According to my tracking stats it’s going down well, SpilGroup certainly have a decent chunk of traffic. Sadly they got the SWF dimensions wrong when putting live, but I’ve emailed them and it’s being fixed now! So the high rating it currently has is despite the fact the graphics look a bit screwed!

Will keep an eye on play totals and report back how it goes in a few days.

I was pleased to see that Stickhead over at The Joy of Sticks blog (a superb Atari ST blog!) wrote a nice comparison of my version with the original including videos. You can read that here. Here’s a video of the game taken from YouTube (created by The Joy of Sticks):

Oh and Jeff/Steve if you’re reading this, you can now post about the little easter egg in it

You can play it on Agame.com or the translated versions at UK English, Netherlands, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Latin American, Brazilian, Indonesian and Malaysian.

Watch their new pitch video below (the HD version is here)

Social Arcade - Facebook App from Richard Vanner on Vimeo.

Jack’s Beach Blitz

Monster spawning generators can be shot (but take a lot of your limited ammo supply), you can also pick-up power-ups such as freeze or instant kill. But without taking out at least a few of the generators they just keep on coming! They also move pretty speedily (as do you), so you don’t really have time to run away from them. Thankfully they are pretty dumb, so more often that not you can evade them quickly, but if you don’t do something about the number of them you’ll soon get overwhelmed.

Graphically it’s obvious the 8-bit Rocket team could do with a talented artist onboard (sorry guys!). The graphics are far from terrible, but do get cluttered on later levels and have that “grid like” look to them, which a skilled pixeller can avoid easily. In-game the animations are cute, and things move along at a very nippy pace. The main menu is a bit of a jumble though, with mixed visual cues. Some careful spacing here would do wonders. It was also really quite hard to visually differentiate between something that would do you damage, or do you good, so that was more trial and error.

As for the audio - it’s great Lots of big sounds and rolling effects. Glad to see you got to use that music too guys!

Aesthetics aside it’s the gameplay that counts, and JBB has in this in spades. There’s a nice puzzle element (unlock things that block your girl), there’s the solid arcade element (shoot, and shoot fast + avoid) and there’s the whole time aspect too. Take too long and you’ll be swamped.

It’s nice to see a real solid arcade blaster out there. Give it a play!

You are a candy collecting pumpkin, and you must zoom around the graveyard collecting as many sweets as possible while avoiding everything else. Skulls, ghosts, bats and tomb stones are out to get you.

The Witches Hats will give you either a trick or a treat when collected - so it’s up to you if you dare take them!

I had fun writing this, definitely my fastest turn-around for a game yet (although I could still do better if I didn’t tinker so much!)

Update: You can now play this game on Kongregate.

Oh and squize: Thanks for the greets and I was glad to see you got this released! Surprised you managed it so quickly given how you admitted you like to procrastinate about these things rather than do them

You’ll need Flash Player 10 to view it: http://blog.gamingyourway.com/content/binary/index651.html

All I can say is WOW! It is incredible. I’ve never been to a Video Games Live concert, and there is one coming up soon in London at the end of October which I sadly can’t make, but I’ll be sure to get tickets to the next one as soon as they return! The CD is stunning. Think lots of game music as performed by a full-on orchestra, with wonderful vocals.

The CD opens with the Kingdom Hearts music, which blends nicely into the Warcraft Suite, and it doesn’t let-up from there. The Civilization IV Medley by Christopher Tin is nothing short of beautiful, with an incredible African theme. The operatic God of War montage sends chills down your spine, and I’ve not even mentioned the music from Advent Rising, Tron, Halo or Castlevania.

If you treat yourself to one CD this Christmas, consider this one! It’s truly stunning. Game music like you’ve never heard before (unless you’re lucky enough to have been to a VGL concert of course, in which case I’m extremely jealous of you )

There are over 2000 videos from VGL on Youtube here. Just watch this and tell me that’s not a great concert to be at?

This game was made for the Shaun the Sheep web site, and is a fun take on the classic dice game Yahtzee, only featuring characters from the TV show instead of dice, and a sci-fi setting instead of a casino!

If you are a member of the site (and logged in) then it’ll save your score to the highscore system - see how you compare with others across the world!

Read about the development process and play the game here.

The reason for the slow-down is that I’m nearing completion on two brand new games, and resurrecting and finally finishing a third. The old game I’m finishing off is Five Dice Frenzy, a Yahtzee inspired dice game. I’ve beefed-up the visuals, added a worldwide ranking / highscore system and a comprehensive playing guide. There are a few tweaks left but then I will happily release it. It’s up on FGL at the moment but I’ll finish it properly next week.

My two new games are Tractor Beams and Fruiti Blox:

Tractor Beams In-game

Tractor Beams is a new game for the Shaun the Sheep web site. Next week, around the 15th it will be released and feature exclusively on there for a month before we seed it further. It’s a strategy game very similar to Five Dice Frenzy, but totally Shaunified! We did the visuals in-house, again the excellent pixel work of Gav / Jam Factory (check out his awesome new blog design!).

The game features a really cool effect I created (almost by accident) on the title page, where the logo literally beams down from space into view. The effect could easily be re-used for a “spooky / ghostly” appearance, so I’m going to package it up and release it next week, so you can use it in any Hallooween inspired games you may be working on

We Tractor Beams will go down well on the Shaun site. It takes a while to get used to it and understand how to play, but once it’s clicked the highscore attack becomes really addictive!

My next game is Fruiti Blox:

Fruiti Blox In-game

Fruiti Blox is my brand new game, with graphics by Peter Jovanovic. It’s an against-the-clock puzzle game, which is very nearly finished - but I’m still toying with the idea of expanding the core game out further and including several “mini games” to enhance it. I’ll decide next week once Tractor Beams is released

Despite what the screen shot above may look like this is NOT a “Match-3″ game at all!

PixelBlitz

So what’s next? I actually think it’s time to cease game making for a moment and spend some quality time on PixelBlitz, finishing off all the odds-and-sods I left hanging around, and integrating some core new classes into the fold. By the end of the year I fully expect to have the world manager done, and hopefully the tile map class as well (but no promises on that one!).

I’ve been using PixelBlitz (at least core parts of it) in all my games recently, and it definitely speeds things up. But the more I use it for real games, the more I realise we need to add!

Right now though I’m off to pack for The Game Creators Convention 2008. I attended last year and it was great fun, so I’m expecting nothing less this year Most people will be there already, but I need to travel up in the morning instead. It means getting up at 4.30am, but it’s worth it!

You had 5 hours to create a game based around the theme of “Lies” (you were free to interpt that theme however you wanted).

I was late to start, so only had 4 hours, but here is my end result

The competition winners should be announced on Monday. I don’t expect to win (some of the other entries were brilliant!) but it was great taking part all the same.

Or go here: http://evo.bombsquad.org/99er/away3d/99er-evof.html

It’s stuff like this that makes me want to use Away3D instead of PV3D! But the new BSP enhancements I saw at FOTB08 in PV3D were very impressive.

Damn it’s great to have so much choice