I've been working on some proof of concept stuff over the past few months. First one is called ScribbleCast and it's a game for your Chromecast. I always thought it was weird how few games were available for Chromecast. To me it seemed like a sure fire way to deliver casual games, like Jackbox TV or Monopoly, even if the audience was small. Chromecast has a latency so realtime games are out, but surely someone could come up with something?

So I started working on one. A couple hundred hours in I can kinda understand why no one else has done it, but I have something that works and is fun.

Scribblecast:

Scribblecast is meant to be a homage to Sketch from WarioWare Wii U. Sketch was effectively rapid fire 3+ player pictionary with the Wii U gamepad. Person with the gamepad draws words for 2 minutes. What you draw on the pad shows up on the screen. If someone in the room guesses, you press a button on the gamepad to give them a point.

Scribblecast runs in the browser, on a pc and on most mobile phones. No app download. Go to the webpage, press the button to cast to your TV. When the app and the tv are connected, each person draws their face. Then it goes round robin. Whoever has the phone draws as many words as they can, with the drawings reflecting real time to the tv

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it when it's done. I'd like to monetize it somehow but I need to polish it way more first. I've done playtests with my friends and it works surprisingly well. Very low latency between the screen and phone (100ms~). Super exciting for me to see.

Phone Screen

Tv Screen:

Technical Details

For anyone wondering, interfacing with a Chromecast has been difficult. When I started this project I wanted to connect to the Chromecast directly from the mobile phone. I needed to display something different on both screens. I researched the Chromecast docs and I couldn't make sense of how to create a chromecast native app. It seemed that I would need to present my graphics as a stream of video, or do something very low level. I started looking for workarounds that would be less work.

Casting two different screens is difficult, but most phones have hardware to cast what's displayed on the screen natively. So I could've gone that route, but how do you create pictionary when both parties can see the screen? I couldn't give the drawer a secret list of words that way. Someone came up with a solution, a type face that can only be read when the screen is at a tilt.

https://codepen.io/ninivert/details/JEPzxO

But this is super ugly. It would be easy to cheat if both parties could see it. I couldn't have any audio in the game this way. And since the phone drives the resolution, it would be letterboxed to hell on a television. So this idea was passed.

Casting a stream of video to a chromecast is hard, but casting a webpage is dead simple. I did some research and I guess it's common for signage to run a chromecast pointed towards a webpage. When it does this, the chromecast is actually running a separate version of your webpage. Perhaps shamefully I haven't figured out what's doing the "thinking" yet. Is the webpage running on the device that sent it, the cloud, or directly on the chromecast? I'll need to figure out.

So I decided on a three part architecture. The Phone client would be a Godot framework HTML5 game. The TV portion would be a lightweight (sub 1mb) client using standard HTML5 and JS Canvas. No Jquery. Then a node.js server to communicate between the two. The phone client sends a Delta of the bits drawn to the screen, and then the server passes those updates along to the tv client. All using mostly asyc html calls, with error correction. In my tests a single 15 minute games uses about 100kb of data, which seems great to me.

What started out as a way to avoid learning the low level code for chromecast apps turned out to be a blessing. When casting using other solutions, there was typically a 3-5 second delay between the phone and the tv. But since the chromecast is getting it's data from the webpage, and not from a video stream, updates are as fast as the ping to the server.

The fact that all this is up and running is awesome, but there are some downsides. My codebase is tiny, but I am maintaining 3 different projects. The web tv client needs to be so lightweight that I have to do all the low level canvas manipulation and data handling by hand. In that vein, I think I would've been better not using Godot for the Phone client. I need to run from the web, so I could've built this entire thing using HTML5. Godot is great but the html5 export is bulky at 15megs, I don't need all those modules for what I'm doing. But then again it would've taken much longer to do that.

Paddle Pals:

Paddle Pals will be a web game and native IOS and Android app. It's a 2 player game, with a matchmaking server. One person paddles left, one person paddles right. I wanted to experiment with some realtime multiplayer games using node.js, so I made a dead simple game. If anyone is really interested you can DM me to try out the alpha.

I expect that I'll release the web version on Newgrounds in a few months when it's done. A lot of work to do, especially on the look, UI and responsiveness. Before the release I'd like to do some stress testing too.

After Paddle Pals is done I plan on doing more multiplayer web/mobile games. I really like games that encourage cooperation, and I think there's a lot that can be explored in short, anonymous co-op games. Using the Chromecast I also have some ideas for party games. Not sure exactly which project I'll start, but I am excited about all the toys I have to play with

It's been a few years since I've made anything noteworthy but I'm starting to get back into it. Getting a fulltime job really took a dump on my free time. Last time I released a full game was 2014, since then I've made some mobile games but they weren't very ambitious. Over the past year I've started to find a good balance and been able to devote more time to my personal projects.

I picked up drawing last year and I'm going to start submitting my art to the portal. I want to get better at drawing so I can make assets for games and animations. I also have some HTML5 projects in the works that I'd love to submit to NG when they're done. Some multiplayer games that I plan to start a dev log for.

I'm just glad there's still such a large community here, making great content. You guys are really raising the bar.

I'm pretty happy with Telekinetic Incident. That's not something I can say about most things I released in the past couple of years haha, I spent a lot of time polishing it, Zeedox and Br0kenEnglish did a great job on the art and voice acting. Last week I put it on Armor Games and it did alright over there, it also gave me a lot of feedback on how I could make it better before I did a wide release. I also put a lot of analytics in it, so when it eventually spreads out I'll have some data on how people actually play it. The NG api has a bunch of cool things for tracking players, it's pretty cool.

Go play it!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/625312

Other than that I've still been working with my friend Neal on this desktop game we're making. I don't want to say too much because we're so early in development, but I'm excited about it. I'm going to take a break from Flash development, at least for a few months, and put all my time into it. I feel like I should've expanded into other platforms a long time ago, especially with flash games on the decline but that's another issue. Here's a concept image that Neal worked up.

After working on it for far too long and getting all the art assets redone by Zeedox my new game, The Telekinetic Incident, is finally at a point that I would consider to be done. I'm really happy with how the art turned out and I'm looking forward to seeing how/if people enjoy the game. Play it when it comes out!

When this game is finally released I plan to start working on my next project using MonoGame full time. I'm working on it with my friend and we intend for it to be a lot bigger in scope than most of the games we've made so far. I can't say too much about it yet though.

Also watch this thing.

My new game is coming along and I really feel it's one of my best games so far. I spent more time than usual planning things out and I feel that the game is better for it. So that got me thinking, what steps do you guys usually follow when you start making something?

I spent about a month writing down ideas for levels, stories, UI's, mechanics and characters before I opened Flash to work on anything. It really simplified things, there was always a plan to refer to. The document I wrote wasn't all inclusive though and I did end up cutting and adding a few things. After the initial planning, I used placeholder public domain art and programmed every mechanic and puzzle idea I had before I worried about the aesthetic. Reminds me of how I-Smel said how No Time To Explain needed a design doc.

In the end, getting all the ideas out in the prototype helped me to make a less buggy and more cohesive product. I'm really eager to start my next project now, at the very least because I know I can design and program a halfway decent game now.

So for the people who care to respond, how do you develop games or make animations? How much of your time is spent in predevelopment, storyboard and the like? Do you write your own tools for things such as level editing and particle effects?

And because I don't think I've said yet, my new game is going to be a platformer based around telekinesis with a little bit of time manipulation. It should be out in a month or so, it's got some nice ideas in it!

After almost a two year break I've started working on another serious game. It'll hopefully be out by the end of the year but that's a really optimistic deadline. I'm trying to create a design document and follow a plan as opposed to fabricating and throwing away features as I go with most of my other games. Maybe that'll lead to something more polished. Maybe.

So I made this game called Reverse Tetris about a year ago. I lost the source files and all decompilation attempts failed. The game was done for the most part, it was just locked to flashgamelicense.com and newgrounds.com (for the dump). I decided to upload it to newgrounds today so you guys could play it, and then I remembered that uploaded flash files go to ungrounded.net or something like that, not newgrounds.com. So I basically just put a blank flash file into the portal.

If you really want to play it you can go to the dump file .

http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/39 a92d8fdbd8b19110609b735e84b876

Well it looks like Reverse Tetris made it through the portal. But it's only a blank screen. What the fuck?!?

Over the past year I've made a really stupid mistake twice. I kept the most recent copies of my FLA's on a flash drive. Two times I've had a flash drive fail and that set me back quite a bit. All my files were pretty much on those flash drives. Luckily I upload swfs of files, but decompilers didn't like my code so they would give me FLA's with errors. I pretty much had to word backwards reconstructing my games by using really old FLA's, decompiled art and fragmented code that I could recover from my flash drives using some junky software.

I undertook 2 big projects near the beginning of the year, and one is probably never going to be finished (Bow Game) but the other should be done before the end of the year. Another smaller game that I've been working on with ColdReaver should be out before the end of the year too. One fun sized game that I had finished and found a sponsor for called reverse tetris is almost unsalvageable. It would take me a long time to fix it because how of I made it, not to mention I would never be able to fix the bugs that were in the game itself. I wish decompilers would work 100% correctly all of the time but I guess it's my fault in the first place for not adequately backing things up.

So if anyone was wondering I'm still working on things.

I just remembered.

I have a friend who runs an organization that raises money for cancer charities. They hold competitive gaming tournaments and all the profits from the tournaments goes toward charity. So to raise money for charity all you would have to do is participate in a tournament.

It's pretty cool and relatively simple to participate in. I know a lot of you would be doing tournaments anyway and there are some prizes. Check it out and see when they'll be holding a tournament for a game you play.

http://fragforcancer.ca/

And on facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=l ogo#!/pages/Frag-For-Cancer/1002972033 63917?ref=ts

So I was looking at the discovery channel at 3 am and this came on.

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I wanna be able to do that D: He wants to open a school for climbing, to teach children in his country. I think it would be pretty cool. I've been working out for a few months now and to be able to do things like that guy is my ultimate goal.

Also I scrapped most of what I did on my Jailbreak game so far and tried again because what I had before was shameful. I have a screenshot of early early version.

It's going to be a kind of stealth/brawler game at some points. I guess a good comparison would be Arkham. I tried to find a style I could actually create decent looking things in, and it came out alright but I'm still not very proud of it