Spelchan.com Summer 2019

Blazing Games has been closed, at least the home page has. For the moment I am leaving the other pages up so if you know the link to a game then you can still go to the page. This will be eventually changing but I'm in no rush here. I produced a lot of Games so there is a huge amount of porting work to do. I have reviewed the  results of the poll and as a result have made changes to my release plans for this year.

Coffee Quest was released a month early. My holiday games seem to be slightly more popular than I expected.  For this reason I am going to make sure that I have holiday games ported as appropriate. This decision has me in the process of porting my Canada Day flag game for release this Canada Day (July 1st for non-Canadian visitors). Next year I will release my Independence Day game for my American friends.

I have decided that, in memory of my Mother, I am going to only release Color Collapse episodes on Mother's Day but do plan on creating related games once the remaining two episodes have been released. 

I noticed that the voting list of games missed some of the games that were already in HTML5 so those will become filler for when I am too busy to finish porting other games. The first of these will be Sudoku which will be released in August as my card and dice collection are very low in popularity. A beta of Coffee Quest 2  will hopefully be released this September with a Halloween game for October. November’s release is not yet determined yet and will be dependent on my time in September and October and I plan on creating a unique Christmas game this year.

I am not going to have any official release schedule for 2020 (other than a game every month) but do plan on showcasing the games I am working on in whatever game I am going to release in January. Hint, it will not be an updated Calendar NIM game this time.

So hopefully you will enjoy the site. Next fortnight I will start the next chapter of my Creating HTML 5 Games with Animate eBook so hope you continue reading.

Blazing Games Life after Death

It has been no secret that the Blazing Games site is going away in April. This may lead to the question about what I am going to do with this blog after the site shuts down? I have been thinking about dropping this blog keeping only my Homebrew Gamejam blog but I am slowly porting the Flash and Java games from BlazingGames into HTML5 and hosting the new versions on Spelchan.com. There are a lot of games that I had created on BlazingGames so this process will take a very long time so it makes sense to continue to keep this blog running. Besides, I have to finish posting the chapters from my Making HTML5 Games using Animate eBook.

I will continue posting the sections of the book each fortnight with updates on game ports made between the chapters. In addition to Spelchan.com, I also have my 2600Dragons.com and will soon have TarotRevealed.com which is where I plan on hosting my tarot games. There are a lot of pages that make up the site as well as a lot of features that I would like to add to the site so this is going to be a process that will take a fair amount of time. I am going to spread this work out adding new layouts or features every month with the site being updated on the 15^th of each month.

Right now I am running into some issues setting up the site (adding it to my hosting is still pending) but hopefully the site will show up shortly and I will be able to have the first version of the site ready by the 15^th of this month.

I would like to be porting games much quicker than I currently am but at the moment am working on my Masters degree so my spare time is very little. The few hours a week that I allocate to working on both blogs, porting games, and developing my emulator should probably be used for study but I consider this my time so try to allocate some time for these projects. Naively I was hoping to get ahead of the release schedule so that I wouldn’t need to worry about hitting release dates but that has not been the case. My summer schedule is lighter but as we are expected to work on our thesis at that time I suspect that my tune situation will be just as bad in the summer. The Coffee Quest engine isn’t too bad so I should have no problem releasing content for that series but I was really hoping to do my revamped One of those Weeks and Ultimate Retro Project games.  

Needless to say, my focus for the larger project will be Coffee Quest  and once that project is done I will have to make a decision between Ultimate Retro Project and One of those Weeks. What I want to do with OotW is very time consuming but I should be finished my Masters degree so unless I decide to go for a PHD I should have more spare time. More on this once I have finished posting the next chapter of the eBook, which will be starting next fortnight.

Coffee Quest Trilogy Plans

The Coffee Quest (CQ) series started off as an attempt to create a web-based role-playing game using the then-new Java programming language. Java, while a very successful language in many areas, failed in the browser and has been replaced by JavaScript using HTML5 components and CSS3 style sheets. This tends to be collectively called HTML5. My original plans for porting to HTML5 was to simply use an engine that supported HTML5  and finally get around to getting my CQFS engine working by building off the back of another engine. I started experimenting with the Unity engine but really do not like that engine. Then I remembered that for a game jam I participated in back in 2012 that I started working on a FPS version of Coffee Quest. That existing work, while still in an early development stage, would be perfect for the first three games in the series so I decided I would do a Coffee Quest Trilogy game that would combine the first three games into a single package. As this game is developed, the individual episodes will be released on Spelchan.com giving visitors to my site early access to the game.

The enhanced HTML5 version of the game will be mixed-time combining both real-time and turn-based play. I may make the option of an FPS mode where the game would be fully real-time. Each game in the series will have multiple episodes to reflect the different maps, and possibly a number of new maps, that will be made available. I have not decided if in the final game to lock the maps and require players finish other maps to unlock additional maps or if to make everything accessible. A third option would be to have all the Coffee Quest 1 maps initially unlocked to the player and once they have finished any of the maps, to unlock all the Coffee Quest 2 maps. Once a Coffee Quest 2 map has been completed, then the Coffee Quest 3 maps would be made available.  

My ideal release plans, which knowing history are very unlikely to work out, are as follows:

Quarter 1 of 2019 would be the release of the Coffee Quest release candidate with a new map (or two). The goal here would be to have a better automap, better quest status area, and the ability to click on the automap to bring up a full-screen map screen.

Quarter 2 of 2019 will hopefully be the beta release of the Coffee Quest 2 module which introduces monsters and inventory to the game. The Coffee Quest series uses the concept of conditions to weapons where the weapon deteriorates in quality over time and will break if the weapon or armor deteriorates too much. One change that the enhanced version of the game will have is that picking up additional copies of the same weapon will simply improve the quality of the weapon if you already have that weapon instead of filling up slots in an inventory.

Quarter 3 of 2019 will hopefully be the release candidate version of Coffee Quest 2 with a new map and enhancements/fixes made to the game.

Quarter 4 of 2019 would be a new Christmas game using the CQ-Trilogy engine.

Quarter 1 of 2020 would be the beta of the Coffee Quest 3 game which would introduce multi-floor towers.

Quarter 2 of 2020 will be an easter-themed game using the CQ-Trilogy engine.

Quarter 3 of 2020 will be the final build of the Coffee Quest 3 module.

Quarter 4 of 2020 will be the beta release of the combined game and will have some new maps as well as a halloween themed game.

If I fall behind on one of the quarter objectives then I will release additional maps for that quarter’s release. This would delay the final release of the game by a quarter. If things go smoothly I will finish the enhanced version of the original Coffee Quest Trilogy by the end of 2020 but odds are there will be a couple of quarters that I will miss so most likely this project will not be completed until 2021 or 2022 in the worst case situation. Depending on my situation once this project is completed, I will look into doing a similar project for the porting of Coffee Quest 4 and the final creation of Coffee Quest 5 and 6.

Site Plans Winter 2018

Working on my Masters of Science in Computer Science is proving to be very time consuming. While I am trying to allocate blocks of time towards my porting and site work, the amount of time that I am actually able to devote to these side tasks is not as much as I would like. This means that there may be changes to the blog post next year. As the book is mostly written, there will not be any changes to this blog. The emulator work has slowed down so I will have to decide how to handle things once I catch up with my current work. Worst case scenario is that I cut back to monthly updates though will likely write some side-trip articles covering other aspects of the development such as the creation of test games and assembly libraries.

Spelchan.com will continue to be updated each month with a port of an existing game. As you have already seen, the October game was changed to Pent Up Anger. While I was going to release Coffee Quest 2 next month, instead I am going to release Cribbage Square and will use my new Coffee Quest engine to do an enhanced version of Santa’s Search for the December game.

I do plan on releasing a Coffee Quest episode every quarter of next year, with more information on the Coffee Quest porting plans to be made next fortnight as next fortnight’s port will be on the making of HTML5 Coffee Quest.

Even though the Dozen Days of Dice series is not overly popular, I really don’t have time to do a worthy port of One of those Weeks, so until I have enough time to do a proper OotW port, the Dozen Days series will be a placeholder with an episode every quarter.

This leaves four games open.  These will probably be used for holiday games but I have not yet made up my mind what I will be releasing so consider the other four releases for next year to be mystery games. They may even be new games if I end up creating some for University assignments.

Next fortnight, as mentioned above, will be a look at my Coffee Quest port and what the plans are for that series.

State of the Site May 2018 update

With my being accepted into a Master of Science in Computer Science program I will be extremely busy for the next couple of years. I do want to keep up with my site, which is not that time consuming if I predominantly post ports of the games from Blazing Games so both this blog and my homebrewgamejam.blogspot.ca blogs will continue while I am in university. The frequency of the updates is going to be shifted from weekly to alternating between the two blogs with each having an article posted every other Saturday. If things get too hectic, I may cut back to a monthly update but am going to allocate a block of time towards the site and blogs so that things will continue unless something bad happens.

My Easter Egg generator is not really writing a postmortem for. While I did learn a bit about color filters while creating it, this is not enough to warrant a full article.

This month is seeing the release of two games. The first being the HTML 5 version of Four in a Row which is not a new port but does need to be transferred over from the Blazing Games site eventually and as towel day is so late in the month why not this month. The original version was still rough so I decided to clean up the AI a bit and to add animation to the game. There is still a lot that I would like to add to the game before I would consider it to be complete but not sure when I will find time to do that so it may be a decade before this game is properly completed.

Towel day will be the release of my Towels for Earth port. However, I will be posting the postmortem of the game before the actual release of the game. That will be the topic for next fortnight’s post after which I will start posting Chapter 4 of my Animate CC eBook.

Fleet, which I was planning on posting in June, is not quite ready. If it is not ready in time I may post a different game in it’s place but hope to have it finished. If the game is not ready by the 25^th then I will go with an alternate post. Either way the site will have information about what I am going to post. If the game is delayed, it will still be worked on so will be posted later in the year. 

July's game will be released on the 13th of the month as that month has a friday the 13th. It is going to be 13^2 Spikes. August is String Along, but I may substitute it for Fleet if a delay is required.September is when CQ is finally suppose to appear but if things go as planned there may be a bit of a surprise with that release.

Calendar NIM Review

Normally I like to have a postmortem or a making of article about the games that I have just released, but the nature of my Calendar NIM game makes an explanation of the twelve months a bit more appropriate. Each image represents a game that I am hoping to release during the year, though it is subject to change. The games chosen are not the only games that I will be releasing, but are simply the ones I am positive that I can finish though are subject to change and unexpected delays. Still these games are pretty certain. For those of you who haven't looked at my Calendar NIM game, it is located at http://spelchan.com/games/y2018/calendarNim.php

January is a 2018 New Years image that was released by LMoonlight for free and is used to represent the Calendar NIM game itself.

February is Video Poker, which was a game that I created for my original Flash Game Development book which is in the process of being re-written for HTML5 development which will start being posted on this blog next week. This game has already been completed so this is a guaranteed release.

March is when I release my Easter game which is the egg generator. While this was really low on the vote, the generator is used in two other easter games so I am going to port the generator first. This will be challenging as the masking technique I used is  not supported in Create.js so I will need to come up with a different approach. As this game is not going to be released until the end of the month, I will probably take the opportunity to release my NIM game as a bonus.

April 1st is Easter so my April Fool games will have to wait until next year. The thirteenth of April is on a Friday so the original version of thirteen squared spikes will be the choice for that month. This game has already been completed so it is a guaranteed release.

May 25th is towel day so it makes sense to release Towels for Earth. I am not sure why this game is so high on the voting chart but this is the most appropriate day to re-release the game. I have not done any work on it at all but it is not a difficult game (it was created in a game jam after all) so this shouldn’t be a problem. As this is late in the month, I may also release Pent Up Anger which I have already finished.

June is really subject to change but I am planning on porting Fleet to C++ and using emscripten to convert it to asm.js or to web assembly. I started playing around with emscripten for my 2600 emulator project but pretty much have gone the Kotlin route with that project so this would be a good project.

July is another month with a Friday the Thirteenth in it so the Thirteen Spikes Unlimited (TSU) port would possibly be ideal. The current version of TSU was written in HAXE and compiled to Flash as there were issues with the JavaScript compilation. I will see if things have changed with that and if so this is simply re-compiling the project. If not, I have the core of Thirteen Squared Spikes to use as the base of this so it should be a very quick port.

August has String Along set up as it’s game which has already been completed so is guaranteed.

September is Coffee Quest which will be a WebGL game. As with Fleet, I will likely port this game to C++ and use emscripten to convert to web assembly and Asm.js. The construction set will not be part of this, but the extra maps may be. At the moment I am thinking of going weekly for september releasing a new map each week. This is just speculation at the moment with a final decision on what I will do to be made in September.

October is Nightmare Maze which happens to be the first episode of One of those Weeks. It is being referred to as Nightmare Maze as it is part of my book. I have big plans for One of those Weeks so there will be additional news about the project later this year (I hope).

Let’s face it. Coffee Quest was a very simple game, with the series only really starting to take of with the release of the second game in the series. This is why November will be Coffee Quest 2. It will be built on top of the Coffee Quest code base so will be in whatever language Coffee Quest ends up being released in. Again, I may release the extra maps every week but that is not certain yet.

Finally, also likely using the Coffee Quest engine, will be the high-def version of Santa’s Snowball. Higher resolution, better graphics, better sound, and 360 degree movement with an automap will make this Christmas game what I wish it was in 2017.

There may be additional surprises throughout the year, hopefully one involving One of those Weeks, but even without the extra releases I don’t think the year is too bad.

Return of the Games

It has been a while since I last wrote a post in this blog which makes sense as Blazing Games has closed. The site still remains up though it has not been updated other than adding a poll to determine which games are worth salvaging. The idea here is that the poll will be periodically checked to see which games visitors are most interested in so that I have a better idea of what order to port games in. While the larger games I created are positioned near the top as I expected, there are a few games that I am questioning why they are doing so well. Fleet I can sort of understand as Java applets are dead, but why is Towels for Earth so high up?

While Blazing Games is closing in 2019, I will slowly be porting the games and posting them on Spelchan.com. While I was using my homebrewgamejam.gamespot.ca account to cover the games as they were released, I really don’t like interrupting my emulator project especially as there is so much material that needs to be covered there. I have decided that for 2018 I would keep homebrewgamejam focused on the homebrew emulator and the construction of 2600 dragons (also surprisingly high on the list) while my game releases will be covered on this blog.  

I was in the process of rewriting my Flash Game Development book changing it to HTML5 development with the plan to break the book into two books. The first book would be about creating HTML5 games using Animate CC (which is the “successor” to Flash) while the second book would bypass the expensive Adobe software and create the games using the open source Create.js library that Animate CC itself uses. I was trying to see if I could publish these but some deals I was working on fell through. Since the point of the blog is to detail the making of the games, and the books are a glorified form of this, I am thinking that the first book will slowly be released on this site. Each week I will release a section of a chapter. When a chapter is finished, I will cover the making of and postmortem articles for the games that have been released to Spelchan.com while I was posting the chapter sections.

Next week will be a review post that will cover the game I will be releasing for January which due to the nature of the game that will be posted New Year’s Day will cover some of my plans for 2018.

Planning my NES RPG Development Path

How much planning a project requires is largely dependent on the size/complexity of the project and the number of people working on the project. The more complicated the project, the more planning things out will make things go smoothly. It certainly is possible to complete a complex project without any planning, but the time required to do so will be significantly higher than the time that would be saved by proper planning. Planning doesn't need to take the form of formal documents, though if you are working with large teams a formal design specification document is probably a good idea.

I tend to design by working out what screens a game needs then breaking down each of the screens. After breaking down my NES RPG game I quickly realized that I could turn this project into a number of mini-games. These pieces could then be assembled together to form the core of the final game.

The first game is totally unrelated to the RPG but will have common code that will be used by other projects. It will be a simple quiz game. This will let me get my multiple-choice prompts working, number printing, random numbers, and some of the math routines. The 6502 does not have multiplication or division (other than bit shifting) so this has to be done in software.

Next will be a outdoor scrolling maze game. This obviously will be used for the game map screen. This will rapidly followed by a treasure hunt game using a scrolling covered map that only reveals itself as the player explores the map.

The final pair of pre-game mini-games will be the combat engine. This will be developed as a series of arena games. The first arena will simply be the combat with pre-determined characters and monsters. The second game will add the character stat screens and a store where players can buy equipment for upcoming battles.

At this point all the major parts of the RPG exist so they can be combined into a proper RPG. This will be broken into separate chapters so each chapter can be released separately yet be combined into a single larger final game.

Welcome to 2014

As some of you already know, Blazing Games has switched to a Monthly release format, while my development blog is switching to a weekly format. This is to allow me to spend my time focusing on larger scale games and hopefully turn my hobby into something that can actually pay my bills.

I will continue to have postmortem articles for my game jam games, and will probably expand this to include all the games that I release. Postmortems are nice to have as they help both myself and other game developers spot issues that they should pay attention to. For me, they also help me keep good habits in mind and remind me to avoid all the bad habits that are far too easy to show up.

Anybody who has followed this blog for a while knows that occasionally there will be some news that gets me annoyed requiring me to write long rambling rants. While these will occasionally show up, I do not expect the number of these posts to increase.

The bulk of the posts will be following my development of a  late-eighties commercial quality NES role-playing game. In other words, by the end of the project I want to have a NES game that people would have been willing to pay money for had it come out in the late eighties. This will be made up of very in-depth with side articles on programming 6502 assembly language and the NES.

While I will covering the entire development of this game, I am going to focus more on the theory and logic behind what I am doing rather than the code. My thought is that understanding why something is done is far more important than the actual code. If you understand the theory then you can do the implementation in any language you want. I will try to make my source code available so anybody interested in the nuts and bolts can simply download the source files and look at the code.

2013 Plans

I am sure that anybody who regularly reads this blog already has a good idea what my plans for 2013 are, but I figure I should go over them anyway for the record. While I was originally planning on developing Color Collapse Plus over the year, that was before I actually started participating in game jams. I may still work on that project as it was my mothers favorite game, but my priority for 2013 will be on a number of larger commercial projects. As I want to have regular content for the site, I am planning on participating in game jams such as Ludum Dare. The games developed during these challenges will make up the bulk of the site game releases, with the remaining releases being updates of already existing games until I actually finish one of my larger projects.

My larger projects will be targeted towards tablets and possibly smart-phones. The target platforms will be iOS and Android, though I may also port to Windows 8 tablets/phones if the effort will not be too great. Once the tablet releases are done, I intend on porting the game to the browser (probably Flash but HTML 5 isn't inconceivable). The browser versions will be broken into a number of episodes and released in installments.

My game jam work will initially be done in Flash but as my GameJam library reaches maturity (hopefully by this summer) I will port it to HTML 5 and transition to using that if the performance is adequate. While ActionScript and JavaScript are very similar, I am just way more comfortable with ActionScript as it has language constructs that make it much nicer for working with larger-scale projects. Still, JavaScript is quickly becoming the language of the web, though a lot slower than the experts predicted. I personally think Flash will be viable for at least another 3-5 years. If Adobe gets their head out of their butt and create an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler it may be significantly longer though the resulting Flash programs would be "native" HTML 5. Sadly I suspect that Adobe will let Flash whither away and instead try to turn their new Edge Animate software into the replacement for Flash.

I have not decided which games I will be updating, so if anybody reading this feel free to email me with your favorite game and I will put that game on the top of my update list. Updating will include cosmetic updating as well as (for Java and Flash games) porting the game to HTML 5.

The future is collapsing.

When I wrote my original version of Color Collapse last millenium, it was in C++ for Windows 95. At that time the shareware scene was still strong and I had noticed that there were a lot of Tetris and Columns clones appearing. My personal design philosophy is that if you are going to "pay hommage" to a game, you should always have something original or new to add to the game. Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule (such as for existing card and board games) but I've always tried to put my own twist on any game that I am developing. With Color Collapse, that twist was to have the game board filled in at the start and the goal of the game was to clear the board.  I don't know if I was the first person to come up with this idea, probably not, but I was not aware of any other game that did this when I originally created the game.

When I finally decided to play around with web development a few years later, I ended up having to port the game from C++ to the then relatively new Java platform.  Last year I was going through the games I have created for the BlazingGames site with the goal of seeing what games could have enhanced versions created for it and came up with a lot of new play modes and special tiles that could be added to Color Collapse so decided it would be a good upgrade candidate. Unfortunately, before I got that project started properly, my mother was hospitalized and later died of cancer. The fact that my mother really enjoyed this game both has me wanting to finish this enhanced version while making working on it emotionally hard. The fact that the 2012 meme can only be exploited once dictated my plans for 2012 so this years releases are pretty tied up.

For this reason, I have decided that 2013 would be the year I really focused on properly enhancing this game. My 2011 plans were to write the game in Flash. Now that everyone is writing Flash off, even though I personally think it will be at least until 2016 that Flash will remain strong, I am thinking that HTML 5/JavaScript is probably the route to go with this game. The game is not overly complex so there should be no issues moving the game to JavaScript.

The sad thing is that even that decision is not a straightforward decision. I can use my existing (BGLayers) library for the game. I can switch to another open source library which would probably provide me with better performance and more already implemented features. I could also wait and see what Adobe's Edge tool does. From the tiny amount I have played with an early demo of the tool it does seem like a JavaScript version of Flash but different enough that I would probably have a lot of re-learning to do. All this is assuming I want to write JavaScript using JavaScript. As it turns out, that is not the only option.

Alternatives to writing native JavaScript is Google's PlayN which converts Java into JavaScript and has a game library as well. Also from Google is their Dart language which is in early stages. Then there is CoffeeScript which seems to be gaining a fairly large following.

This is one case where having too many options is just as bad as not having enough. About all I can say at this point in time is that the Color Collapse Plus project will be the site focus of 2013 (subject to change due to unforeseen factors or the incredibly unlikely event that the world really does end) and will be in HTML 5. The how is the tough question.

Plans for the remainder of 2010

I am about to embark on a rather interesting third-party project while continuing my own project so the amount of time that will be dedicated to the Blazing Games site will be reduced in the short term. The third-party project will probably appear on Blazing Games once it is done as will my own project but as both of those are large-scale projects. Thankfully, 3 of the 5 months are mostly done, one of the months can be done in a day, and the final one can be reduced from 4 layouts to 2 layouts.

I really don't like posting my release plans as things have a way of changing quickly causing my plans to be altered. Still, I suppose it won't hurt as long as it is clearly understood that these plans are subject to change without notice.

The August game will not be released until the 13th as it is the 1.0 version of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited. I am thinking of porting it to HTML 5, but am not sure about that plan now that my time has been reduced even further. September will be the final episode of Dozen Days of Words. October will be the Vampire Attack 2 open source release. Thoughts of porting to HTML 5 are there but again I doubt there will be time. November will be a couple more Tarot layouts. Finally, Dungeon Romp Christmas Edition in 3D will finish off the year.