Monthly Archives: July 2015

Cube Defense

Click Here for the download links

I made this project very quickly for a contest. It took about a weekend. It wasn’t made to be a polished game, the primary goal was for it to be a proof of concept for an idea I had.

The idea was to use the style developed in my Isometric Rotation Tutorial and build on it to make a game. I also wanted to play around with implementing an A* Pathfinding Algorithm to navigate this semi-3D terrain. When I thought up the game I only had a faint knowledge of A*. When making the game it was my second time writing an implementation and this time around it went a lot smoother. For the most part it was a basic 2d grid for the terrain, the only exception was that there was more cost for the enemies to navigate up the pillars, so that was taken into account so that the enemies could choose the most optimal route.

As I said earlier this wasn’t designed to be a polished game. I pretty much stopped once I got all the mechanics working and spent no time trying to make it very balanced. Maybe one day I can spend more time on this concept and expand it to a full game.

Bundestag Fight

Status Complete
Development Period Some weekend June 2014
Target Platform PC
Development Plaform Game Maker Studio
Status Complete
Development Period November 2013 – December 2013
Target Platform Android
Development Plaform Game Maker Studio
Contributions Programming
Co-Creators Spyros Kontis: Art, Game Design

Click Here to find it on Google Play

This is another project I worked on with Spyros. This was specifically developed as an entry for the Tizen App Challenge. There were many sections that could be submitted to in the contest and the sum of all the prizes added up to more than 4 million dollars. I’m pretty sure the primary purpose was a baseline of quality apps developed for the Tizen store which is why the company contributed so much money towards it. I believe this competition was also the reason why Yoyogames added Tizen as one of the valid platforms for Game Maker.

We didn’t win but it was a good experience and this turned out to be my favorite of the 3 fighting games I made with Spyros. I think the art style looked the best in this game, music was made especially for the game which sounded pretty good and I also liked the Hercules theme in general.

There were some new features to the game apart from a different theme. The story line was portrayed through an interactive slideshow and it developed as you beat more bosses. You could select the bosses by choosing between icons on a map of Europe and styles of the individual bosses differed more. Compared to the other games this one was also designed more with the mobile platform in mind. During both the slide show and the map the user could navigate with swiping, yet another thing I’ve never tried out before (although since then I have made a generalized extension for mobile integration which can be found on the Game Maker Market place)

Parliament Fighter

Status Complete
Development Period May 2013 – October 2013
Target Platform Android
Game Engine Game Maker Studio
Contributions Programming
Co-Creators Spyros Kontis: Art & Game Design

Click Here to find it on Google Play

This a project I made with Spyros Kontis, he found me on YouTube and asked to help develop this game. This was the largest project I’ve worked on at the time and fighting games in particular are a tricky game to develop. That said it got finished and I’m very happy with how it turned out. Throughout the process I learned a lot about organizing my code to make it readable and to also avoid redundancies as much as possible. I started with 8 fighting character objects but through the use of parenting and some clever scripts I managed to get it down to a single parent object.

The political satire game about the greek government, I liked the premise. The beginning includes a Star Wars style scrolling text intro describing the story which is something I’d never done before. Another new thing for me was that it had to have a language selection feature. The 2 languages were Greek and English. Greek is a particularly difficult to implement since it uses a different alphabet. A few months prior to this I made a tutorial about custom fonts. Luckily greek has fewer letters than the English so I was able to create a special “Greek” font which mapped all the ASCII letters to Greek looking letters.

Another major accomplishment was implementing the AI. I did so using a state machine which included a ~12 node system with various connections between the nodes. I’d never made one before and I’m very happy with how the result turned out.