One Game A Month

Games - www.onegameamonth.com

Hello all, as promised in my first post I am here to talk about a fantastic idea and fun website, www.onegameamonth.com. One Game a Month is a website all about... Well creating one game a month. It is all about motivating game devs to actually get a game up and working and ready for public consumption every month. Sounds crazy, like too much hard work? Well people are on there and doing it.

Armed with my new tool, Stencyl, I decided to finish my Space Rocks game and enter it on the site as my first game. It was very rewarding due to the way the site gives you XP for various actions, including releasing a game. The XP rewards get bigger and bigger if you keep releasing a game every month. Not that you can do anything with your XP but lets face it, geeks love XP.

My profile and XP

There seems to be a nice little community forming too. There are twitter accounts to follow and a reddit plus other various ways of getting in contact with like minded people. I've already got a few new followers on twitter and my game keeps getting played since putting on the site, so I'm really happy about that.

I'm really looking forward to April. I fully aim to release another game to the unsuspecting gaming community. The more experience I get at making and releasing games the better I'm hoping to get.

Watch this space...

Next time I will be talking to you about April's gaming project!

Welcome to ISK Productions

This is my new blog site to tell anyone out there a little bit about myself and my game development endeavours.

I have been wanting write computer game for sometime but I found that the learning curve is pretty steep, especially with a young family and, to be fair, my really bad procrastination problem (this is the main cause).

So over the last few months I have been trying to learn to program in python and java but I quickly find I don't have enough hours to fully get to grips with it and produce something quickly. I understand that it is not easy and if I want to release my dream I would need to spend a lot more time learning to start off with. But I found this frustrating and then I came across Stencyl. Well that was it for me. I downloaded this great bit of software and with in minutes of the first tutorial you can get a working game. It is fast and ridiculously easy to get to grips with. I understand that it might be limited in what it can produce and I'm sure I'll have to move on at some point. Although it does seem early days for Stencyl and they seem to be fitting more and more features into their system.

If you haven't had a look at Stencyl I would really recommend you go and take a look. If, like me, you want something fast and easy to deliver playable games then this is for you.

So with my new tool in hand I started to create my first game, Space Rocks. It is basically an Asteroids clone and where a lot of first time developers start. It has taken me the best part of a month to get it working like I want but that is with me dipping in and out of it. I've not spent hours every day trying to get it working, it's been an odd hour here and there tweaking what I already had.

The best thing about it is that I've not just used someone else's artwork or sound effects. I've even created them myself. I downloaded a pixel art program called Pixen (Mac OS). I then used an online resource to create my various sound effects called as3sfxr.

So I urge all you aspiring games developers, get out there and look at the tools on offer. Stencyl is my choice at the moment but I know there are plenty of other tools now I have looked around. I think with a little bit of effort anyone can get an idea up and running. Good luck!

Next entry I will talk about OneGameAMonth. Sounds like hard work but I think it might be fun!