Alan Rawkins

I’m a little late posting this but what can you do. Back in early May I participated in the Toronto Independent Game Jam (TOJAM). The object of the Jam was to program a full game, from scratch, in 3 days, while adhering to a couple of requirements. The requirements in this case were to use an image of a goat on a pole, a sound bite of a Toronto subway car door closing, and to fit the theme of ‘Cheese’. My entry was a game called Happy Goat Lucky.

The Jam itself was a lot of fun. It was pretty cool to see so many talented developers whaling away on their projects at all hours of the day. It was also great to just have three days to do nothing but code.

The quality of the resulting games is pretty amazing. All of them are now available for free online at http://tojam.ca/games_2008/default.asp, so go check them out!

If you are a DO addict you owe it to yourself to check out this video. A warning though: it’s a real tear jerker.

Update: “Top Scores” have been added to the scorechart; you can now see the best scores from all users on Facebook, as well as your friends scores and your personal best scores.

If you play DO2 and use facebook, you can now combine your addictions into an unprecedented void of lost productivity. In Dolphin Olympics 2: Facebook Edition, the scoreboard will only display your scores and your friends scores, so you can finally know who the best DO player in your circle of friends is.

I have received a lot of emails from people saying that Dolphin Olympics 2 is no longer working for them. If you are in the same boat, here are a few things to try:

1. Delete your temporary Internet files.
2. Uninstall and reinstall the Flash Player.
3. Try playing in a different browser, such as Firefox or Opera.

Also, it has been brought to my attention that the game does not work in Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista. If you are using Windows Vista, try playing the game in Firefox.

Skilled flipper Hempick has posted a video of a 233 point run in DO2. SPOILER WARNING: This run hits some of the furthest reaches of space. If you haven’t made it up there yet and don’t want to know what’s up there, don’t watch the video.

Update: The video is now also viewable in-game, under ‘How to Play’, on the 4th page.

I’ve recorded and posted 38 million point run in Dolphin Olympics 2. This is the first time I’ve done a video on youtube so the quality is a little low, but hopefully the maneuvers are clear enough. I was lucky on this run in that I started right on an extension, but I don’t think that had a massive impact on the final score. You can see the big boost to the points comes from getting to the really high planets, and mixing up a lot of tricks to get your multiplier as high as possible.

This wasn’t a perfect run either, so there’s lots of room for improvement (which is reflected on the high score chart; I didn’t come close to placing top 10). There’s more stuff to get to in space, and I didn’t finish with a big tailslide or starslide, which can help a lot.
Recorded with Camstudio

There have been a lot of bug fixes in Dolphin Olympics 2 over the past few days, including some changes to how the game controls and how points are scored. To keep an even playing field, I’m going to reboot the scoreboard soon, probably later on today or tomorrow. Apologies to anyone who has worked hard to get onto the top ten, but I’m sure you can do it again, right?

Dolphin Olympics 2 is ready for consumption. The game is still tentatively under development, and no doubt the high score chart will need to be rebooted before long, but otherwise it’s pretty much good to go.

donationcoder.com have posted the results to their 2006 Accessibility Game Programming Contest. Some really imaginative games were submitted, and it was great to be a part of it. Props to all of the winners, developers, and of course and the contest organizers who put in a lot of work and made it a really fun experience for everyone.

Jayisgames.com have posted their top casual games of 2006, and nominated Dolphin Olympics in the action/arcade category! It’s a big honour to see it in there alongside those other games, all of them are extremely cool. A big congratulations to all of the winners.