Ludum Dare 37 - Domain

I competed in Ludum Dare #37 in December, where you create a game from scratch in 48 hours. This was a rough one - it came right at the end of the semester, which is tricky, and it was also happening right after my wife had surgery, so I was focused on her needs first. The theme was one I'd voted against - "One Room." Many creators just ignored the theme, or made whatever game they wanted as long as it nominally fit in one space. Only a few really integrated it. That made for a lot of similar games, all limited in scope. So, not the greatest competition topic, I think.

I had a hard time figuring out a concept, but I ended up making a game which was a tank game, but in a weird world where you're trapped in a room and just shoot the walls, not at other tanks. I thought it came out OK, although I didn't have much time for polish. I did it using Unity, which I've been experimenting with for a few years, as opposed to CraftyJS, which I used for my previous three games. I turned it in a few hours early, actually, so it's not as polished as I could have gotten if I'd ignored the rest of my life, but that wasn't in the cards.

The game, called Domain, is playable on the web here. Let me know what you think. I did OK on the ratings - made the top 100 games, sitting at about the 90th percentile of the 901 games submitted for the single-author competition. My competition page (with rankings) is here.

Aaaand we're back...

Wow, it's been a long time. But I'm back, and let's kick the dust off this blog. I've been working this summer on a project I first started way back in 2006 or so, which is a word game based on anagrams. It's been through several iterations, first as one of quite a few puzzles in a multi-puzzle game kind of like the old Fool's Errand game. That one I never finished, but I kept this idea around and developed a Flash version in 2009. It's here. I also never took that anywhere, but it still seemed fun, so I kept the idea around.

I worked on it some a couple of years ago as I was getting up to speed in Unity, and I realized it would probably work as a mobile game. This summer, I got back into it and finished it up. So, later today, I'm going to launch it (as a public beta at first) for Android phones, with an iPhone version coming soon. It's my first foray into mobile gaming (although I consulted on early pre-smartphone versions of Snood for mobile). Here are some screenshots:

PlayStore link is here - should be live soon. Let me know what you think!