After a lot of writing, thinking then surprisingly only a little coding, I finally have a somewhat ok word spawning system. It’s far from perfect and still needs an algorithm to spawn shooty things on the words. On the whole, the game is finally playable in a basic way.

I’ve changed a few things from my original design and simplified a couple of areas. Before, the truth bits you collect counts as a currency but also as a shield, so when you get hit you lose your saved up truth bits. This was extremely frustrating, so now you have no shield and when you get hit by an enemy bullet the lower portion of the level (or sea of ignorance as it might be called) will rise up creating less space to move down from the falling words. Gameover happens when you’re crushed by a word against the sea or the sea crushes you against the very top.

The truth bits collected for destroyed letters can no longer be lost and instead of spending these bits, you spend single tokens (dumb name I know). You get a token each time you fill the bar on the left with truth bits and you can then decide, on the fly, whether to upgrade your main weapon or lower the sea a bit or explode a truth bomb (massive damage and removes any enemy bullets caught in the range). They all cost 1 truth token.

After I have finished all the features for the word spawning system and added some kind of options selection, I will upload the game to itch.io and look for someone in the #GamerGate community who will create the art so that it looks swish 😛

With any luck, my next post will have a link to download the game and I would love to hear what you guys thought.

Cheers,
Marios

As I mentioned in my previous post (sorry for the delay by the way), I’m having a short break from developing You can Double JUMP so I can work on something completely different which is related to the consumer revolt GamerGate. My idea for the game as you can see above is a “shumup” where you have to shoot negative words and collect truth bits to not only charge your shield but to gain enough truth to upgrade your weapons. The speed and sizes of the words increase as time goes on and I plan to have three modes:- Normal, Hard and Endless.

The design is pretty much all thought out and I have to complete the word spawning algorithm, add blocks that fire at you and a few power ups.

Sorry for the hasty post and I hope to have more for you next week 🙂

Over the last few months, there’s been quite the stir in one part of gaming and it’s mostly focused around the hashtag #GamerGate on Twitter. You may have heard of it as people who want journalistic ethics in games media or as people who want woman out of gaming. Whatever you may think of the hashtag and the people who use it, I want to make this post because I feel some honesty about where I stand on the #GamerGate issue should be made in a somewhat official capacity.

Where I stand
Now hear me out. I wholly support the notion that games journalism should be more transparent by disclosing relationships and to not collude with each other. When I saw the 10+ articles all talking about the same thing, I firmly believed it was an attack on the identity “gamer” and it seems to be a backlash to claims to conflicts of interest against certain individuals. Also, I shouldn’t have to make this clear but I will anyway. I condemn all acts of abuse, harassment, doxxing and threats of any kind. I feel that the strong focus on these types of threats not only make other potential attackers more tempted but also it ruins any possible discussion and distracts completely from the very likely claims of corruption and collusion and in the case of the articles, well it’s pretty blatant collusion.

Double Jump development
So now that I lost some of you let me discuss You can Double JUMP a bit. Development on DJ has been slow this year and I have to be honest that after nearly 2 years in development I’m tired and need a proper break from DJ, at least for now. The laser focus I had in the first year has wavered a bit and I’m struggling to think of new and original level mechanics that feel great to play.

New game
The reason I mentioned #GamerGate and DJ in the same post is because I’m going to use my time away from DJ to design a small game based on my experience of #GamerGate. I’ll be revealing the game in more detail tomorrow. Some say it’s suicidal for a gamedev to support this idea but I’m not making games to make millions. I just want enough to keep making games and to put food in my family’s tummies.

Thank you for reading my ramblings and tweet me @MariosKalogerou if you want to discuss anything about #GamerGate with me. We could discuss it here but a public forum is more ideal for that kind of discourse.

Cheers,
Marios