Monday, 7 May 2012
Saturday, 2 July 2011
1500 plays
Vexed Hedgehogs has 1500 plays at GameJolt. For me, this makes it far more successful than anything else I have made. A couple of my games have clocked over 1000 plays before, but this shows what you can achieve when you replace originality with cloning. Oh.
Mind you, chatting to a proper game developer the other day as he got his 1,000,000 th player for his commercial title keeps things in perspective.
The other joy is reading reviews in Russian, Italian and Czech where the fact that it relies on linguistic jokes that don't translate easily (sorry) means that it has been received as a fairly serious clone of Angry Birds. Oh dear.
Mind you, chatting to a proper game developer the other day as he got his 1,000,000 th player for his commercial title keeps things in perspective.
The other joy is reading reviews in Russian, Italian and Czech where the fact that it relies on linguistic jokes that don't translate easily (sorry) means that it has been received as a fairly serious clone of Angry Birds. Oh dear.
Monday, 16 May 2011
Busy Busy Busy
I have been busy. Oh so busy. And when I am busy, perhaps paradoxically, I have a habit of making games. Having discovered the joys of short burst development via the Experimental Gameplay Project I have found a lovely outlet for the frustrations of the day job. Anyway, I thought I’d share. Think of it as getting my feelings about some of contemporary game design off my chest. And I love Angry Birds, by the way.
Vexed Hedgehogs was built in a hurry and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until it looks like it took an age to make. God bless physics engines built by other people, which made this far easier than it looks to make. I am ridiculously proud of this.
Go download. (PC only)
And then there is ZoomZoomZoom, which I am reliably informed isn’t up to snuff. Curse you, colleagues, for your honesty. I like it.
Go download. (PC only)
Vexed Hedgehogs was built in a hurry and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until it looks like it took an age to make. God bless physics engines built by other people, which made this far easier than it looks to make. I am ridiculously proud of this.
Go download. (PC only)
And then there is ZoomZoomZoom, which I am reliably informed isn’t up to snuff. Curse you, colleagues, for your honesty. I like it.
Go download. (PC only)
Monday, 31 January 2011
1000 plays
Yay, Walk with Jack has got a thousand plays/downloads at Game Jolt, which is cheerful news. Given that GM games don't work in a browser (whatever the plug ins pretend) but have to be downloaded, that is quite a milestone for me. Peanuts to what your average Flash game can get at Kongregate or Newgrounds, mind, but still quite good. For context, Shush has a grand total of 989 plays/downloads and has been online since May 2007. May 2007? I have been doing this publicly since May 2007? Sheesh.
Have another picture:
Have another picture:
Monday, 24 January 2011
Experimental Gameplay
I keep telling myself that one day I will write a proper commentary on the little games I make, so that they make a little more sense than they currently do.
Three things occur to me, however:
I make games to relax.
I make games as experiments.
I make games that are more doodles than art.
I have had a fair amount of staring into space time lately, where I have found it hard to grind the day job into the weekends and the evenings so I turned to making a couple of (very quick) games according to someone else's theme, in this case that of the Experimental Gameplay Project.
I therefore offer these only as relaxing doodle experiments, largely about mouse control. The theme for January was 'inanimate', and both took four or five hours to complete (the brief for EGP is that dev time be under a week, so they are comfortably inside that).
The links take you to Game Jolt downloads of PC only exe files.
The first is called Danse Macabre and features the music by Camille Saint-Saëns and has the unquiet bones of a skeleton drifting away from its burial. The player is supposed to use left mouse to drag the bones back to rest. More experience than game, but there are some things I like here.
The second is All My Base, a space invader-a-like with a completely different control mechanic. There are blue and green invaders firing blue and green missiles at your bases, which cannot move. You need to manoeuvre the green on blue and the blue on green to destroy them before they hit your bases. The trick is that you can only drag the alien ships on screen as a single formation (they behave like a layer). It is slower than a true arcade game, and a bit puzzlish, but again there are things I am pleased with.
Three things occur to me, however:
I make games to relax.
I make games as experiments.
I make games that are more doodles than art.
I have had a fair amount of staring into space time lately, where I have found it hard to grind the day job into the weekends and the evenings so I turned to making a couple of (very quick) games according to someone else's theme, in this case that of the Experimental Gameplay Project.
I therefore offer these only as relaxing doodle experiments, largely about mouse control. The theme for January was 'inanimate', and both took four or five hours to complete (the brief for EGP is that dev time be under a week, so they are comfortably inside that).
The links take you to Game Jolt downloads of PC only exe files.
The first is called Danse Macabre and features the music by Camille Saint-Saëns and has the unquiet bones of a skeleton drifting away from its burial. The player is supposed to use left mouse to drag the bones back to rest. More experience than game, but there are some things I like here.
The second is All My Base, a space invader-a-like with a completely different control mechanic. There are blue and green invaders firing blue and green missiles at your bases, which cannot move. You need to manoeuvre the green on blue and the blue on green to destroy them before they hit your bases. The trick is that you can only drag the alien ships on screen as a single formation (they behave like a layer). It is slower than a true arcade game, and a bit puzzlish, but again there are things I am pleased with.
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Walk with Jack
href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_WHDvXnKQEf8/TQNP8K5ANvI/AAAAAAAAAX4/lOlxwtjEKCA/s1600/walkwith3.png">
So, this took two hours to build a prototype that remains almost unchanged from what I released, but took a while to polish in the wee small hours where I should have been doing something more productive.
I am never sure if my little games are really experimental games -- they are not often concerned with testing a hypothesis, but more explorations of ideas in interaction, but this one related to a problem -- if you put a game on iPhone the finger gets in the way when you interact. The solution means that this game is best described through its mechanic -- 'What you can't see can't hurt you'. It made the Jay is Games Weekend Download last week, and has picked up some positive comments (and about 800 plays in just over a week, which is pretty good for me, if miniscule by internet standards)
It also relates to the act of seeing in games, that I have written about from an academic point of view, and is a game I had planned to make for a while now. Oddly enough the variant I am playing with at the moment, which is a mini adventure of stitched together scenes, is closer to the original intention, which owed a lot to Mr McGoo.
Anyway, a 13.4 Mb download for the original at either Gamejolt or YoYo
So, this took two hours to build a prototype that remains almost unchanged from what I released, but took a while to polish in the wee small hours where I should have been doing something more productive.
I am never sure if my little games are really experimental games -- they are not often concerned with testing a hypothesis, but more explorations of ideas in interaction, but this one related to a problem -- if you put a game on iPhone the finger gets in the way when you interact. The solution means that this game is best described through its mechanic -- 'What you can't see can't hurt you'. It made the Jay is Games Weekend Download last week, and has picked up some positive comments (and about 800 plays in just over a week, which is pretty good for me, if miniscule by internet standards)
It also relates to the act of seeing in games, that I have written about from an academic point of view, and is a game I had planned to make for a while now. Oddly enough the variant I am playing with at the moment, which is a mini adventure of stitched together scenes, is closer to the original intention, which owed a lot to Mr McGoo.
Anyway, a 13.4 Mb download for the original at either Gamejolt or YoYo
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Hubris
Funny week last week. The children were away with grandma, and I had a bitty week of having to drop into work most days despite being technically off on leave. So I spent time playing with an idea until I could get it playable.
I guess I had been thinking about Lost in Static a little and I have always had a desire to make a flea circus game. I have a memory from childhood of Michael Bentine's Potty Time featuring dioramas with invisible protagonists moving (with footprints) across a sand table, but YouTube seems to imply I dreamed it all. And I have always had an interest in making games about games -- as the Pinball Panda games (and particularly Ultimate Toybox) make obvious, and an academic observation or two to make about the figure of the avatar and its visibility. So all this came together in making a game in which the avatar/protagonist is more or less invisible and which there is always a balance between movement and stillness. Bad guys and coins fade in and out depending on whether you are moving and, as with Lost in Static, it is hard to represent this with screenshots. I will try, however, with a level or two with more going on than most:
It has certainly gone beyond proof of concept, and I think does something new, but I can't seem to get anyone to play it, beyond colleagues forced at gunpoint. Another idea that fascinates me more than others, perhaps? It is available (for PC) at YoYo Games (where I entered it into a competition hoping that that would generate plays) and at GameJolt, and for intel Macs here. And there is a low quality YouTube video in the post below.
Audio isn't its strong point, but apart from that I think this is interesting.
I guess I had been thinking about Lost in Static a little and I have always had a desire to make a flea circus game. I have a memory from childhood of Michael Bentine's Potty Time featuring dioramas with invisible protagonists moving (with footprints) across a sand table, but YouTube seems to imply I dreamed it all. And I have always had an interest in making games about games -- as the Pinball Panda games (and particularly Ultimate Toybox) make obvious, and an academic observation or two to make about the figure of the avatar and its visibility. So all this came together in making a game in which the avatar/protagonist is more or less invisible and which there is always a balance between movement and stillness. Bad guys and coins fade in and out depending on whether you are moving and, as with Lost in Static, it is hard to represent this with screenshots. I will try, however, with a level or two with more going on than most:
It has certainly gone beyond proof of concept, and I think does something new, but I can't seem to get anyone to play it, beyond colleagues forced at gunpoint. Another idea that fascinates me more than others, perhaps? It is available (for PC) at YoYo Games (where I entered it into a competition hoping that that would generate plays) and at GameJolt, and for intel Macs here. And there is a low quality YouTube video in the post below.
Audio isn't its strong point, but apart from that I think this is interesting.
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