Odd Ball – Ludum Dare 38 Success
Check out our Ludum Dare 38 entry ‘Odd Ball’ for the ‘A Small World’ theme competition from this past weekend.
Odd Ball is a simple puzzle game with the goal to complete the 16 levels as fast as possible. Tweet your best time with a screenshot to us @MikewareXGR!
Entry Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/odd-ball
Play Directly Here: http://www.mikeware.com/oddball/
Optimized for play on a desktop browser.
Cogs in a Machine Now Available!
We’re pleased to announce that Cogs in a Machine is now available for purchase through The Game Crafter!
Thanks again to all our Kickstarter backers for making this possible and showing their support.
Be sure to check out our next game experiment ‘Spiredice’ this weekend at PAX West as part of the Indie Megabooth Tabletop Showcase. We’re in the ACT Theater on Friday & Saturday and the Megabooth on Sunday & Monday.
Cogs in a Machine – Kickstarter
Cogs in a Machine is an easy to learn press-your-luck dice rolling game for 2-6 players. Play as a gnome working on an assembly line. Use your gnome’s special abilities and roll dice to build Cogs and Teeth, which you use to assemble components. Assemble as many components as you can before your other co-gnomes. The other gnomes will try to Supervise your work, but be warned: They may not have your best interest at heart. After all, it’s every gnome for themselves when you’re a cog in a machine!
We’re now running a Kickstarter campaign at http://www.cogsinamachine.com/, so please join us there for more details!
Cogs in a Machine is at PAX Prime 2015 this weekend August 28-31 in the Indie MEGABOOTH, so come by and check out the game and play it for yourself. See you there!
We’ll also be in Boston on September 12th for the Boston Festival of Independent Games.
Space Battle Arena v1.0.1
King of the Bubble
Just over 3 years ago Space Battle Arena was born. What started as a crazy idea being built on-the-fly has turned into a whole platform for a series of Programming Games. It has come a long way over the past year especially, and we are proud to be in a state where we can publish stable builds.
Space Battle Arena has its own website now (available here). It is the main resource for all materials related to Space Battle including the latest client and server builds, client java docs, student and teacher resources, as well as information about developing for Space Battle.
The project has also now been open sourced on GitHub and will continue to be updated. If you run into any issues or have suggestions, please file Issues for Space Battle there. Note: that the main development cycle for Space Battle is between April – June.
In the meantime v1.1 a.k.a. the “Discovery Quest” update is already in the works for ‘Season 4’ at Issaquah High School this year. For the most up-to-date news, follow us on Twitter @MikewareXGR.
“Cogs in a Machine” Selected for PAX South Tabletop Showcase!
“Cogs in a Machine” is a game we’ve been working on for a while. It’s a dice game for 2-6 players:
The machine is broken! You and your band of fellow gnomes are trying to fix it by putting cogs back in the machine. However, being the greedy gnomes that you are, you figure no one will mind if you take some valuable cogs for yourself once there are a few in there…
Break the machine over and over again as you try to steal and amass cogs the quickest by rolling dice and thwarting your opponent’s attempts at their own success.
It was selected to be showcased along with 7 other games at PAX South on January 23-25, 2015. If you’re there, be sure to stop by our booth and try it out! You can see the rest of the PAX games showcased here.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter or check back here for more info over the next few weeks.
You Have Died of Dysentery: Games in Education are Still Alive
Michael A. Hawker and Brett Wortzman presented this talk at PAXDev 2014 about how non-educational games can have educational value in the classroom. Synopsis:
In the early nineties, traditional educational games such as Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail pioneered the way for learning to be fun (and taught us that you can only carry 200 pounds of meat back to your wagon). Since then, the educational games market has not borne the same success as today’s major game franchises. However, it is possible for ‘traditional’ games not specifically designed to be educational to have curricular value. We will show how we have used a wide range of games and game concepts to provide a familiar context for students to engage with new material and principles of Computer Science. In addition, we will discuss how game professionals can find a place for their games in the classroom.
The Game is Afoot!
Today, we released our latest game ‘Afoot: Sins of the Flesh’ on the Game Crafter.
Afoot is a two to four player mystery memory game that can be played in 20-30 minutes. It adds strategic components to the traditional game of Memory as well as the deductive reasoning and logic of solving a murder mystery from Clue (without having to run around a mansion). The pace of play is quick and keeps everyone engaged as paying attention at all times is important while you try to solve the mystery and earn points.
We’re excited to release this one and hope you’ll track us down at PAX to give it a try!
Space Battle 2014 Final Tournament
Space Battle 2014 was a success. More details will follow on this post in the near future.
Be on the lookout for updated classroom materials in the coming month at http://battlearena.mikeware.com/.
And if you’re coming to PAX Dev, be sure to check out our talk this year: You Have Died of Dysentery: Games in Education Are Still Alive.
Support ‘First Play’ on Patreon
Our ‘First Play’ series announced before in March is now starting a Patreon campaign here.
Patreon is a site where Patrons can support ongoing projects by pledging funds per piece of content created.
If you enjoy watching ‘First Play’ be sure to go support the project and get access to additional benefits.
Thanks!
New Web Series: First Play
We’ve started another web series entitled ‘First Play’ where we play games for the first time and comment on their design points.
In our first episode we play Mini Metro.
Check our YouTube Channel every Tuesday for new episodes.
questions at mikeware dot com
