Archive for September, 2009

Last week was somewhat busier than usual in regards to the game-a-week project: I wound up with four separate ideas on the table before I was through, and at the last minute made something of a reversal to my plans.

The short version of this story is that, yes, there was a finished game for last week, but, no, you can’t play it just yet. In fact, the release schedule for these games will probably be lagging behind the actual development schedule for a while now (though updates to existing games will probably be an exception), though I do expect it to eventually “catch up”.

If you’d like to know more (and to see some screenshots of the most recent game), here’s the long version of the story:

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This past week’s “Game-A-Week” release was a fairly substantial update to LootMore, which has actually been in the works for some time now.

The technically interesting part of the update is the release of LootMore as a Facebook app. With each of the Game-A-Week releases, I try to cover some ground I’ve never covered before, either in terms of an unusual snippet of design or a new technical challenge, and I’ve been keen to start playing with Facebook integration for a while. The LootMore implementation is fairly minimal at the moment, but it does include (optional) posts to your FaceBook news feed for a variety of milestones in the game, and there will almost certainly be more features coming along in the future (very likely more “social” features as well).

There were a few gameplay and content updates as well…

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This week’s game got juggled around a bit, but finally wound up being the updated (and more “complete”) version of Xue. For at least the weekend, it’ll be available for play only on Kongregate, with versions on Newgrounds and here at The Wasabi Project coming along early next week or so, and probably other sites here and there a while after that.

Xue began as a prototype developed for the 15th Ludum Dare competition, which had “Caverns” as it’s theme. The current version of Xue that’s available on Kongregate evolved from the Ludum Dare version, which is still playable here at The Wasabi Project.

An update to the homepage of The Wasabi Project has been brewing for a while, and tonight I’m happy enough with it to release it out into the wild.

The new design dispenses with the over-sized banners for each project, replacing them with smaller icons, which frees up space for recent blog posts to be displayed on the homepage as well as making room for a scrolling panel of highlighted games, news, or what-have-you.

I expect to making some more changes to the design sometime fairly soon (in particular, I’d like to better categorize the completed games, and create a new space for projects that are works-in-progress), but I think this layout is already an improvement (and I hope you’ll agree).

The individual “play this game” pages will be getting a redesign soon as well; hopefully incorporating leaderboards, instructions, commentary, and links to related blog posts for each game (or at least, for each game to which all that content applies).