NG Game Jam Results for Icarus – Wave Attack

It didn’t place. You can view the results here: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1340180

The first place winning entry, Magnetized, is a very unique concept and a great game. I don’t feel disappointed about the competition because such a great entry took the contest. However, the competition felt very poorly run in my opinion, and I will state my two main reasons below:

  • Game results were based on community votes, and even though this was supposed to be a competition to develop games for mobile, the majority of players who voted on my game played on a computer and gave feedback that pertained to keyboard controls. While my game doesn’t have the greatest performance on mobile, the feedback I received is a clear indication that the competition’s intended judging process did not match the final results.
  • Community votes are skewed. Maybe I got the bad end of the lot, but I received many “zero star” votes from what seems like 8-10 year old kids who happen to be members of the site. Maybe every entry got votes like these, but the fact that NG has an abundance of these kids of people makes me not want to submit any future apps there, not even for feedback.

Overall, I learned a lot about making my entry. There wasn’t too much pressure to finish because I had planned everything in advance and had it ready to go a few days before the deadline. The most frustrating aspect of the game was developing multitouch controls.

The current state of the game is slightly beyond the entry. I’ve done some work on creating a cool title screen, but there’s a lot of revisions to be made to polish it. I’ve actually broken the ability to play the actual game with the addition of the new title screen, and this is something I will address if/when I return to this project in the future. For now, you can see the title screen here: https://zesix.com/html5/IcarusTest

You can play the game jam submission here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/616172

Ludum Dare 26 Jam

Yes, I participated. I teamed up with Tobye Ryan (developer) and Lorne Colt (artist) to produce a barely-functional puzzle-solving noir game, although I will admit Tobye and Lorne did most of the work because they are both far more experienced than I am. I’m not sure how well we did in the jam, but honestly I don’t care. The very fact that we were able to start from nothing and submit something somewhat functional within 72 hours is an achievement within itself. I’m not sure I will participate in the next LD Jam at this moment, but it definitely was a great learning experience.

In May my house got hit by the EF5 tornado that swept through Oklahoma, so I’ve disappeared off the radar since then. Tobye and Lorne continued to work on the project after LD26, and they’ve set up a website for the game-to-be here: http://www.walksoftlygame.com/

A New Project

A few months ago (before the May tornado), I shared the sad truth about the Zems project on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Zemsai/posts/515115375202361. Besides the fact that a tornado has hit my house, things haven’t changed. I won’t be picking up the Zems project for the rest of this year, and instead I’ll be slowly diving into a new project that intends to be a modern reimagination of a strategy game I played in Elementary School called Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident. It’s a very well-crafted game despite its age, and if you have the Shockwave Player (http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/) installed on your computer, you can play it here: http://pandagames.biz/Strategy/Spybotics.html

I’ve done some Internet searches and apparently I’m not the only one who is interested in modernizing this game concept. I’ll post updates to the project as they happen and try to have a basic playable demo within the next few months. Stay tuned!