The Boston Festival of Indie Games submission period for digital games ended last night and I have to say…  I’m happy with my entry.

I worked furiously to squash some bugs and get the BostonFIG demo level finished earlier this month.  Shortly before the deadline, coding work on Don’t Blow It slowed a little as I began polishing it and I started to put more thought into the business side of things.  There’s a lot to consider as I try to make not just a game to play with the kids, but a product that other people will want and be able to get.  This festival will be a good chance to expose people to the game and judge their reactions.

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The Boston Festival of Indie Games is a new local showcase for indie games in the Boston area. Lately, I’ve been working on the little details in Don’t Blow It that are important for the festival submission. That’s right, we’ll be showing off the game right there in Boston!

Take a look at the official site for details: http://bostonfig.com

It’s free to register and attend.  If you’re in the area, sign up and come see us on Saturday, September 22nd!

In my recently released game, Button Battle, I opted to use RakNet to implement simple networked multiplayer.  I figured I should talk a bit about how that all went, since I would have enjoyed reading such an article myself… and frankly, I’m going to forget this all soon and I will have to read it later.

I chose RakNet because it has been around for a while (mature), it works on Windows, Linux, and more (cross-platform), and it is free for my purposes (affordable).  I have my own networking library based on SDL_net that is certainly cross-platform and affordable, but I would be making a bad decision (personally, as a game dev, and as a business) if I put more time into the library instead of my games.  SDL_net does what it does well enough, but there is a lot of work to do in order to get something out of it that can be used in games.

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As promised, here’s the source code for Button Battle.  As everyone should expect, it’s not the cleanest code, but I do have plenty of experience and it is commented.  I expect that the code might be a valuable resource for people who want to see how things were done.  To that end, I also made a point to keep all networking code confined to a single file.

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Great news!  Button Battle is finished and you can play it right away…  for FREEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Okay, I haven’t finished a game yet that I plan to sell, but whatever.  Here’s another description for you:

Button Battle puts two players against each other, attacking and blocking until one player is left standing.  The combat is turn-based, where you choose to attack or block high/middle/low depending on how your opponent is attacking.  The quicker you react to block an attack, the more damage your next attack will do.

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I took a little break from Don’t Blow It this week to explore one of my simple game ideas via prototype. The basis of the idea was for a multiplayer game which takes player reaction time into account when resolving combat. So, I set to work making a two-player combat video game similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors.

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Among other things, I’ve been making some new levels. Here’s one in development called “Pig Hill”:

On Pig Hill, you simply carry a round pig up to the top of a large hill. This round piggy likes to roll back down the hill, along with the oncoming logs that knock you around.

In testing, it’s a little frustrating because the logs come flying down the hill at crazy speeds.  They easily send you back to the bottom of the hill if you don’t time your jumps well.  A dash of linear damping should fix that. 🙂

We’ve just released a gameplay video of Don’t Blow It!  Now you can see the craziness of 4-player puzzle co-op in action.

Also, look out for dontblowitgame.com.  That’s where you’ll find all the official info about the game as it comes.  You’ll continue to get dev updates on this blog (yes, right here, where you are looking).

Don’t Blow It has been steadily improving over the last few weeks.  I’m running out of programming tasks!  There are some new features I’m planning to add later, but more importantly, I’ll be producing a gameplay video soon (let’s hope for this week).

Here’s another screenshot to mark our progress:

It’s getting really exciting now, even as I struggle to manage the development.  I can’t wait to play it for real… but that means I need to get various pieces in order, like level design, art, music, and networking.  There sure is a lot of work left, but the game will be worth it.