After the Global Game Jam we had a meeting within the Computer Games Society and decided that we would hold our own game jam a week later at UWS. The timing of the Jam was not ideal but we did not want it to interfere with people starting back at University.

I made a simple game by myself using Construct 2. It is called 'Flame Boy' and it is an infinite jumper. The reason I made it an infinite jumper was purely down to time constraints. However it is also an addictive play style which works quite well with the player striving to beat their previous high score. 

Once the jam had finished I decided that I would release the game onto the Windows Store. It turned out to be a bit of a hassle but I did eventually get the game released. You can see it in the following link.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-gb/app/flame-boy/de7a7064-37fb-438b-80a0-b97313d6fe67

I just took part in the Global Game Jam which was a good experience. I decided that I wanted to work with a team which was working with Unity2D. Before the Jam I went through some tutorials on Unity. The best help was on the Unity website in the Learn section. There are videos which take you through the basics of Unity2D but the most helpful part are the live classes held by Mike Geig.

The game was called PvE: Player v Everyone. It was quite simple and all you had to do was survive as long as you could in the Colosseum while killing as many goblins and orcs as you could. Your score would go up with each kill you got.

Over the summer I decided that I wanted to beef up my portfolio. I started my own gaming company called 'Crow Games' which I will use for any games I produce from now on. At the University of the West of Scotland there is a competition over the summer called UN-versity 2013. The competition is between all students who have produced anything over the summer holidays. The prizes include a Kinect for the xbox 360.

I decided that I wanted to become more familiar with different pieces of software so I chose Construct 2 to make the game and G.I.M.P. 2  for the artwork.

The game is called 'The Space Ace' and it took the best part of the summer to produce. When I started making the game I didn't have a limit in the size of the game. Basically I wanted to test the waters and see how powerful Construct 2 was. I thought that I would be limited in what I could put in but to my surprise I have still to find that barrier.

In trying to find the limit of Construct 2 I made the game quite big which meant it was too big to release to mobile phone or Scirra Arcade Store. There was however a site called 'clay.io' which had almost no limits so I uploaded the game and within 3 days it was approved and posted onto their website. There was also a plugin for the site which meant I could add in a leaderboard and achievements very easily.

I learnt a lot about making games with this project. Mostly about how to release your game which will be very useful in the future. For example for the Scirra Arcade Store there is limit in size to 10mb and a limit in layout size which was 800 in length. My game was about 45mb and 1000 in length.

For my next project I want to make a game where it can be released to multiple platforms and learning about all these limits in advance would make a big difference.

Here's a link to 'The Space Ace' if you want to have a go...
http://clay.io/game/thespaceace