm experimenting with freeware, Game Maker, and Flash- trying to decide how I want it to look. I want a retro look, but I also want to be more flexible with graphics, sounds, and picture. Flash may be a better choice than Game Maker if that's the case.

Unless there's a free substitute for Flash, I'll just have to download a month trial to get a good feel for it. This multi-game project still has a ways to go before it's "semi-working", but I'm doing all I can to make time for it, if even for a few minutes during a busy day.

Well, there are emulators built with flash. So, if you did an atari or nes game or whatever, you could use it to bring it to the masses. One of the problems with both java and flash is that it still doesn't allow you to store high scores or saved games or anything. So, you would probably have to use it in conjunction with and SQL database. You could probably use a combination of flash, html, and php with an SQL database and make a pretty kickass game.

Also with flash, graphics and music are usually key elements of it. Flash probably would be good for puzzle games, action/adventure, but php would be a better bet if you were going to do rpgs and text adventures.

Some PHP/SQL games you can check out:
Legend of the Green Dragon:
http://lotgd.net/home.php?

Solar Imperium is a pretty awesome space/scifi war/strategy/simulation PHP game, based on an old BBS game called Solar Realms Elite.
http://www.blackcountryrock.org/shooterjen...lar/welcome.php

World of Phaos was a nice RPG for a php/sql system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWMmKgpVtJs

Don't let the graphics fool you. If you are good with graphics and sound, you can make them as good or bad as your skills will allow. I'm mainly mentioning these three games, because I used to run all three of them myself. The copy of phaos I had was actually buggy, and I had to fix one of the bugs, and I also hacked every one of the games to bypass the e-mail verification servers and various other signup and sign-in parts, to make it easy and fast to login and play.

One of the games required an e-mail address to sign in and wouldn't accept just a username. It's been awhile, but what I believe I did was made it so that when someone signed in with just a handle, like 'Malakai', it would actually copy that handle into the program (invisible to the user) as malakai@malakai.com or something like that. I don't really remember how I bypassed the actual e-mail verification, but I do remember that on at least one of the games, I had it setup to display the verification code as soon as you signed up, the same code it would have sent out via e-mail. I use to have the hacked files for them, but I think the hard drive crashed and I lost them. It's been awhile.

The only issue with SQL is that it does take some horsepower to drive it on the server end, vs flash games, where most of the horsepower is on the user's end. SQL is basically the same thing that runs the world of warcraft, everquest, and pretty much every MMORPG server. It's just a database though. That's why you need PHP, hdml, flash, java, or whatever else to interface with and control it.