Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

  • Our 3rd NFL game – Guardian Training: Over Throw is now out

    overthrow-titlescreen

    We really enjoy working on the NFL Rush Zone games for CA based agency Brandissimo! So we were very pleased when they asked us to create a third game for them based on the new Rush Zone Season of the Guardians.

    over-throw-mobile-640

    Guardian Training: Over Throw was built in HTML5 for desktop and mobile browser. You start in the VR zone where you learn to jump and throw before being unleashed across 4 changing stages. Smash down the blitz bot targets as you go, collecting the power-ups, avoiding the obstacles and seeing if you can smash the other players scores on the site.

    obstacles

    In order to maintain performance on mobile browser we used a relatively low resolution (480×320) and up-scaled it for tablet. Working directly with the designers at Brandissimo! we were able to ensure the graphics still looked good scaled up. It also meant performance on lower-end devices was kept responsive, which is vital when you’ve a stack of blitz bots to knock down with your last chain bonus throw. They were able to mock-up the animations and effects in Flash and we translated those into HTML5.

    Play Guardian Training: Over Throw on the NFL Rush Zone site.

     

  • Insert Coin to Continue: The HTML5 Game Sponsorship Market

    I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the onGameStart 2012 conference in Warsaw, Poland. The title of my talk was “Insert Coin to Continue”. A gentle nod to the fact that lots of game developers do actually need paying in order to carry on creating great games! I wanted to share my experiences and results of working in the HTML5 game sponsorship market. The Flash world is well served by sites like FGL and blog posts detailing income and strategies. But very little exists for HTML5 games, hence the choice of topic for my talk. This article will cover most of my presentation for those who weren’t able to attend.

     Client games vs. Indie games

    As a company we develop HTML5 games for both clients and ourselves. The reason is both financial and practical. Client work simply pays better right now. And the more of it you do, the more doors it can open to other bigger and more interesting projects. In my experience this is no different to any other platform. But there are obvious benefits of making your own games:

    • It’s your own IP! There is value in establishing a brand and common IP even in the relatively small scale sponsorship world.
    • You can make anything. This is important – no matter how awesome your clients are you are always working within set brand guidelines. They’ll never really allow you to do truly anything you want. But when you build for yourself this restriction is removed. You have to be careful of course, as great as Dinosaur Chicken Rock III might sound to you, if you want to get sponsors it needs to appeal to the wider market too.
    • There is the very real chance of long term income. I’ll cover this later in the article, but ad revenue and ‘game rental’ can build up substantially over time, where as most client work is a one-off payment.

    The benefits are obvious. As well as getting to flex your design muscles in your own way there are significant long term benefits as well. Lots of companies started out by mixing client and indie work only to find that the income from their indie endeavors was enough to leave the client side behind (Nitrome are a good example of this). So let’s explore how you turn this passion into income.

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  • Two of our HTML5 games for the NFL Rush Zone site are out

    We’re pleased to announce that 2 of the games we built for the new NFL Rush Zone site are out. The site was designed and built by Brandissimo! and has been a key destination for American football loving kids since 2007. But due to increasing mobile traffic they built a mobile browser experience to coincide with the desktop one.

    Part of this revamp included porting some of their much loved Flash games over to HTML5. We were pleased to have been asked to handle the ports of the games Galactic Rusherz and Jump Duck. As with all our games they were built for both mobile and tablet scale, and offer small slices of quick action fun.

    Play them both at http://nflrz.nflrush.com/games – make sure you use a mobile browser or it’ll redirect you to the desktop site.

  • Pixel Application for Mobile Phones

    Here’s a little app I concieved years ago, while I was still wasting a couple of hours every day riding the bus to work. It’s a program for making pixel graphics, and has a very streamlined interface that has been designed especially for use with mobile phones, on the bus, in a park, on the toilet…

    This is a mockup for 176*208 phones. I might make another one in 240*320 soon.

    Here’s a version with the help overlay turned on, which gives you a glimpse of the awesomestness of the interface 😀

    So, if you are a J2ME or Symbian programmer, and interested in this kind of endeavours, drop me a line.