Only 4 days left in NG's Stencyl game jam, and my game still needs a lot of work. Well, I didn't get any enemies done today, but I did make some spikes. Every good 2D platformer has to have spikes in it, right? Well, at least mine does anyway.

I wanted to make tiles for the terrain that sloped up and down, but when I tested them out I found that my character would not move up the slopes correctly. Since I don't have enough time to debug and re-do the character controller instruction blocks in Stencyl in order to get this to work correctly I'm sticking with perfectly horizontal tiles. Works for me, at least until after the jam is over. I spent some time making colorful terrain tiles and placing them freely in the scene to get an idea of how the colors would fit together, and then I got an idea of what kind of look I'm going to go for as far as terrain. I'll work on the tiles and scenes more tomorrow, as well as finally making some enemies I hope! Here's what the game looks like as of right now:

Thanks for reading!

OK, here's my second post for my game I'm working on for Stencyl Jam 2014. I've spent about 18 hours since my last post on the game. I got the controls working well (I hope) for the character movement, and I also made a pixel-drawn character and animations for the movement as well. I'm happy with how the little guy turned out. If I have time to add ladders, then I will make character animations for climbing and descending ladders, but it's looking like that probably won't happen before the 28th.

I also made it so the character (I don't have a name for him yet) can now shoot plasma charges which now are able to explode on impact with anything. I drew the plasma charges and explosions using the pixel tool in Pixelmator, which I think I am slowly getting the hang of. Next I plan to work on animations and programming some enemies to blow up. But first I'm going to sleep. Oh, here's a screenshot of what it looks like so far:

Thanks for reading!

Yes, I am crazy. That's why I've decided to commit myself to making a game for NewGrounds' Stencyl Game Jam 2014, which ends on March 28th, one week from today. Here's why I'm crazy:

The game jam was announced a whole month ago, but I only found out about it one week ago, at which time I had never used Stencyl before. Plus, I am very new to game dev. I only started trying to learn game development just over a year ago. I've only completed one game (which sucked btw) up to this date. I've never done a game jam before, and I started my first one now when it was more than halfway through, and the way I started it was to cram like crazy to learn Stencyl as fast as I can. That means about 12 hours a day on average on game dev. But it is so much fun! So, yeah, I'm crazy...

So I'm going to make the next few posts to show my progress on the game I'm working on, a 2D platformer game, if anyone is interested in this kind of game dev. Don't expect much the first few posts. I've spent the last 2 days programming the run and jump movement of the player, as well as programming moving platforms that will allow the player to ride and jump off of them correctly. I decided that Stencyl's built-in behavior for run and jump movement is terrible (no offense, Stencyl), so I started making my own from scratch. It's been a buggy process, but progress is being made. Here's a snapshot of what I have so far.

Don't expect the final game to look anything like this. What I have here is a simple test scene I used to work out the mechanics of the player's character movement. There is much more artwork to come, as well as more mechanics. I'll probably give the character a gun to shoot enemies. I also plan to make the main character look completely different. This one now is a bit too wide and so it makes the gameplay a bit awkward when trying to fit through narrow openings. Creating the character animations for idle, run, jump, shoot, hurt, and die in Pixelmator are my next immediate goals.

I plan to also do the music myself for this game jam. I worked on one song, "Stencyl Jam 1 (WIP),"  last night and I uploaded it here: http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/570711

Thanks for reading!

For those of you who are into video game music, who are your favorite video game music composers? I'm new to making video game music, and I'm trying to learn more about it. So far I think my favorite is Danny Baranowski, who did the music for Super Meat Boy and several other popular indie games. Who do you like? Thanks!

Thanks for reading my post, whoever you are, I'm honored. This is my first post, so I'll tell you a bit about myself. First off: Yes I am a person and, No I'm not an organization for charity. I chose the name "HelpThePoor" because I think there are a lot of people who do not have the comforts that others have, and I think people should help each other. Plus, who knows? I might be poor one day and needing help! :D

I started learning game development about 11 months ago in my spare time. I've loved video games since I was about 6 years old or so. Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, Tetris, and Mega Man were some of my favorite games from NES. Super Meat Boy is probably my favorite game right now. Also, I LOVE music and recently started making some video game style music in GarageBand. I've uploaded four of my songs to NewGrounds so far, so I welcome any feedback you can give, any thoughts you have at all on my music so that I can learn from what you hear in my songs and use your feedback to improve my music. I play the electric guitar somewhere in the intermediate level, and I hope to add some recorded guitar to my songs in the future. Also, I plan on getting more advanced software, such as FL Studio, pretty soon to make better songs.

So far I have one game nearly completed, called "Memory Thump," which can be played on kongregate.com, and I have started working a bit on a retro-style game involving a fish that spits stuff at enemies to destroy them, similar to a space shooter game except with sea creatures instead of spaceships.

If you like any of my songs and want to use them in your project for others to see, please send me a private message to let me know. As of right now, all I ask is that you give me credit for my song(s) somewhere in the project. Thanks for reading!