After a marathon effort last night between myself and Damien, we managed to get Mudslinger Defense to a nearly ready for market state. This morning, I put the finishing touches on it and submitted it to Microsoft! That’s 5 of 5!!!

5 games in a little over a month, and two weeks to spare on the contest! Now I just have to sit back and wait for the contest to end…

The final game for the contest is shaping up well. There’s just a few little AI idiosyncrasies that need to be ironed out, plus some other oddities that need to be worked on. Once those are done, it’ll be in great shape. With any luck, it should be ready by the end of the week.

I’d like to give a big thank you to Damien Calloway for taking up this final game in the contest.

In other news, I’m starting to work on a project that I’m not allowed to talk about presently. It’s much bigger than most of the projects I’ve worked on in the past. When I can say more, I will. For now, you know why I am quiet.

Well, that was the fastest app I’ve ever written. Yesterday, I went from not being entirely sure how to make an RSS reader to having a functional prototype. Today, I cleared away the few bugs that were in the code, made it look and feel how I wanted it, and published it!

Riddle Dude is the brain child of my brother and one of his friends. It’s a website that gives brain teasers every day. My app reads their RSS feed and displays these riddles. Hope you enjoy it!

Here’s a sample screenshot of the app:

The prototype for the new game is complete. Presently, the working title is merely “Landfill”. We’re still trying to coming up with a catchy name. It will come to us…

Here’s a few screenshots of the game so far:

I’ve been working on art for the next couple games over the past two days. Nothing much to see yet. Presently, the plan is to make a pong variant for one and an entirely new game for the other. The new game doesn’t quite have a good name yet, but the basic theme is promoting recycling by way of a game. Hopefully, I will have some screenshots for you tomorrow.

If you’re in the US, have a happy and safe Memorial Day. Otherwise, have a happy and safe Monday.

Decision time. Klondike is taking too long. The feature that allows you to save a game in progress is what is creating the extra time. I am going to have to cut it for the contest release. Later, after the contest, I will re-address these games I produce and bring them up to my typical One Month Games standard of quality. Most likely, the Klondike game will be changed into a multiple card game app that will have all of the many features people expect from card games similar to this (statistics, saving, scoring, etc).

For now, I am going to trim out the save feature and just get this thing released.

Unfortunately, yesterday I had to deal with a family crisis, so I didn’t make any progress. Today I made significant progress though. I have the auto finish button done, and a new game button. Restoring a game after a phone call is a much more complex process, and will be finished by tomorrow. I probably have it 75% completed. After that feature is up and tested, it should be ready within a few hours. Then, it’ll be off to Microsoft, and I’ll be on to the next game.

So far as I can tell, all current bugs are gone. I have just two features I want to implement for the game play, then I will add proper menus, tack a logo screen on there… and boom. We’re done. With any luck, this will be tomorrow or Wednesday!

The game is very playable. You can win it. All possible types of moves are available. It’s really “done”, except that there’s no auto-finish. Also, if you get a phone call in the middle of the game or tap the phone’s buttons, it resets your game. Both of these are what I’m going to be adding tomorrow.

This game has taken far too long. Clearly, I need to make much more simplistic games for this contest. I’m working on several new game ideas to that end.