Author Archive

  • Colour Chain Stats – Part Deux

    Well for some reason AddictingGames didn’t consider Colour Chain “addicting” enough, and didn’t approve my upload. Oh well.

    On the plus side a few portals have started ripping off the GameJacketed version and posting it to their own sites. PuffGames gave me a respectable 4000+ plays in 24 hours.

    Best of all though are the stats from the site the game was actually created for – Shaun the Sheep.com – where the game has now topped 30,000 plays since its release a few weeks ago. I’m nearly finished on a new game for the site which will be released early June, so I’ll keep everyone posted.

    We’ve also picked up a contract from Cartoon Network to create a kick-ass game for a new show that debuts later this year. I can’t give any more details away other than the game will be a horizontally scrolling beat-em-up. Game design spec work starts this week, with a prototype shortly after. Definitely exciting stuff.

  • Colour Chain Release Stats

    The game Colour Chain was officially released onto the Shaun the Sheep site 6 days ago, and has been going down well. The “Top 5 scores of the day” feature is proving a good draw / challenge. So far the game has had 6000 plays in 6 days (which is on par for the traffic levels we get). The average time someone spends playing the game is a very healthy 6 minutes 5 seconds.

    Wanting to experiment further I released Colour Chain onto Kongregate, Newgrounds and AddictingGames to see what the response would be like, and to get used to the submission process.

    I wrapped my game in a GameJacket so I could monitor its travels, prepared some screen grabs and let it fly.

    The game appeared on Newgrounds instantly (as an “Unapproved” title) and I was shocked to see it gain 300 plays in the first couple of hours. Newgrounds obviously has some serious traffic. It’s got a pretty good rating on Newgrounds (3.18 / 5.0) and the comments are surprisingly friendly. Not at all what I expected.

    Kongregate wouldn’t let me use my GameJacket version, so I had to upload a plain vanilla one and trust their stats. It still received 300+ plays within hours of release. The average rating is 2.64, which is totally fair, and the comments are mostly constructive which is nice.

    AddictingGames hasn’t released the game yet, so we’ll wait and see what happens. I’ll post again when I have some more stats to share.
    Play Colour Chain on Kongregate

    Play Colour Chain on Newgrounds

  • SWF format goes totally open!

    The Flash blogging world has pretty much erupted today with this news. I read it first on Aral’s blog, but the short of it is that Adobe are going to make the SWF/FLV/FL4 formats totally open, with the license restrictions removed. This is massive, and this video details it all. The more pervasive the format becomes (across multiple devices, hello iPhone!) the more avenues we’ll have to deliver our content into. Which can only be a good thing!

  • Pimp My Spectrum

    The winner of the Breakpoint 64k PC demo this year is just brilliant. It’s not a PC demo done in the “spectrum style” – it’s actually a Spectrum demo, running in an emulator, all in 64k. Ok so the emulator is “overclocked” but still, bloody hell.. this is some mad Z80 skills.

  • Glitter Thrust

    I was playing around with Flint 1.0.2 and a bit of Asteroids ship code that I had (from the Keith Peters AS3 Animation book.) I had the emitter following the ship, leaving a nice particle trail as it went. And then it occurred to me – why not make the particle renderer a mask for an image? A couple of minutes later and the end result surprised even me! Fly around with the cursor keys, as you do so your ship will push the swirling black smoke away revealing the picture behind, leaving a trail of shiny glitter particles as it does so.

    [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/glitter_man.swf” width=”550″ height=”400″]