Thanks to everyone who helped me beta test .90. It has taken me a full year to get to this point. When you work full time and have a wife and young son, it is very difficult to find time to make a game. Anyway again, thanks to Steve Fulton,…

Jeff sent me a beta release of Retro Blaster and I have posted it.   You can play it right now and start blasting everything in your path.  If only I would tell you what the link is…        

The fine people at wiicade have created an API for Flash that will allow programmers to test for ANY button press on the Wiimote!   The A,B,+,-,1,2, and the direction pad are all available, as well as the pointer from the Wiimote.   To test this API, I took one of my unposted…

OK, so I was at Target on Friday looking for cheap games in the marked-down section (red price-tags!) and I found a copy of “Big Mutha Trickers 2” for $2.49. Since I have a weakness for trucking games, and $2.49 is my ‘buy it now’ price-point, I had to get…

My first video game true love was Asteroids. I think the game must have satisfied some internal, mental need to keep things cleaned up. The Sisyphusian nature of this electronic task was enough to make me pour quarter after quarter into the machine in an attempt to just earn one…

Creating Brickbasher (just added a few days ago, but programmed in 2004) was one of my first eye-opening experiences programming small garage games. I have been a fan of Breakout style games since the age of 8 (read about the story here) when I first sampled the classic Atari 2600…

So, if you have looked at our Work In Progress page you will notice that we have a lot of half-finished games and ideas that we plan to someday come back to.   To be honest, the list on that page really only scratches the surface.  I probably have 2 dozen…

So we are just starting to experiment with Flash games designed specifically for the nintendo Wii.  I started this process on Dec. 24th, the day the Wii opera Browser was downloadable. That day I got the first version of Fireworks Blast ready to work on the Wii.   Thge first thing I…

Breakout 2600   Hypnotic death notes Each block wails an 8-bit tone Blinks out then silence   Burrow A Hole Through Your color-banded shield Watch ball go ape-crap   Difficulty B Paddle too tiny. Back to Difficulty A   One last little block Yes! I cleared level two What? No…

I spent the last week working on jStar. After researching and working with a* for the last few days, I came to the conclusion that while very powerful, it was slow and overkill for my arcade-adventure, shoot the robots game. Also, since the player is constantly moving, the recalculations using…

Ok, so I can count all of my previous experience programming path finding algorithms on two fingers. The first was in high school when Steve and I had a very rudimentary computer class instead of typing. One of the basic programming tasks we were asked to perform was to make…

Even before we owned a computer or game console, Steve and I were designing games. All the way back in 1978 I was borrowing graph paper from my dad and designing pixel art of space ships, baseball games, and what not. Computer graphics design was a brand new field, and…

Garage Launched Games! If you haven’t read Steve’s first blog entry, you should take it in. It describes how we started making games (or at least how we started to want to make games), and gives you an idea of how little time we really have to make games in…

Over that last few days working on the game has been a learning experience and an exercise in frustration. I finally found a halfway decent running animation to use as a template. It came from the 2600 version of Miner 2049er. Having finally found a decent animation, I dug into…