Category Archives: Game a Week

After graduating in 2014, I took 10 weeks to create a series of Game a Week projects. You can learn more and find out about the inspiration behind the endeavour at this blogpost. In 2020, I updated these posts with a series of videos revisiting these projects, a playlist of which you can find here.

Week 10 – Go Right

Week 10 marks an exciting first for my Game a Weeks; happy collaboration. Please indulge in Go Right – download and play here.

The controls are explained in-game. If you absolutely have to mute the audio, press the M key.

Credits

I’m going to start this post off by giving a huge shout out and thank you to the four other people who contributed to the game.

Tom Lamey is the enigmatic hero responsible for the lovely character design and great spritesheets that bring the protagonist to life. He also advised me on the general look of the game

For the music I counted on the talents of the insatiable Jack Drewry. He brought together a couple of rag tag musicians to aid him, collectively they’re known as Squid Tooth, but separately they go by their birth names of Jack, Laurie and Rowan.

I hope you agree that these four all helped raise the bar on my games with their contributions. I’ll talk more about how it all came together below.

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Week 9 – Colourful Threes

And now for something completely different. Download and play here.

Arrow keys to try a slide, space bar to confirm it. Imagine it’s on a phone screen; pressing right swipes right, and so on.

Some bad news: this game is going to be incredibly colour-blind unfriendly. I wanted to have letters on the cards to give you a fighting chance but I ran out of time. I’m so sorry.

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Week 5 – Physical Breakout

This is the fifth week of my Game a Week challenge. I didn’t have a clear goal this week but things really came together once I started experimenting on Friday, and you can download and play the result here.

The paddle follows the cursor, use a and d (or left and right cursor keys) to tilt the paddle slightly. Use the ball to destroy the blocks! I’ve clearly taken inspiration from the Breakout (or Arkanoid) series, but added a physics-y twist.

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Week 4 – Graduation

A small update for a small game. I was busy pretty much all week so threw this together in two hours on Sunday; guess the reason why after giving it a download and play.

Yep, I graduated this week so I was super busy with that and entertaining my family who came to visit. So I used that as the theme and tried to think of the most lightweight idea possible so I could still make a game without having to stress about keeping up with it all week. And this is the result!

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Week 3 – Blink

So I’m actually incredibly happy with this one. It hits all the right buttons for me: it’s a novel gameplay mechanic, I implemented something technically challenging, and I think I’ve achieved a really nice atmosphere in general. I implore you to give this one a play. Download here.

Headphones are recommended. W, A, S and D to move, mouse to aim, M to mute the sound if you really want to, but I advise against it.

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Week 2 – Flappy Infinite Jetpack Bird

I completed my second week of Game a Week! Download and play here.

The development of this one was completely different form the first week, so I’ll go over that in a moment, but first I’ll break down the basic gameplay:

  • Aim the cannon with the two arrow buttons
  • Start the firing sequence by clicking the Fire button once, this’ll make the power gauge on the left bounce up and down – the fuller it is, the more force will be used in the ensuing blast
  • Click the Fire button a second time to fire the bird out of the cannon
  • Once she’s out, just click anywhere on screen to use the jetpack. The fuel gauge on the bottom of the screen will show you how much is left in the tank. Once the jetpack runs out of fuel, it’ll fly off
  • Get extra fuel by flying through green rings
  • Get a speed boost by flying through orange rings
  • Get some extra points by flying through yellow rings
  • Try to fly as far as possible!

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Week 1 – Radial Space Invaders

I decided to start simple with my first Game a Week by taking an old classic and putting my own twist on it. The result is this weird hybrid of Space Invaders and Super Hexagon, which you can download and play here.

I included a God Mode functionality just in case you don’t have the patience to play the game cautiously, simply complete one run and start the next by pressing ‘G’ instead of the space bar.

I decided to start this week as I knew I’d have a lot of spare time, without any university work or other commitments to worry about, but even so I ended up spending a lot longer on it per-day than I expected. I feel that it paid off, though, as I think the end result is a half decent experience.

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