Upcoming Release: HackyZack

Those of you who follow me closely have probably seen a HackyZack GIF or two. It is a project I started one night as a solo game jam. It was just something fun that I threw together to blow off steam after staring at a single project for way too long.

This is something that I feel that I need when working on a commercial project. When I start a big project that I am passionate about, I get super excited and work, work, work. Often 12+ hours a day. There is bound to be some form of burn out period, and during that time I like to have something else ready.

The important thing to note is that your side project should in no way detract from your main goal. HackyZack is not my full time gig. It doesn’t take any time away from CATAM. It is my nights and weekends. It is my breathe of fresh air after a rough week of water physics.

Moving Forward

The plan with HackyZack is to test the itch.io market. As well as the micro game market. I want to pump out some quick, 1-3 hour experiences. I have a lot of fun ideas and neat game mechanics, but some of them don’t really need and/or deserve a twelve hour epic with an interesting story. I’d like to use this opportunity to make small games by myself. It also allows me to practice pixel art.

I started a new file and created HackyZack again from scratch. I have been working on it for about a week and I plan to release it within the next four weeks.

-Z

#ScreenshotSaturday (11/15/14)

Sprite Skewing For Procedural Animation

Recently I posted an article called How To Make A Platformer FEEL Good. In it, I displayed several GIFs where the grass and hanging vines would move a bit when the character interacted with them. Several people asked me if I made a ton of animations to make that happen or if I was doing some form of programming magic. It was the former. I had a bunch of four-frame animations playing. However, that is by no means necessary. In this article, I’d like to show off one way to achieve a particular procedural animation effect without the need for any sprite animations.

Introduction To HackyZack

HackyZack was a game that I started a few days ago for a quickie game jam. I felt like it was fun enough to fiddle around with and it has been coming along quite nicely.

My plan is to make a bunch of levels in my spare time and release it for cheap over on itch.io, asap. 😀

-Z

Solo Game Jam #1

12:09 AM

A few months ago I started doing ‘Solo Game Jams’ during late night tweeting sprees. I realized that my follower count was very proportionate to the number of GIFs that I was tweeting so I came up with a fun way to experiment with ideas and half a constant stream of content.

Theme

Tonight is one of those nights. The theme is: OBSCURE SPORTS. I had several ideas today after looking into Jan Willem ‘JW’ Nijman’s tennis game, TENNNES. For those of you who don’t know, JW is one half of the dutch independent studio, Vlambeer.