Simple Developments Guild's site

Simple Games Spotlight: Space Invaders

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:29:15 +0000

Space Invaders by Kaigne.

I don't think I need to go into explaining what Space Invaders is. If you've never played it, there is something wrong with you and you do not have the right to call yourself a "gamer". That's the equivalent of a chef claiming he's never boiled water. Log out of your Skyrims and Battlefields this instant and play a real game for once in your life.

Space Invaders is a perfect fit for the guild. However, your game has to be of a certain level of quality to be accepted into the guild. Surprisingly, a guy I don't think I've ever heard of on BYOND exceeded my expectations. There is just so much awesomeness going on with this game's presentation I can't begin to explain it in words. Of course, the way the game is presented is normal as far as the "real world" goes so-to-speak, but here on BYOND where you are greeted with Super Saiyan 15 Vegetatrunks title screens, and "how much red u want in ur eyebrowz?" alert boxes, games put together like this one are a rarity. It's only proper that I make you all aware of this game, and if you weren't sure how to decently present your game, you might want to log in and take some notes. A game like this would ROCK using the Flash client.

LEARN FROM KAIGNE

Contest Idea

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:24:21 +0000

As you are all aware, there has been a decrease in activity in the guild. I've been busy doing ~~nothing~~ school work, Yusuke is shooting Arabs, and I can't even remember where Lige is.

So, I'd like to run a contest but I still have no job so I can't put up money to give to the winners. However, Dj Dovis made a suggestion that I don't think will interest you guys but it's worth a shot.

Basically, you pay to enter the contest and the winner gets the sum of all the entry fees. That's assuming I don't accidentally use the cash to buy myself a new pair of Nikes.

So, vote in the poll and we'll go from there.

Recent Inactivity

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:01:09 +0000

Don't consider the SDGuild dead just yet. Ye of little faith!

I'm a bit inactive at the moment due to internet being revoked from the outpost I am stationed at in Iraq. We're tearing everything down in order to pack it up and move it to the states. We're only leaving behind what the Iraqis will be keeping (which is very little.)

I'll be back soon. Until then, Lige and EmpirezTeam are more than capable of handling the Guild. You won't even notice I'm gone ;)

I'll be around maybe once per three weeks or so to see how everyone is doing. My personal laptop took a dump on me and it's now dead :( and so is alot of my work on some projects and systems I was programming. Oh well, it'll be fine.

Keep working on your simple developments and submit them for review and listings within the guild.

Well, onto another hiatus!

P.S. Yusuke13 loves ya

Simple Developments Guild: Another Update

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:29:12 +0000

The board game contest went beautifully. I can't thank everyone enough for all of the support whether you participated and developed an entry, voted and supported the contestants, hosted the entries during voting or just plain rooted on our contestants. I want to thank everyone for your support of our mission. Our success depends upon those developers and participants.

SDGuild contests could use some help, however. Cash prizes are cool and all, but let's get some help from all of you SDGuildlings [see what I did thar? hurrhurr] for some prizes. (Cash prizes will also exist along side this idea. Don't worry :P)

I'm not asking for your money. (aside from the donate button over in the top box on the left of my page, but that's a different endeavor altogether) You can donate a subscription to your game for however long you like be it one month, six months, a year, lifetime or whatever other timeframe you wish. You can do that by clicking here. The link will take you to the "Game Author Donations" portion of the SDGuild's forum. Thanks ahead of time for anyone that either considers it or gifts us a subscription to give away in a future contest.

It doesn't have to be a subscription at all. You can donate anything you like. (Except Lebron James jerseys. We don't accept those.)

Simple Developments Hosting Services are still lacking clients and customers. I think the prices are fairly cheap. If you're looking for hosting, give us a shot, and we'll do our best not to disappoint. All money made during this will be put directly into the contest prize fund and given back to our winners. I'm hoping to generate enough revenue to start offering larger cash prizes as well as a prize for the silver medal. Let's see what we can get done!

We're not all about contests, however. That's just a clever rouse to make you guys develop something! That's right! The secret is out of the bag now. You caught me. So, tell me. Have any of you learned anything yet? Has anyone learned the lesson I'm trying to teach? The lessons go hand-in-hand with my "It isn't about the size" blog posts I made not too long ago. (You can find the first one here and the second one here in case you missed them.)

Here's the basic overview of the idea:

1) Games are meant to be fun. It doesn't take a year to make a fun game. It only takes a good idea and some effort.

2) Making games is also meant to be fun. For all of you that participated in any of our contests, I'm sure you had a few smiles and a bit of a sense of accomplishment at least once or twice.

3) It doesn't take a genius to make a game. Believe me, I'm no genius. (surprise!)

4) Developing, programming, pixel art, GFX and anything that goes with it is a bit addictive. Once you start down that path, you're hooked.

I remember my first game. It was ugly! The object of the game was to run around digging holes to see what you can find. I spent forever on it, due to fail knowledge and inexperience. But I remember when everything finally came together and my crooked little stick figure dudes were shoveling their rumps off and finding gold, jewelry, underground monsters to fight and all kinds of cool stuff. I was proud of that accomplishment. No matter how ugly it was.

So, get in on the hosting and if you'd be so kind, help us out with some prizes to make things more interesting.

Thanks for reading

Don't wait for a contest! Make something!

Board Game Contest Over

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:30:54 +0000

Here are the five submissions for the contest. I pretty much have an idea which one I have chosen, but I will hold a poll just to see what you guys think! The voting is open to BYOND members only, so I doubt someone will spend $18 to memberfy their alternate account just to win $10.

I want to personally thank all of the participants and remind everyone once again what they were competing for.

Prizes are:
$10 Cash Via Paypal (if winner doesn't have a paypal, other arrangements will be made)
Winning game will be listed and supported by The Simple Developments Guild.

Thanks to everyone for their support of the contest and for those that submitted a game. For those of you that worked on a game but either didn't meet the deadline or ran into personal issues hindering you from completing your game, I salute you! Thanks for your participation and may the best game win!

The Poll is Officially Over and the Winner has been decided.

Simple Developments Guild: Hosting

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:52:21 +0000

One day remains for the board game contest! Get your submissions in as a comment on the blog post about the contest by clicking here!

I recently picked up a VPS server and am thinking of designating a port for the purpose of hosting (for cheap) to generate revenue for the Simple Developments Guild contests and prizes. I'm currently hosting Forgotten World by: Teka123 on it (click here for the link) an RPG currently in Alpha stages with plenty to do and plenty to be excited about! Go check it out ;)

If you'd like to have a game hosted, the pricing is $2/week. Contact me via pager and I will handle the hosting for you. Payment is require prior to setup of the server. (money back guarantee) All I require is the host files (.dmb and .rsc files) and payment. Updating and such can be handled either in game via update administration verb or simply by me downloading the new host files and uploading them to my Filezilla.

Look in our forum for more details and a way to submit your game for hosting or simply click here

If we get enough requests, I'll purchase more VPS's to accommodate the needs.

Thanks for reading.

Edit: Prices are as follows:

1 week: $2 USD
2 weeks: $4 USD
1 month: $6 USD

Simple Developments Guild

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:04:19 +0000

Recently, I changed the forums around yet again. My ambitions are to require affiliation to the Guild in order to use them, also, I want to see more involvement from those Guild Members!

Every Guild Member Has:

1) The ability to submit a blog post for review.

This means, if you see a game worth reviewing, by all means review it! Come to this site and type up your review and submit it for us to review. If you tend to make a continued contribution to the efforts, I'll surely give you a few cool buttons to play with linked to the site, as well as a (pretty) cool title to go along with it. We need more involvement from you in order to make this work!

2) The knowledge of what kind of games you like to play.

Share with us your philosophies on the forum and tell us what you like to play or what you would like to develop/see developed. Plant a seed and get stuff accomplished!

3) All the tools you need to do something great.

Games don't have to be a huge endeavor. If you have a good idea, a decent understanding of the DM language (or a friend or two that does) and a spare weekend, you can create a game people will want to play. Who says it has to end with release? Make the game playable, fun and halfway decent to look at and release it. Then, update to your heart's content!

Contest

A few submissions have been made. A few new promises have been made by developers to work on their submissions.

The thing I hate to hear the most is: I only have [x] amount of days left. I guess I'll catch the next one. I've seen plenty of great games made in 10 days! That was the original deadline. Now, I've also seen plenty of great, fun games made in 5, 3 or even 1 day. No excuses. Just make something!

Submissions

At the time of this blog post, we haven't had a single submission since the Guild's inception. It's sad. The only submissions we have received were on my personal forum prior to the creation of this site. This site was created 2 August.

Visit the forums today and submit a game of yours or someone else! If the game is considered for listing, the author will be notified and permission will be asked of them. Submit a game you created or just a game you enjoy playing!

That's about all I can think of for now.
Thanks for reading.

Guild Update

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:15:36 +0000

Board Game Contest

Quite a few contestants seem to be working on our latest challenge as seen by my last post to the guild's site. I have counted seven (7) projects currently under construction and have already received 3 entries. Keep up the great work and tweak those creations! You still have six (6) days remaining until the deadline.

Forums

I've recently been working on arranging the Guild's forums to be more member-friendly. I've had a few questions to why some of the topics weren't accessible. Here's the answer: Most of the sections require you to be a Guild Member to be able to write a new topic or reply to one. However, everyone can read the topics.

The current list of sections and forums are as follows:

---Off-topic---
General Discussion: Talk about whatever you like (For everyone)
Classified Ads: Get help for your developments here! (For Guild Members Only)
Project Announcements: Let us know what you're currently working on (For everyone)

---Game Submissions--
Submit a Game: Request a game be listed or removed (For everyone)
Reviewed Games: Games that have been reviewed for listings/removal (Guild Members Only)

---I want to help!---
Drop in a Resume: Want to help? Apply here! (Guild Members only)
Reviewed Resumes: Resumes that have been reviewed (Guild Members Only)

I'm looking to get the Forums more active. If you want to check out what's being discussed or have something to say that follows those topics, click HERE for a direct link to the forums.

Personal

I've been working alot lately. My projects are suffering a bit from this, but I'm getting back on track a little at a time.

Recently, Teka123 and I have began work on a new, improved Teka Co Chat since the last has been lost and hasn't seen any updates in quite a while. The new, revamped version will contain the following features:

Lobby where you initially login
Fully interactive interface
Player-created rooms
Password-protected rooms for private discussion
Advanced server controls

I hope to see you at its release!

Thanks for reading.

Simple Developments Guild: Contest

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:13:25 +0000

Our last contest ended with only having three entries and Heyya46 as the victor. This time, I hope to have at least double that amount of participation.

Recent happenings

We are still rather short on game submissions. As soon as we have a few supported games, we can start the inner-guild contests such as scavenger hunts for medals, 24/48/72 hour high score contests and a few other ideas I have in mind.(You'll see soon enough ;))

Board game contest

From the time of this post, you have exactly 10 days to develop an original board game. This means it can't be monopoly, yatzee, chess, checkers, chinese checkers, backgammon or any of the other numerous board games in existence. The board game must be original!

As long as it's your own IP, I'm not going to place any other restrictions on the game or the developments of it. Only original work (to include the board game itself, any sprites/tiles and any programming involved in development) must be 100% your own IP.

The deadline is August 25th at 1:15 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST). In order to submit your game, you must post a link to the game's hub as a comment to this blog post.

The Prize:
$10 cash (paypal required)
If you don't have a paypal, I can do game subscriptions or we'll think of something.
Winning game will be listed within the Guild.

Good luck and happy developing!

Thanks for reading

Submit your games to be listed under the Guild.

Contest Results

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 04:01:34 +0000

I would like to thank everyone that took time out of their week to develop a game for our little opening contest. We had a total of only 3 submissions. The submissions are as follows:

http://www.byond.com/games/Djdovis/SurvivalMaze

Survival Maze by Dj dovis is a maze in which the object of the game was to apparently walk around and pick up burgers while trying to find your way back from or out of the maze.

http://www.byond.com/games/Heyya46/Luck

Luck by Heyya46 is a PvP style game in which you challenge other players to a test of your luck. The object of the game is to defeat the other contender using nothing but sheer luck. Your HP is set to 100 and damage dealt by battles is randomized between 1-100.

http://www.byond.com/games/Laserdog/forysuke13bylaserdog

forysuke13bylaserdog by Laserdog is another maze-style game where you must navigate your way through a host of scary pictures to find your way to the next level. The walls are invisible and you must make an educated guess through trial and error or just plain luck.

After careful consideration, the winner has been chosen by EmpirezTeam.

And the winner is Luck by Heyya46.

Thanks to everyone for your participation. There will be more contests in the near future.

By the time this blog post is complete, I will be logging into paypal to send the $10 in USD to Heyya for his victory.

Thanks for reading.