I have a new website

A few days back I decided that it would be a good idea to have a personal website showcasing my work for the purpose of marketing my games. Of course I had made a simple one page website before for promoting my game Jack N' Jill, before. Back then, I had used Apple's iWeb to build it.

The problem with iWeb is, that Apple no longer supports it and it has become quite outdated. The websites exported from iWeb are not optimized for mobile. So, I began searching for other WYSIWYG webpage builders that would help me quickly build webpages for my games. Although I did find a few intersting programs, none of them seemed to meet my needs.

Finally, I decided that I should just spend some time refreshing my html, javascript and css and use a good old text editor to build a website. You can check the result at http://rohansgames.website/. The website is pretty simple and completely static as of now, but atleast it is better than having nothing.  Building this website was a fun learning experience for me. One new thing I learnt was how to construct fonts. If you visited the website, you might have noticed the pixelart fonts on it. These fonts were all designed by me using FontStruct. FontStruct is a great tool and I can see myself using it as a better option to design the text in my games too!
 
I have quite a few plans to improve on my website and make it more interesting. For one, my engine already has the ability to export to web (using Emscripten). So, I can see myself publishing my games on it too!

Squareboy vs Bullies

Another blog post after another long interval. Fortunately, I wasn't away from game development too during this time. I've been working on an old school beat 'em up game, in the style of Double Dragon and Final Fight. Double Dragon used to be one of my favourite games growing up and even now I quite often feel the itch to revisit one of my old beat 'em up favourites. So, naturally, I should develop a beat 'em up of my own, right?

I initially started the development by redesigning and reimplementing my "engine" and I'm quite happy with the result. It is cross platform (iOS, OS X, Android, Web using Emscripten) and built in a way that I just need to have one C++ codebase for my game, and can easily build an executable for one of the above mentioned platforms. Squareboy vs Bullies is, of course, built on this "engine" and I'm very satisfied with the game itself and the way it runs on all of the platforms.

After the game was "almost ready", I decided to send it out to a few people for feedback. One of them was Bernardo Espanol (from Nardio). Bernardo liked the game a lot. In fact he liked it so much that he felt it deserved to be showcased at an event, PlaycraftingNYC. Being the awesome guy he is, he took the Squareboy prototype, along with two other amazing games, Cally's Caves 3 and Tottoko Dungeon. Squareboy being a part of this bunch was very special for me. According to Bernardo, the game was received well at the event and one person even found it hard to get away from it. This makes me all the more excited to get the game out there as soon as I can and hear what people think about it!

Currently the game is ready, but needs to be reviewed (on iOS and Mac) and published. If everything goes well the game should be out before Christmas this year. I'd like to thank all the people who helped me test the game and provided their valuable feedback, and I believe they all deserve a shout out! Be sure to follow them on twitter,  because some of them are working on their own amazing projects, which are definitely worth looking at!

Bernardo Espanol: https://twitter.com/Nardionet
Don Boody: https://twitter.com/donboody69
Jordan Pearson (Calley's Caves): https://twitter.com/CallysCaves
Ben Thumbs: https://twitter.com/ThumbsBlue
Colin from Quikding Software: https://twitter.com/Quikding
Thomas from Norseware: https://twitter.com/NorsewareOrg
Rahul Lakhi: https://twitter.com/RDLakhi
Mohit Lakhi: https://twitter.com/MohitLakhi

Also a big thanks to people from among my friends and family, who tested the game and gave me their feedback but don't use twitter (as far as I know)

Now, finally, on to the good stuff!

Screenshots (Desktop Version)

Title Screen

Bullies at the bus stop

Screeshots (Mobile Version)

Landscape UI on the iPad

Portrait UI on the iPad

Trailer:

Squareboy vs Bullies will soon be out on iOS, OS X and Android. If the game does well, I might also consider releasing it onto other platforms like Ubuntu and Windows!

Interview on Nardio.net

Bernardo from Nardio was kind enough to give me an opportunity to be interviewed on his website. If you like my work, then that is a really good place to know more about yours truly! :D

You should also check out all the other stuff on Nardio as well. There are quite a few fun and interesting games and apps reviewed there, along with reviews for books, movies, tv shows etc. You can also read interviews from some other very interesting game developers!

Jack N' Jill Pebble Watchface

I recently got a Pebble smartwatch as a gift from one of my uncles. So, I decided that I'd make good use of it and develop something for it. I started off by looking at all the available apps and watchfaces on the pebble appstore, which revealed a lot of cool and interesting stuff that people have done there. Finally, I decided to develop a Jack N' Jill themed watchface for it. I figured that it would make a cute little display for a watch and it might also get some people interested in my game.

I also thought that it would be a good idea to put in some useful features like displaying the current location and the weather/temperature for the said location, along with displaying the time, date and day. Doing this wasn't as hard as I initially thought it would be. In fact it was quite easy to understand, thanks to all the guides and tutorials available on the net, and also the well made Pebble Native SDK.

The native SDK is C based and uses JavaScript to communicate with the host smartphone device (and consequently the web). Although I do know C programming, I've never developed a functional app using the language. Figuring out how to do things within the boundaries set by the platform was quite an enjoyable experience and I learnt quite a few new things in the process.

Screenshots:

If you use a Pebble smartwatch you can download the watchface for free

An update of my work over the past year

It's been a while since I last updated my blog, almost a year in fact! So first of all, to everyone reading this, wish you all a happy new year!

Jack N' Jill

Although I have been inactive on my blog, I have worked on quite a few things in the past year. Jack N' Jill has received numerous updates and now it has a total of 140 levels, along with its own walkthrough series on YouTube. Although the daily downloads of the game have understandably fallen since last year, the game has been doing really well on Android and iOS. I am really thankful to everyone who took the time to play the game! If you still haven't, I highly recommend you to try it!

 The Pit

Around sometime in May and June, I participated in a gamejam called lowrezjam. The idea of the jam was to make a game in a 32x32 resolution. My entry was a story based platformer game, called "The Pit", with multiple outcomes based on the various decisions the player takes within the game. I used a C++ to JavaScript cross compiler called Emscripten for this game. While it took some time to figure out a few things, it was great to see my OpenGL / C++ code be compiled into something that could run in a web browser. You can play The Pit for free on gamejolt!

Zie Invades Earth

Around September/October, I began working on another new game. This time I wanted to make something a little more casual, mobile friendly and quick and easy to play. I took my inspiration from the old Game & Watch games and came up with an idea, around that concept. The player has to help an alien steal candy (or anything else) from a kid. The goal is to keep stealing and score as many points as possible. Once again, I made use of pixel art graphics for this game as well, but this time the game is in color. The game is called "Zie Invades Earth". As of now, the game is available for free on the Play Store, and should soon be out on the App Store