A Complete History of Transport Tycoon

I’ve just finished writing an article about one of my favourite games -  Transport Tycoon, a 1994 game from Chris Sawyer. The article can be read over at Squidoo – an excellent site which allows anyone to start writing articles, movie reviews, tutorials and lots more. Check it out.

New Game: Footie Pinball!

I've just uploaded a new game to Carnival called Footie Pinball!

To create the game I first used the Wizard tool to create a fairly basic pinball table. I then downloaded this game and added to it using the Game Creator. Some graphics I drew using Macromedia Fireworks while others I modified by taking screenshots of the Wizard pinball graphics and changing the hue and saturation to make them fit my football theme.

I replaced the background sound with a public domain recording of crowd sounds from a real football stadium and I replaced the sound for the skillshot with a public domain sound of a guy shouting "Goal!".

This is the first pinball game I've made, and this is not an area of gaming I'm familiar with, so I will be interested to see how it is received.

Play Footie Pinball!

New Game: Colourific!

Sorry for the late post - I published a new colour matching puzzle game two weeks ago. It has currently been featured on the home page of http://www.simscarnival.com/ for about a week and has already been played over 1100 times!

In this game coloured blocks fall from the top of the screen and stack up at the bottom. The player must click on blocks which have blocks of the same colour next to them to make them disappear. To add to the challenge I have set the game to only give points for groups of three or more, though strategically it can be good to clear groups of only two.

I drew the graphics myself in Fireworks and created the sounds effects using a very useful utility called Sfxr. I used a public domain recording of a ragtime piano piece by Scott Joplin for the background music.

The Game Creator code for finding groups of blocks of the same colour is quite interesting. Hopefully I'll get around to writing about it soon but in the meantime you can download the game and look at it yourself in Game Creator.

Play Colourific now!

New Game: AXOL

Today I released my second entry for the $1000 Galactic Game Challenge which ends on 1st August.

It is another space shooter entitled AXOL. I drew all the graphics myself and recorded the sound effects. The music came from a free source online.

In this game the enemy aliens come in four colours. Your ship is in the centre of the screen and fires bullets at the aliens when you press space, and rotates on the spot when you press the left and right keys. When your bullet hits an enemy the same colour as your ship it dies and you gain 100 points. When your bullet hits an enemy of a different colour your ship changes to that colour but you gain no points. It is quite challenging.

I may have to adjust the ship's rotation to make it a little easier to aim.

Play AXOL!

New Game: Sotuya

This was the first game I published using Simscarnival.com from EA. The game is based loosely on Sudoku but with arrows in place of the numbers. I got the name Sotuya from the Japanese words for Arrow and Sort.

This game is in the top 500 on Simscarnival which I'm quite pleased with.

Future improvements: at some stage I have it in mind to add a feature to this game whereby the game starts with some random arrows locked meaning you have to work around them to solve the puzzle. This will be a great improvement to the difficulty of the game - at present it is possible to finish the game quite quickly because you can repeatedly play the game with the same moves as previously.

Play Sotuya now!