Dan Donnan

The Month of Games officially begins - one game each week for all of August. You can play it now by downloading from itch , or you can get it from the Google Play store if you have an Android device.

Just before I began working on Bird Game, I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to work on now I'd ruled the football game out. It seemed like I was going to go and do a puzzle game, but then there are two ideas for games that would be ideal for releasing at Halloween, primarily because one is actually set then, and the other involves ghosts. So now I have to choose which of those I am going to do, because trying to develop multiple games at the same time doesn't seem like a good idea. Especially if both the ones I pick are the Halloween games because they will be releasing at the same time. But then a thought occurred.

I've wanted to do a game jam for a while. The last time I did one was in person about 10 years ago with a group of friends from Uni. We made several small games over the course of a weekend. One of them was Gnome Patrol. It was basically Plants vs Zombies but the gnomes replaced the plants. It was also set in Alan Titchmarsh's garden because he hates games so he'd really  hate this. Another was Duck Nukem. Nothing was really playable - it was more the pun, and the Photoshops that came with it. I cannot remember the other games we spent hours making, but I do remember the 5 minutes I was on the train with a couple in their 40s going through a marital crisis. I hope Sharon and Tony sorted things out. I've browsed itch.io a few times to see what game jams were ongoing, and picked a few I wanted to do. And then I never had the time to do them. A few weeks ago I saw one where the theme was birds and the challenge was 'always moving'. I came up with an idea pretty qui...

So, this week's post was supposed to be about how I started to use Unity's physics systems and decided they didn't work they way I wanted. I was prepared and already had it written, along with next week's about controls, and the week after a post about cameras. And then the Nintendo Direct happened. To recap last week's surprise twist, I was at my leaving drinks on Wednesday evening and telling my now former colleagues about how I was planning to make a 5v5 football game with power-ups inspired by Mario Strikers because it's been 15 years since the last one and Nintendo clearly don't care for it because it isn't golf or tennis. And then, less than 20 minutes after getting home, Nintendo announced a new Mario Strikers game.