GamePyong

Games that make your brain hurt Puzzle games are one of GamePyong's favourite genre of games. We've played a lot of them, from Tetris to Candy Crush Saga . We've also made a few such as Ints , Firewords , Monkory and Quicket . There are many different types of puzzle games and in this series of posts, we'll be taking a look at some of them to see what we can learn. The first type that we'll focus on is tile-based puzzle games. Tile-Based Puzzles These are games where you need to manipulate tiles to produce some result. It might be trying to get the tiles to form horizontal lines, matching three or more tiles of the same colour or some other type of tile manipulation. The oldest and arguably greatest tile-based game is, of course, Tetris. Created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, the game exploded into popularity and is widely regarded as one of the best puzzle games ever designed. It has also spawned a number of derivatives. Another type of tile-based p...

The most brutally difficult, profanity-inducing game we ever made We were unable to build a new game this week because of the new improvements we added to the previous game, Quicket. This took up a significant chunk of the week. We will therefore be looking back at the making of one of our older games in this post. The History Crates was built in August 2012 and released as a Java applet which allowed the game to be played within the browser. At the time, GamePyong was heavily invested in Java as its game programming language. We made use of the awesome LibGDX  game framework to create Crates. The game was inspired by a title called Space is Key that we enjoyed playing a long time ago. The Game Crates is a very simple one-button game. There are three sections in each level. Each section is populated with crates that explode upon contact with the player. The crates are placed in tricky positions sometimes, necessitating quick reflexes. The player runs automaticall...

A Cricket Game For People Who Don't Like Cricket Update - Quicket is a staff pick on an issue of the Phaser World newsletter ! In a previous post , we built a cricket game as part of our series on Caribbean Games. We liked the game so much that we decided to expand it further this week. It's quite a rare occurrence that a game that we built is unique, fun and well-received, so it made sense to polish it up from the initial post. Quicket was literally built in one day and even though its core gameplay loop was engaging, we knew a lot more could be done with it. Leaderboards If you played the original Quicket from last week's post, you would have noticed that there wasn't really any reason to keep playing other than to try to beat your own score. One of the first improvements we made was to add a highscores list to the game so that you can compete against other Quicket players for the most runs scored. In our experience, the existence of a leaderboard in games ...

Caribbean Games is a  series  that is focused on highlighting games indigenous to the islands of the Caribbean.  GamePyong  will explore various local and regional games and pastimes, derive inspiration from them and create games based on them. The Gentleman's Game with a Twist Play the game we built for this blog post here: Play Quicket UPDATE - Quicket has been released on the Google Play Store: Quicket App Cricket was brought to Trinidad around the late 1790's by the British and would go on to become one of the most popular sports played locally to this day. It is a bat-and-ball game which has 11 players per team. The game is played on a rectangular pitch surrounded by an oval-shaped field. One team tries to score as many runs as possible by hitting the ball while the other team tries to restrict the scoring of runs and get all of the players out. Once a team has been bowled out, the teams swap roles. The team that has amassed the higher score afte...

Substituting Artistic Talent with Code I can't draw to save my life. I've tried, but even my most basic drawings don't seem to look right. Fortunately for me (and the rest of the world spared from my terrible programmer art), I can use code to draw my content for me. Procedural content generation  refers to using computer algorithms to automatically create vast amounts of content such as textures, environments and music. Games such as Spelunky and No Man's Sky  and many others make extensive use of procedurally generated content to create their worlds. For No Man's Sky, a game which is set in a generated galaxy, it would have been virtually impossible to create all of the content that is present in the game by any other means due to the sheer size of the game. In this post, I'm going to show some simple examples of procedurally generated content specifically for creating variety in games. This is what the end result will be: You can try it for yo...

Caribbean Games is a  series  that is focused on highlighting games indigenous to the islands of the Caribbean.  GamePyong  will explore various local and regional games and pastimes, derive inspiration from them and create games based on them. Knuckle Down and Get Rolling Play the game we built for this blog post here: Play Pitch Playing with marbles is one of the oldest and most pervasive games in the world. Made of clay, stone, ceramic or glass, marbles are small spheres about half an inch in diameter; though some like the 'Big-Goonks' are a bit larger. Modern marbles usually contain a swirl of coloured glass inside. In Trinidad, the most coveted marbles were usually crystals (coloured glass with nothing inside), 'K-K' (opaque white marbles with coloured designs), 'Snake Eyes' (marbles that contained 2 or 3 dark swirls) and the aforementioned 'Big-Goonks' (larger and heavier than regular marbles). There are many different games that ...