DEADJAM

From the mind - the screen

[deadjam]

Play ZERO FUN now and find out if you are a one or a zero! www.bit.ly/zerofun

[deadjam]

Zero fun? You decide.

[deadjam]

MAYHEM! iOS Sticker Pack - Oh my!

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/mayhem!-stickers/id1155910811

50%* of the MAYHEM! Sticker Pack will be donated to charity - http://charityfund.deadjam.co.uk

* After Apple's cut.

[deadjam]

#BEARFULS Sticker Pack for iOS

“There’s a bear for everyone!” 

http://bitly.com/bearfuls

[deadjam]

#indiegamedev Tips For Press Coverage

Read my short article on tips for mobile game press coverage - http://bit.ly/1Odg7Bg

[deadjam]

#ThumbSpace FREE to download on iOS! http://bit.ly/thumbspace

I was the Producer, helped with marketing and cut the trailer for this fast-action, adrenaline-fuelled, thumb shoot ‘em up!

[deadjam]

‘Game Idea Ten’ or ‘Looking Back at 2015 and all my Game Ideas’

I have a problem. Like most people, I can and do come up with (game) ideas for anything and everything. Ideas are cheap, they are worthless when they are just ideas rattling around in your head. Realising an idea and then taking that idea and producing something real is what counts. It could be creative writing, pottery, a new culinary dish, anything at all. The end product needs to be tangible, maybe something people can enjoy or engage with or even benefit from. It could be anything as long as it’s exists outside of you’re own mind.

In 2016 I hope to realise more of my own ideas. I tend to have ideas for games all the time. When I mean all the time, what I really mean is about once a week, sometimes more but on average once a week.

Now this is a dangerous habit and the reason being, that I’m not a developer. I’m an amateur game designer who released his first ever game on iOS in February of this year (more on this in another post - one day!). Really I need to either learn how to code or team up with people to prototype my ideas and make the game.

One day I might develop and code my own game but I just have enough time for everything else in my life so I rely on the help or service of others. Now that’s fine for now. I don’t expect people to work with me for free and what little money I have I will offer to the programmer and artist to get things moving. I’m positive that in 2016 I will be involved in a few more games than I was in 2015.

So what’s with the long introduction to a post about this game idea called ‘Ten’ I hear your shout at your screen? A good question indeed. At the end of the year people like to reflect back at the last 12 months, so I’m doing a little bit of that, plus I think it’s healthy to write about your feelings and thoughts to set them free - whoa, what am I smoking? Ok, ok here’s the idea, or rather the inspiration behind the idea.

This week I was checking out @thomasnoppers’s Tweets as I’ve been following the progress of his paper craft toy designs over the last month. We both share a passion for Robots and it would seem Japanese culture. His latest design, the Nood-O, popped up on my timeline and as soon as I saw it an idea for a game fired up in my mind. The game involves this Noodle chef bot character taking centre stage with other bots as the supporting cast. I’m leaning towards a sim management puzzle type game - details are fuzzy while I’ll let the idea percolate a little. In my head the game would play on mobile devices but for now it’s just a nice, exciting worthless idea...

I hope to have more on Ten another time.

Nood-O by Thomas Noppers pictured above.

[hayes2d]

Thanks so much for following!

To say thank you, I will design a logo in the same style as above for the first 3 people to reblog this!

[deadjam]

What would happen if ‘free to play’ spilled over into our daily lives?

[deadjam]

Game Dream - August 2015

I woke up this morning with a smile on my face. 

The last thing I remember from my dream was dropping to the dusty floor and making myself as thin as possible as a unit of cavalry (that’s soldiers on horseback to you and me) charged around and over me, only narrowly missing any vital parts of my body. Once the last horse had hurtled past and the deafening sound died down, I lifted my head, pulled my hand from under me and shot three times with my (Cowboy gun) revolver. I brought down three soldiers from the rearguard as they rounded a corner.  Three for three. Nice shooting if I do say so myself.

The dream ended. I was left satisfied.

That was the ending to this somewhat thrilling mind film being screened in my head. Here comes the first thing I remember.

The dream opens on a flight to Japan. The interior looks similar to a small lecture hall with seats descending to the front, although there wasn’t a lectern in sight just a large screen. It felt very much like a plane but with extra width, this may have had something to do with the fact I was viewing myself in the dream at this point as if I was looking through a fish eye lens to accommodate the entire scene.

I sat the right side of the plane (closest to camera) with around ten other passengers. We all had VR headsets on playing a game and the events were streamed as one complete film and POV to the rest of the cabin. Impossible I know to stitch together ten different points of view to present one succinct flawless film, but it is a dream after all.

Inside the game, my comrades and me were situated in Western territory, there was sand, dust and sky everywhere. We were standing in a fort and our task was to defend the oncoming wave of enemies about to rain down on us. Armed with pistols, shotguns and our sunny smiles, we wore cowboy getup but also had some serious tech from the next Century. Our leader was looking at a screen of a portable radar unit (whatever that is) and some of us had microphones and ear plugs to communicate with each other.

Things got a little hazy in the dream at this point, a bit like the start of a sandstorm kicking up. I remember someone saying we should drive the coach (and I mean an automated metallic hunk of metal with lots of wheels and tyres, rather than a stagecoach) to one of the anticipated entry points to help block out the enemy. When bang! I was separated from the group and the next thing I saw was a unit of Confederate soldiers on horseback, having smashed through the perimeter charging straight towards me. Uh-oh.

[deadjam]

Character sketches* for a bystander in my #storydev project titled Stanley. 

*drawn by an artist friend

[deadjam]

The Dark Side of VR

This morning I was having a little one-on-one with the highly talented @meowsa over on Twitter. It was one of those innocent and random tweet exchanges where you write what you’re thinking and then the other person responds with their thought -I think you get it, it’s called a conversation. Anyway, we were touching on the topic of VR and what (unintentionally) came out of it was a seed of an idea for something - perhaps a webcomic, maybe a short story, either way I haven’t really thought that far ahead.

Here is the final Tweet in our conversation: 

“@meowza Nice. And without the cleaning. I can imagine people staying in VR way too long wanting to swap with reality (the dark side of VR)”

After posting this final Tweet in the conversation here’s (a summary of) what sparked off in my head. You will need to take into account that society’s mass adoption of VR was successful; so fast forward a few years;

Police get a call to a flat and find a dead body slumped over the bed. The 44 year old man dies from dehydration while being plugged into VR for over 60 hours.

We now have special VR suits designed to aid us in long stretches of being immersed in the most successful new virtual reality “Your World”. The VR suits take care of feeding us fluids and removing waste!

We have become a nation of ‘sloth like’ unhealthy people from being immersed in VR for obscenely long periods of time. After this thought registered it sparked the memory of how we were depicted in Wall-E with ‘brain washed’, unhealthy people in personal micro vehicles. Well VR is responsible for something similar, we are ‘zombie like’ in our waking life and only really come alive in VR.

Points 2 and 3 are very much intertwined and point 1 touches on the more morbid and dark side of a somewhat dystopian future with VR.

- - -

Well that’s all that came to mind in those brief five minutes with @meowsa on Twitter. Of course I could expand on it and develop it further it but I’ve got games to prototype and it might be nice to let that seed of an idea germinate and eventually grow (or wither away and die) :D

DEADJAM

[deadjam]

MAYHEM! Official Release Trailer

[deadjam]

Teaser Trailer for MAYHEM!

[deadjam]

Game Idea X

I was having a daydream this morning and came up with reaction based mobile game. I visualised it and played it through in my head and it seemed quite exciting. Minimal but fun.

Now that I've actually had time to jot down notes and expand on it, it doesn't have quite the same appeal. In fact it's almost like another idea I have rattling around in my 'ideas' folder on my computer, just skinned differently.

This is either me iterating the original concept in my mind or not really having an original idea and bringing out the same old thoughts. 

Either way I think I need to develop the idea further before discounting it and then get someone to prototype it for me to see if there is any potential.

Over and out.

[armyoftrolls]

SciFiNow magazine Zombie Mall illustration, put on tumblr cuz twitter seems to mess up the pixels…

[deadjam]

Awesome!

[deadjam]

So what happens when I need to multiple items to a #tivtag reward card? That's a good question, I need to think about this...