I’m always tinkering with my own little game clones, but lately I’ve been interested in creating some nice little DHTML WYSIWYG tools to help with game development.

As well, a few people have let me know that while the current documentation is useful, I need to add more tutorials and templates. (Thanks to all for the kick in the butt encouragement).

Well, it’s happening. I am listening. I’ll have some good stuff posted on the site in the next 4-8 weeks. If you haven’t already, grab the RSS feed for the site, or sign up to the GMP google group to get an update when I post the new code and documentation.

Simply click the variable/method title bar to toggle to the view of the single item, or click the expand/collapse links to apply the change to all items in the section.

This this should make the API a little easier to read. Enjoy!

This new release adds the G.deleteGob method. Thanks to Ray for noticing that the method was missing! New documentation for the method has been added to the API documentation as well.

Enjoy!

Truth be told, games look better against the black background, and I just can’t resist a little web work. Hope you like it!

The old look was flying saucers. The new look is more pixelated like space invaders.

Hope you like it!

Really, it’s an old look from the first version of the game. Several friends have mentioned that they missed the trophies from the original version. Well, guys, they’re back.

Hope everyone likes them!

GMP is great for making sprite-based, 2-D games, and it can easily power most retro-style arcade game designs. It is also well suited to making puzzles such as sudoku or gogopop. All of the games on gogomakeplay.com are built using GMP.

Professional game developers will find GMP useful for making rapid prototypes during their game development cycle. Set up is quick, and changes can be viewed by anyone with a browser.

Game hobbyists will find GMP easy to learn and hack. It’s simple enough to use as a learning tool, and powerful enough to run the back-end of production-quality games.

Plus, it’s easy to share your games: just put them in a web page.

GMP builds upon the architecture used by your web browser to build and manage dynamic HTML pages. Many game coding tasks are quite similar to making a dynamic web page.

The API is fully documented, and there is a tutorial to get you started. You can find everything you need in the GMP section of this site.

If you make games, or have always wanted to, then this is the tool for you. Enjoy!

Several features have been simplified so that new users will be able pick them up quickly. Changes include merging Tags into Gobs, and rewriting the intersection management logic to use only position and direction for intersection resolution calculations.

The previous Gob/Tag relationship enabled complex sprite management, but the same results could be achieved using a simpler design — multiple Gobs with built-in Tags. This change reduced the size of the engine by several KB, and will be much easier for new GMP developers to pick up.

The changes to intersection management leave the kinematics logic up to the game developer, who can make their motion as simple or complex as they desire. The functions and variables removed included those for calculating velocity and acceleration, and for performing radial and linear deflections. These changes also reduce the footprint of the engine by several KB.

Each of my games have also been upgraded to use GMP version 1.7. These upgrades took about 4 hours each, and the games run smoothly on A-list browsers on Win2K, XP, and Intel macs.

As part of the games upgrade, I separated the engine and game files, including the appropriate license in each. This means that as of now, GMP v1.7 is free to the world! (It already has the MIT/GPL licence attached). For the moment, you’ll have to download it by reading the source on one of the game pages, but I’ll have a proper download package in the coming days.

The site has also been given an easier-to-read look, in preparation for the game engine API documentation, which is on its way.

I wanted to create a shooter, just to show it could be done in javascript, and to use some more advanced math to get some interesting sprite movement.

It took about 4 weeks from start to finish, working part time (after work, weekends). Of course, there was almost no design phase: it borrows heavily from well established games.

My biggest challenge was making the game easy enough to play during a moment of distraction, and also making it addictive enough to play for more than a few minutes. I don’t know if I succeeded — I’ll have to wait a few more weeks before I can return to the game play with a fresh perspective.

Well, you can decide how well I made the game. I hope you like it.