Greedy Bankers v0.01 is here!

Update (1 March 2011): Greedy Bankers for iPhone is now complete, and is available from the App Store now! Visit www.greedy-bankers.com for more details

Please note that this blog post is for a very early prototype of Greedy Bankers. For up-to-date information on the game, please visit www.greedy-bankers.com

It's been a while, but I'm finally making a new blog post. And not only that, it's a blog post with a fresh new game for you to play!

Greedy Bankers was developed for the Experimental Gameplay Project June/July theme, Casual Addiction.

After toying with various ideas I eventually settled on a neat and simple puzzle game with neat presentation and lots of rewarding effects. The mouse-driven sliding tile mechanic was inspired by my earlier Shifty Trains, which had already proven fairly addictive, and the controls were smooth and intuitive.

UPDATE: Downloads removed because they are out-of-date. The released version of the game is available from the App Store, while the most recent version of the Prototype (November 2010) is available from my portfolio site.

Greedy Bankers was developed using XNA 3.1. To run the game you will need to have XNA Framework 3.1 installed. This is really quick and simple to do, and is only a 7MB download. Download XNA Framework 3.1 from here.

You may also need to have the .NET Framework version 3.5 installed. You can download this from here.

Please let me know what you think, and tell me about any bugs and issues you come across. I'd love to hear your comments!

Experimental Gameplay Update

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been working on a game for this month's Experimental Gameplay Project. I decided in the end to leave the game unfinished and move on to new things, as it wasn't really turning out to be as fun as I'd hoped!

However, so as not to let the work go to waste I thought I'd make a little video to show off where it got to. Have a look below and see what you think.



I learnt a lot from the project, so I don't regret doing it. I'm definitely looking forward to March's challenge!

Experimental Gameplay!

Over the past month I've been working on a small project for the Experimental Gameplay Project, which is a monthly experiment where participants have to make a game in seven days or less to a given theme. Games such as Canabalt and the prototype for the excellent World of Goo all spawned from this website. The theme for the month is Rejection, and I've been cracking away with my entry!

My game is a little point-and-click adventure called Brain Dead, about a guy who's brain has been rejected by his body and he needs to find another one. You can get him to put different items in his head and that allows him to do different things. For example, a dictionary will allow him to read, a radio will allow him to speak, and so operate a phone.

Unfortunately, during development it turned out that it wasn't actually very fun! I worked on it for about three days and then, due to a combination of a lack of faith in the idea and a large amount of classwork to do, I put it on haitus.

This week I'm planning to finish it off, in time for the end of the month, and submit it to the website. I'm going to take the game in a slightly different direction and make it more AI-oriented. So the player will be able to put items in the guy's head, but he'll act of his own accord, depending on what he wants (determined by the current situation) and what he can do (i.e. what's in his head). I can imagine this being a lot more fun.

Some of the other members of Warwick Game Design are taking part too, so I'll be putting up links to our entries as soon as they're ready!