GamePyong

Games built for Jams The October 2016 edition of the Game Developers Trinindad and Tobago (GDTT) monthly game jam featured the theme Halloween - you are the monster. It required you to build a game where you play as the enemy instead of the hero. GamePyong once again rose to the challenge and built a game within the month of October to fit into the theme. A Devil with a Sweet Tooth Since this game jam took place around the same time as Halloween, we decided to build a game around things associated with Halloween. The idea we came up with was Candy Devil; a game where you play a devil who loves candy. We wanted to make this game as simple to pick up and play as possible. The mechanic it uses is a collection and avoidance one. The game can be played with the mouse or using one finger on a mobile phone. The player simply needs to collect as much candy as possible while trying to avoid a constantly increasing number of homing missiles. The game is available to ...

Games built for Jams A game jam is an event in which game developers, artists and musicians come together in order to create a game based on a theme within a short period of time. It is usually used for acquiring experience in creating and finishing games. The theme and short time span tends to breed creativity. One of the biggest game jams in the world is the Ludum Dare . The Game Developers Trinidad and Tobago group on Facebook has perhaps the largest collection of game developers in the country. The group runs a monthly game jam in which members propose and vote on a theme and then proceed to build a game within a month. This series of posts will focus on the games submitted by GamePyong for these game jams. Theme: Make a game incorporating these words: Jetpack, Ocelot and Twin The first jam was for the month of August, 2016 and it's theme is mentioned above. GamePyong took the theme literally and decided to build a game in which the protagonists are tw...

Games for friends Sometimes the best moments in gaming come when your heart is pounding as you try to decimate your friends in some good old-fashioned multiplayer fun. This series of posts focuses on some of the games we've built to deliver these moments. The next one up is Simplicity. Simplicity This is a multiplayer puzzle game that was inspired by Super Puzzle Fighter . Players play side-by-side and are given the same set of puzzle pieces (called orbs). The orbs are colour-coded and must be stacked according to their colours. When a smash gem arrives, the player can use it to smash all of the connected orbs of the same colours as the gem. In so doing, the player's field is cleared up a bit and an equivalent number of orbs are sent across to the opponent's field. The first player to reach the top of the play area loses the match. An actual match can be seen in the video below: Simplicity is a real-time multiplayer game. Players are able to drop orbs at a...

Games for friends Games that you can play by yourself are great, but at GamePyong, we've always been fascinated by the ability to play against anyone, anywhere in the world. The very first version of All Fours Online was built shortly after we first learned how to send data across a network via sockets. Playing against a computer AI can be interesting but it in no way compares to a real, live human opponent. In this series, we'll be taking a look at a couple of the multiplayer games we've built in the past (excluding All Fours, which was covered in a previous post ). The first one is a little-known card game called Psychic. Psychic This is a recreation of the two-player card game known as Psychological Jujitsu . In the game, a normal deck of cards is separated into its suits, and each player is given one of the suits (not the diamonds). The diamond suit is shuffled and placed face-down in the middle of the players. The players can look at their cards. On each turn...

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 ...