Tiny Hawk was my entry to Ludum Dare 11 back in April 2008. The theme was “Minimalist”. What I made was a single-switch platforming game, inspired by the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series of games. It had a cute little combo system for getting high scores, and you had several context sensitive moves you could perform with just one button. I remember that when drawing the main character, I tried to keep the resolution as small as possible while still making it recognizable as a skateboarder.

Tiny Hawk didn’t win Ludum Dare 11, but I was very happy with how it was received. It was featured on the IndieGames blog, Auntie Pixelante called it the bee’s knees, a fellow called Palad made a couple of fan levels for it, and somebody even wrote a MobyGames page for it, with the absolute coolest description of the game; I highly recommend reading it.

Fast forward to 2010; PoV announces the October Challenge, wherein he challenges everyone to make a game or polish up an old one during the month October, and make just one dollar of revenue. I jump on it, and what better game to polish up than one of my most highly regarded LD games, Tiny Hawk? I figured that making a Flash game would be a good way to make a few dollars, because of the relative ease of making money through a sponsorship with the help from a site like FlashGameLicense. I end up tweaking the game a whole bunch even while it’s sitting on FGL up for grabs. This does end up improving the game’s look a lot, but eventually doesn’t get me many new bidders. I end up selling a primary license to the good folks at GameBods.

The Flash version does end up being quite different from the Ludum Dare version. The game now uses more than just one button, based on feedback received about the LD version, where people would sometimes get annoyed when they couldn’t turn around after they made a mistake. I also include acceleration into the game, which ends up being a core mechanic, as the player needs to make sure they have enough speed to make all the jumps. The visual look is of course also highly improved.

The Flash version ends up on many Flash portals around the world. It’s been played over a million times across different sites. You can play it on my own site TinyHawk.com, Armor Games, Kongregate, Newgrounds, etc.

After Tiny Hawk Flash is released, I start thinking about the possibility of making Flash games for a living. I sign up for some counseling on setting up my own business. Before I’m even through with that though, I get an e-mail from a representative of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and get into talks about developing PlayStation games. By March, I have set up a sole proprietorship, and have a PSP devkit ready to make games. I decide that Tiny Hawk would be a good first project to do. Mostly just to get my feet wet, and finish it quickly. I end up running into some problems though. I spend some significant time in the hospital, losing time and breaking my flow.  I also end up starting the project in one of the dumbest ways possible. I decide that it would be good for productivity to use a high level scripting language to write the game logic, and only use C++ for the core graphics processing and stuff like that. This ends up not working out, as the PSP is not fast enough to run all the game logic in an interpreted scripting language, and I end up struggling writing all the necessary language bindings.

I finish Tiny Hawk PSP port in the beginning of December. I barely miss the deadline to get it out on PlayStation Network by Christmas though.

And here’s what the game is looking like right now. The graphics are all new, and there’s a new scoring system. Otherwise it’s very similar to the Flash version. It’s coming out on January 4th in the European region, which I believe in the PlayStation Network’s case also includes South Africa and Australia, at least. I do intend to get it out at least in North America as well, as soon as possible.

I’m not going to go into too much detail in describing the game right now, but I hope you guys liked this retrospective on Tiny Hawk, and I hope if it’s available in your region and you have a PSP or a PS3, you check out the game when it comes out January 4th! (Rated PEGI 3)

Moar screenshots!

This is what I’ve been working on. I started late, but this is looking ok enough. Need some obstacles and enemies now.

I’m not completely decided on what tech I’m going to use, but I’m leaning towards C++ with SDL 1.3 and OpenGL. My other option would be AS3 with FlashPunk, which has some significant advantages of its own. Will probably depend on what sort of ideas I come up with once the theme is out.

Play Tiny Hawk on Kongregate

This has been out for a little while now, but turns out I never announced the release here.

I made a game for Ludum Dare #11 by the name of Tiny Hawk. It placed #5 in the overall category, and I got a lot of good feedback on it. It was featured on some indie game blogs too. So yeah, it was a mild success, but I was pretty happy with it.

Fast forward to September 2010, when PoV announced the October Challenge. I decided I would try my hand at making a Flash game and getting it licensed through Flash Game License. At first I thought I would make a 1:1 port of the original LD entry version of Tiny Hawk, but ended up making a bunch of changes to the gameplay and making 32 all new levels. I do think it maintains the core of the original, but improves upon it. I was able to get a sponsorship deal from GameBods.com and the game’s also done decently well on Kongregate. I recently sold a non-exclusive license to Armor Games, where the game has been pretty popular. The game has been played over 300,000 times on different sites. The feedback has been a bit mixed, but some people like the game a lot, so I’m pretty happy about that.

I just received my LD Gift Exchange gift today. It’s a Glasgowbury 2010 music festival programme on a lanyard.

The programme has five parts, for all the different stages at the festival. “Small But Massive Main Stage” in dark red, “G Sessions Stage” in bright red, “Spurs of Rock Stage” in pink, “Eagle’s Rock Stage” in orange, and “G Spot Stage” in yellow. The backsides are all black, with the venue logo and the slogan “Small But Massive” in white. Some of the listed bands include names like “Panama Kings”, “Team Fresh”, “Little Hooks”, and “Henrietta Game”.

The lanyard is 90cm long, black and has the venue logo as well as the words “red square” in white.

The accompanying letter written by gift-giver Grieve has nice lines to write on, and a pink margin line on the left. It also has holes for easy storage in a binder.

The one final approach for physics and collision detection I’m yet to try is to ditch Box2D physics, but just utilize its collision detection system, and write my own physics. It’s the final glimmer of hope for PBE, but it’s an uphill battle at this point.

• Programming language: ActionScript 3
• Engine: PushButton Engine
• Graphics Software: ToonBoom Animate 2, The GIMP
• Graphics Hardware: Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet
• Audio Software: SFXR, Audacity. Musagi or MilkyTracker
• Audio Hardware: Cheap microphone. Possibly E-MU X-Board 25 MIDI keyboard

I got into Flash game development during October Challenge using FlashPunk. Since then though, I’ve been gravitating toward PushButton Engine, but I’ve run into this problem: My previous codebase ended up being a real mess, probably partly because I was learning FlashPunk and AS3 at the same time. I’m trying to avoid that this time, but that’s just making the development go really really slowly, especially since PBE’s documentation is frankly a little bit lacking. The solution of course is simple: For Ludum Dare #19, I will make a game using PBE without caring at all what the code will look like. This way I’ll learn more as I go and possibly discover some tricks along the way. This will make it easier to carry on with my other project in PBE later.

Well, not exactly up for sale just yet, but it is on flashgamelicense.com, waiting for approval so that it can be showed to sponsors. I hope it does well.

I want to thank all the people on #ludumdare who tested the game during development. A special thanks goes out to JDruid, who is responsible for the great music in the game, and did a lot of testing also.

Now, I wait.

At first I was planning on making a super fancy version, possibly with 3D graphics and overall a very different focus from the original. The original was really just a single-switch platformer where you got some score bonuses by chaining tricks together. I was thinking about making it more about the tricks instead. While planning this though, I realized it would have been a lot of work and I didn’t have a clear vision of the final product, so I decided to just port the original game to Flash instead.

Now, somewhere along the way I decided the original game wasn’t quite good enough, so I started changing things. I made the levels smaller. This enabled me to not have to put so much filler into the levels. Some of the original levels were half empty anyhow. With this smaller size, I can fill the level most of the time without repeating myself a lot. Another major thing I changed is I added momentum. This means that if the player avoids various things that slow him down, he can get through the levels much faster, and reach places unreachable at low speeds. Speed, of course is the new name of the game. Instead of a score, the player is timed on how fast he can beat the levels.

Well, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share some of my progress here also. I’m talking about the project more regularly on IRC though, also posting links to development builds. I won’t post those here since I’m trying to keep it under wraps until I get it sponsored.

Here’s a video of where I’m at right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMvmL6AzDFU

It did start raining though, and I think I might have to take a shower now, but that’s ok.

The idea of the game is that you have a baseball bat that you whack your enemies with. The initial enemy here just flies off , hitting other enemies on the way. As you can see, this makes it easy to take care of even large numbers of enemies. I’m also planning on exploding enemies. Not sure about any other enemy types yet. Possibly variations on those two.

My tools:

• Engine: Unity 3D
• Language: C#
• IDE/Editor: MonoDevelop
• 3D Modeling and Animation: Blender
• Image Manipulation: Gimp
• Pixel Art: Allegro Sprite Editor
• Sound Effects: Sfxr
• Sound Processing and Recording: Audacity
• Music: Undecided. Thinking about buying a copy of Renoise.

My plan is to try and get most of my game logic done on Saturday, and focus on content on Sunday. I think I also have to promise myself not to get stuck trying to think of the perfect game idea. Just go with whatever I can come up within an hour or two.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvvT9Xcr4nQ

So, my original RTS plans didn’t work out, so I took on the challenge to make a Glorious Trainwreck -style two-hour game. I did some planning beforehand and googled some tips on simulating water buoyancy in Unity, then at 03:00, I started coding, and finally submitted the game at 05:00, right on the deadline. I managed a title screen, high score recording, music, sound effects and fun gameplay in a single level in two hours. Well, at least I think it’s kinda fun. Also pretty hard.

The entry page is at: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=110

You can play the game at: http://dump.pekuja.com/island_balance.html (requires Unity Web Player)

So here’s what I did manage to finish: http://dump.pekuja.com/pekuja_ld17.html

I’d appreciate any comments on the music. I don’t compose a lot so any critique or tips would be appreciated. The loop was made using DrPetter’s Musagi.