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الرئيسية
Brain Waves
It’s been a while since I’ve released a game so it feels great to be getting another one out there but it’s not because I haven’t been busy! In the time since I released The Dreamerz I have in fact finished four games that are all in various stages of being released. Oddly enough Brain Waves was the last of those four to be made but it is the first to be released. Sometimes sponsorship deals can take a while to finalise and then the sponsor might want to wait to release the game. Also most sponsors seem to ask for a period of exclusivity where the game only appears on their site before it goes live. All that can mean that it can take a while for games to actually get released.
Brain Waves on the other hand went from idea to release in around two weeks which is a pretty speedy development cycle. The other games that will appear on here soon were far bigger projects and took a considerable amount of designing, creating and bug testing before they could be deemed ready for release.
As a result we (robotJAM and myself) wanted to do a much simpler project that we could finish quickly before getting stuck into the next big project (which incidentally is already under way). We drew inspiration from other simple but effective games that often involve several minigames in an attempt to make something that was fun, challenging and competitive. We had seen some other games that involved reaction/skill tests that seemed like they had potential but were generally lacking and we felt we could do better.
We put together a series of minigames that we felt would test people and bring out their competitive side. Leaderboards and facebook integration were a must for this kind of game to enable players to compete with other people around the globe as well as their friends. This is the first time I have attempted to integrate a game with facebook and (with help) it seemed very simple to set it up so that you could post a score to your facebook account (although it must be said that I didn’t play a very big part in setting that up! I have Rob and another developer he often works with, Long Animals, to thank for that).
Anyway, enough waffling, I hope you enjoy playing and competing in Brain Waves! Make sure you post some scores to facebook. I look forward to seeing what kind of impact that might have on the viral spread of the game.
P.S. Stay tuned for my new releases which will be updated soon. Toxers is my biggest game so far in all respects and will hopefully be going up tomorrow.
Play this game…
November 11th, 2010 Games Tags: brain, brainwaves, facebook, waves 0 Comment
Bad Viking
BadViking.com
If you have played a few of my games you may have noticed that some of them appear to be sponsored by a site called BadViking.com. This is actually my own website and I have self-sponsored several of my games (meaning I have my links and logos in the games). BadViking.com differs from this website in that I host games on there from other developers as well as my own.
I hand pick all the games that go onto BadViking.com by playing them first to make sure they are of a high enough quality. I also try to ensure that the site is family friendly, something that I believe to be an important consideration.
The Bad Viking brand was something that I came up with one afternoon after deciding that it was about time I owned a website to publish games on. I drew several little viking characters and refined them until I had something that I liked. The actual name of the brand came later. I bounced a few ideas around, Red Viking, Little Viking, etc before finally settling on Bad Viking. When coming up with a website name a big factor is whether or not the site name is available and I think ultimately that was what led me to BadViking.com.
The decision to self-sponsor some games was made in an attempt to drive more traffic to BadViking.com. It’s a more long term strategy to trying to make money from Flash games since you don’t get the up-front payment that you get with a sponsorship. Instead you have to hope that over time your website will become more popular and that you can make more money from on-site advertising.
I found it difficult to decide whether to aim for sponsorships or to go for the website model but now that I have given both methods a proper run out I have opted to focus my attention more on developing than on publishing. There is a lot of competition in the publishing sector and a large number of already established sites with huge user bases. As a developer you don’t really get the sense that you are competing with other developers. A good game is a good game no matter what other developers are producing around the same time.
I do still maintain BadViking.com and publish games regularly but it is not my main priority at the moment.
September 26th, 2010 Articles Tags: arcade, bad, badviking.com, games, sponsor, viking 0 Comment
The Dreamerz
The Dreamerz is another collaboration with my artist friend robotJAM. It’s another point-and-click game but there’s not a Panda in sight this time. The concept for this game was actually dreamed up (see what I did there) before we made Panda’s BIGGER Adventure. I came across a game that I really liked, The Blue Beanie, and got in touch with its creator, asking if she’d like to do a collaboration.
I put together an idea for a game that I thought would go well with her style of art. Unfortunately it didn’t work out because she was unable to commit enough time to the project but I didn’t want to just ditch it completely because I really liked the concept of the game. I considered attempting to do the art myself but luckily I decided to see if Rob wanted to get on board first. He did a far better job than I ever could have done on the art and helped shape the game into what it is now.
I think we got the formula near enough spot on with this one with a lot people saying that they thought it was the perfect length and difficulty for a Flash game which is always nice to hear. It’s not too challenging but there is enough of a challenge to keep it engaging throughout and the puzzles are all (more or less) logical. We were also lucky enough to get a great sound designer, Reade McCardell, to work on the game. He put together all the sounds which add a lot of atmosphere to the planets. Check out his band here: Fresh Cut Salads.
It has been the highest rated game I’ve made to date, getting scores over 4 stars on Kongregate and Newgrounds, a really great result. It was also reviewed very favourably by JayIsGames, a site that reviews Flash games and that has reviewed several of my games in the past.
But it’s the great comments that players leave that make the business of making Flash games so rewarding. Several players likened the game to Myst and Samorost which was just fantastic since those are great games.
There were of course a few negative comments (you can’t please everyone!), most of them being about the fact that the sound puzzle was too challenging. That was probably the bit that I was least confident about before release since I was worried that people would find it tricky but I still like it and am glad that it stayed in the game.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: click, dream machine, dreamerz, giant, planet, point, point-and-click, space 2 Comments
Panda’s BIGGER Adventure
The second half of Panda’s BIG Adventure sees our favourite back-talking Panda catapulted forward in time to a future where Elvis, the true owner of the time-machine, is being held captive in a robot prison. Ok so the plot gets a little ridiculous in this one but it’s all good fun.
This part of the game wraps up the adventure and features 5 new time zones; the future prison, Leonardo Da Vinci’s pad, Al Copop’s secret moonshine production facility, a World War II trench and the not so wild west. As an extra bonus, for the first time ever you get a glimpse of Panda’s swanky HQ when you face up against the final terminator-pirate boss.
We’ve enjoyed making the Panda games a lot, especially coming up with crazy plots and weaving the film references into the games, but we’ve decided to hang up our Panda shaped hats (for the immediate future at any rate). As much as we enjoy the genre we want to branch out into other areas and make different kinds of games.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: adventure, bigger, elvis, panda, prison 0 Comment
GearCopter
This game was made as a challenge to see if I could make a game in a single day. Several other developers were doing the same thing at the time and I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Long game projects can take some of the fun out of developing after a while so it was refreshing to be making something that I could take from concept to completion in about 10 hours.
The gameplay is understandably simple but it’s actually a game that I enjoyed playing during testing, trying to get better at it and improve on my score. Writing that made me want to check if I still held the high score. As it turns out I didn’t, but it didn’t take me too long to set one again!
I probably wouldn’t have been able to make this in 10 hours if I hadn’t had some of the artwork already lying around from other unfinished projects. It was a fun challenge though and makes me think I should do it again some time although it’s not particularly rewarding releasing a game that is below par in terms of the standard of the average Flash game these days.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: avoid, collect, copter, fly, gear, gearcopter 1 Comment
Popopop 2
I had wanted to make a sequel to Popopop for a while before I finally got around to it. I wanted to take on board some of the criticisms from the first game and listen to some of the fans’ suggestions to try and improve on it. I totally reworked the graphics and, I hope you’ll agree, they are a huge improvement on the first one.
I also reworked the level editor system, improving it so that it didn’t struggle with downloading the data. In the first one I had no experience of saving and loading data in Flash and so the level editor simply loaded all the levels in one go. This wasn’t a problem at first but with more and more levels it became more and more of an issue. I worked out how to deal with this for Popopop 2 so that it only loaded the levels 10 at a time. Having done that I went back and updated the first Popopop so that people could continue using the level editor there.
I also added a feature that allowed you to view the levels by rating so that the more popular levels could be shown first and hopefully the poor ones would be buried.
In terms of level design I tried to make it a bit easier than the first Popopop. I would say that some levels are probably still needlessly difficult but in general I think it’s an improvement on the first game. I also included a new type of bubble, the cannon bubble, which added an extra element to the level design as well as being good fun to pop.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: cannon, level editor, pin, pop, popopop 0 Comment
My Thoughts on Micro-Transactions
Planet Basher 2 was my first foray into the world of micro-transactions. For the uninitiated micro-transactions means selling in game content to the players, usually for a low price. This is a concept that is becoming more and more commonplace in the world of video games with even major titles jumping on the bandwagon. It’s the same idea as buying a downloadable map pack for Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, just on a slightly smaller scale (in general).
In Flash games the one problem for developers such as myself who are trying to make a living from it is that the content is free for anyone to play. I think it’s absolutely fantastic that we have all these great games that we can play for free and we take it for granted that we can. I wouldn’t ever want to change that (besides, I couldn’t even if I wanted to) but I do think that there is something in this micro-transaction idea.
In theory what it means is that as developers we can spend longer and put more effort into adding features to our games that we think our fans would like to see. Under normal circumstances this content wouldn’t exist but by charging a small amount to players it makes it more worth our while to spend the extra time developing.
So the end user gets bonus content (if they want it) and we get a bit of profit. A win win situation. Of course not everyone sees it that way and there is plenty of opposition to the concept. A lot of people are very against paying for content in Flash games and I can certainly sympathise with that view, but what they don’t seem to realise is that we are not trying to charge them to play the game, we’re offering additional content for those that are willing to pay for it. The game is still free and it’s not just a demo.
Of course, in Planet Basher 2 I made just about every mistake I could have in trying to implement micro-transactions. I tried to add them into a game that hadn’t been designed for them from the start (not a good idea) and I also made the decision to publish the game before I had been given clearance to go ahead with micro-transactions (as I recall it was just before going on holiday and I was in a hurry to publish). As a result the micro-transactions only got added to the game once it had been released by which time the non-micro-transaction version was already widely distributed.
In spite of these errors, it enabled me to see the potential for success using the micro-transactions model and I took away some valuable lessons from the experience. I look forward to trialling micro-transactions properly in the future.
September 23rd, 2010 Articles Tags: developers, flash, micro-transactions, money, planet basher 1 Comment
Planet Basher 2
Planet Basher 2 got made because I received a lot of positive feedback on the first one and I wanted to build on it to make an even better game. I corrected the mistakes that I made in the first one and added some extra features to, hopefully, make the experience more fun. You can no longer get trapped between planets because each spaceship has health and so will be destroyed if it hits too many planets. You can also buy armour upgrades in the game shop.
I improved the graphics from the first one by quite a lot and was really pleased with the overall level of polish on the game once I was finished with it. I also added more upgrades to add an extra element of strategy, and achievements to give players more to aim for and rewards for their endeavours.
All in all I felt that it was a big improvement on the first game… so of course it got (slightly) lower ratings! Perhaps people were just a bit bored of the concept after the first one (it’s a fairly similar game in all honesty, just with some improvements).
It’s been a while since I’ve released a game so it feels great to be getting another one out there but it’s not because I haven’t been busy! In the time since I released The Dreamerz I have in fact finished four games that are all in various stages of being released. Oddly enough Brain Waves was the last of those four to be made but it is the first to be released. Sometimes sponsorship deals can take a while to finalise and then the sponsor might want to wait to release the game. Also most sponsors seem to ask for a period of exclusivity where the game only appears on their site before it goes live. All that can mean that it can take a while for games to actually get released.
Brain Waves on the other hand went from idea to release in around two weeks which is a pretty speedy development cycle. The other games that will appear on here soon were far bigger projects and took a considerable amount of designing, creating and bug testing before they could be deemed ready for release.
As a result we (robotJAM and myself) wanted to do a much simpler project that we could finish quickly before getting stuck into the next big project (which incidentally is already under way). We drew inspiration from other simple but effective games that often involve several minigames in an attempt to make something that was fun, challenging and competitive. We had seen some other games that involved reaction/skill tests that seemed like they had potential but were generally lacking and we felt we could do better.
We put together a series of minigames that we felt would test people and bring out their competitive side. Leaderboards and facebook integration were a must for this kind of game to enable players to compete with other people around the globe as well as their friends. This is the first time I have attempted to integrate a game with facebook and (with help) it seemed very simple to set it up so that you could post a score to your facebook account (although it must be said that I didn’t play a very big part in setting that up! I have Rob and another developer he often works with, Long Animals, to thank for that).
Anyway, enough waffling, I hope you enjoy playing and competing in Brain Waves! Make sure you post some scores to facebook. I look forward to seeing what kind of impact that might have on the viral spread of the game.
P.S. Stay tuned for my new releases which will be updated soon. Toxers is my biggest game so far in all respects and will hopefully be going up tomorrow.
Play this game…
November 11th, 2010 Games Tags: brain, brainwaves, facebook, waves 0 Comment
Bad Viking
BadViking.com
If you have played a few of my games you may have noticed that some of them appear to be sponsored by a site called BadViking.com. This is actually my own website and I have self-sponsored several of my games (meaning I have my links and logos in the games). BadViking.com differs from this website in that I host games on there from other developers as well as my own.
I hand pick all the games that go onto BadViking.com by playing them first to make sure they are of a high enough quality. I also try to ensure that the site is family friendly, something that I believe to be an important consideration.
The Bad Viking brand was something that I came up with one afternoon after deciding that it was about time I owned a website to publish games on. I drew several little viking characters and refined them until I had something that I liked. The actual name of the brand came later. I bounced a few ideas around, Red Viking, Little Viking, etc before finally settling on Bad Viking. When coming up with a website name a big factor is whether or not the site name is available and I think ultimately that was what led me to BadViking.com.
The decision to self-sponsor some games was made in an attempt to drive more traffic to BadViking.com. It’s a more long term strategy to trying to make money from Flash games since you don’t get the up-front payment that you get with a sponsorship. Instead you have to hope that over time your website will become more popular and that you can make more money from on-site advertising.
I found it difficult to decide whether to aim for sponsorships or to go for the website model but now that I have given both methods a proper run out I have opted to focus my attention more on developing than on publishing. There is a lot of competition in the publishing sector and a large number of already established sites with huge user bases. As a developer you don’t really get the sense that you are competing with other developers. A good game is a good game no matter what other developers are producing around the same time.
I do still maintain BadViking.com and publish games regularly but it is not my main priority at the moment.
September 26th, 2010 Articles Tags: arcade, bad, badviking.com, games, sponsor, viking 0 Comment
The Dreamerz
The Dreamerz is another collaboration with my artist friend robotJAM. It’s another point-and-click game but there’s not a Panda in sight this time. The concept for this game was actually dreamed up (see what I did there) before we made Panda’s BIGGER Adventure. I came across a game that I really liked, The Blue Beanie, and got in touch with its creator, asking if she’d like to do a collaboration.
I put together an idea for a game that I thought would go well with her style of art. Unfortunately it didn’t work out because she was unable to commit enough time to the project but I didn’t want to just ditch it completely because I really liked the concept of the game. I considered attempting to do the art myself but luckily I decided to see if Rob wanted to get on board first. He did a far better job than I ever could have done on the art and helped shape the game into what it is now.
I think we got the formula near enough spot on with this one with a lot people saying that they thought it was the perfect length and difficulty for a Flash game which is always nice to hear. It’s not too challenging but there is enough of a challenge to keep it engaging throughout and the puzzles are all (more or less) logical. We were also lucky enough to get a great sound designer, Reade McCardell, to work on the game. He put together all the sounds which add a lot of atmosphere to the planets. Check out his band here: Fresh Cut Salads.
It has been the highest rated game I’ve made to date, getting scores over 4 stars on Kongregate and Newgrounds, a really great result. It was also reviewed very favourably by JayIsGames, a site that reviews Flash games and that has reviewed several of my games in the past.
But it’s the great comments that players leave that make the business of making Flash games so rewarding. Several players likened the game to Myst and Samorost which was just fantastic since those are great games.
There were of course a few negative comments (you can’t please everyone!), most of them being about the fact that the sound puzzle was too challenging. That was probably the bit that I was least confident about before release since I was worried that people would find it tricky but I still like it and am glad that it stayed in the game.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: click, dream machine, dreamerz, giant, planet, point, point-and-click, space 2 Comments
Panda’s BIGGER Adventure
The second half of Panda’s BIG Adventure sees our favourite back-talking Panda catapulted forward in time to a future where Elvis, the true owner of the time-machine, is being held captive in a robot prison. Ok so the plot gets a little ridiculous in this one but it’s all good fun.
This part of the game wraps up the adventure and features 5 new time zones; the future prison, Leonardo Da Vinci’s pad, Al Copop’s secret moonshine production facility, a World War II trench and the not so wild west. As an extra bonus, for the first time ever you get a glimpse of Panda’s swanky HQ when you face up against the final terminator-pirate boss.
We’ve enjoyed making the Panda games a lot, especially coming up with crazy plots and weaving the film references into the games, but we’ve decided to hang up our Panda shaped hats (for the immediate future at any rate). As much as we enjoy the genre we want to branch out into other areas and make different kinds of games.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: adventure, bigger, elvis, panda, prison 0 Comment
GearCopter
This game was made as a challenge to see if I could make a game in a single day. Several other developers were doing the same thing at the time and I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Long game projects can take some of the fun out of developing after a while so it was refreshing to be making something that I could take from concept to completion in about 10 hours.
The gameplay is understandably simple but it’s actually a game that I enjoyed playing during testing, trying to get better at it and improve on my score. Writing that made me want to check if I still held the high score. As it turns out I didn’t, but it didn’t take me too long to set one again!
I probably wouldn’t have been able to make this in 10 hours if I hadn’t had some of the artwork already lying around from other unfinished projects. It was a fun challenge though and makes me think I should do it again some time although it’s not particularly rewarding releasing a game that is below par in terms of the standard of the average Flash game these days.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: avoid, collect, copter, fly, gear, gearcopter 1 Comment
Popopop 2
I had wanted to make a sequel to Popopop for a while before I finally got around to it. I wanted to take on board some of the criticisms from the first game and listen to some of the fans’ suggestions to try and improve on it. I totally reworked the graphics and, I hope you’ll agree, they are a huge improvement on the first one.
I also reworked the level editor system, improving it so that it didn’t struggle with downloading the data. In the first one I had no experience of saving and loading data in Flash and so the level editor simply loaded all the levels in one go. This wasn’t a problem at first but with more and more levels it became more and more of an issue. I worked out how to deal with this for Popopop 2 so that it only loaded the levels 10 at a time. Having done that I went back and updated the first Popopop so that people could continue using the level editor there.
I also added a feature that allowed you to view the levels by rating so that the more popular levels could be shown first and hopefully the poor ones would be buried.
In terms of level design I tried to make it a bit easier than the first Popopop. I would say that some levels are probably still needlessly difficult but in general I think it’s an improvement on the first game. I also included a new type of bubble, the cannon bubble, which added an extra element to the level design as well as being good fun to pop.
Play this game…
September 23rd, 2010 Games Tags: cannon, level editor, pin, pop, popopop 0 Comment
My Thoughts on Micro-Transactions
Planet Basher 2 was my first foray into the world of micro-transactions. For the uninitiated micro-transactions means selling in game content to the players, usually for a low price. This is a concept that is becoming more and more commonplace in the world of video games with even major titles jumping on the bandwagon. It’s the same idea as buying a downloadable map pack for Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, just on a slightly smaller scale (in general).
In Flash games the one problem for developers such as myself who are trying to make a living from it is that the content is free for anyone to play. I think it’s absolutely fantastic that we have all these great games that we can play for free and we take it for granted that we can. I wouldn’t ever want to change that (besides, I couldn’t even if I wanted to) but I do think that there is something in this micro-transaction idea.
In theory what it means is that as developers we can spend longer and put more effort into adding features to our games that we think our fans would like to see. Under normal circumstances this content wouldn’t exist but by charging a small amount to players it makes it more worth our while to spend the extra time developing.
So the end user gets bonus content (if they want it) and we get a bit of profit. A win win situation. Of course not everyone sees it that way and there is plenty of opposition to the concept. A lot of people are very against paying for content in Flash games and I can certainly sympathise with that view, but what they don’t seem to realise is that we are not trying to charge them to play the game, we’re offering additional content for those that are willing to pay for it. The game is still free and it’s not just a demo.
Of course, in Planet Basher 2 I made just about every mistake I could have in trying to implement micro-transactions. I tried to add them into a game that hadn’t been designed for them from the start (not a good idea) and I also made the decision to publish the game before I had been given clearance to go ahead with micro-transactions (as I recall it was just before going on holiday and I was in a hurry to publish). As a result the micro-transactions only got added to the game once it had been released by which time the non-micro-transaction version was already widely distributed.
In spite of these errors, it enabled me to see the potential for success using the micro-transactions model and I took away some valuable lessons from the experience. I look forward to trialling micro-transactions properly in the future.
September 23rd, 2010 Articles Tags: developers, flash, micro-transactions, money, planet basher 1 Comment
Planet Basher 2
Planet Basher 2 got made because I received a lot of positive feedback on the first one and I wanted to build on it to make an even better game. I corrected the mistakes that I made in the first one and added some extra features to, hopefully, make the experience more fun. You can no longer get trapped between planets because each spaceship has health and so will be destroyed if it hits too many planets. You can also buy armour upgrades in the game shop.
I improved the graphics from the first one by quite a lot and was really pleased with the overall level of polish on the game once I was finished with it. I also added more upgrades to add an extra element of strategy, and achievements to give players more to aim for and rewards for their endeavours.
All in all I felt that it was a big improvement on the first game… so of course it got (slightly) lower ratings! Perhaps people were just a bit bored of the concept after the first one (it’s a fairly similar game in all honesty, just with some improvements).
