After the blissful chaos of preparing for the Droplet 2 launch party, I finally had time to take stock and catch-up. The party was an absolute success. Both the game iLKe and I made, and the Twitter wall I coded for Gav went down a treat. The Twitter wall featured this awesome video that was projected, Bat symbol like, across Bristol’s Park Street onto an adjacent building. People in the queue (and there were a lot of them!) could send their tweets to the wall and see them displayed in near real-time. Here’s a video taken from someone there. And here’s the actual SWF that was projected (give it time to download, there’s a 3MB FLV streaming in)

Before I discuss the game – can I just say you MUST check out this montage picture of the incredible custom Droplets. They were all featured in the gallery, and the level of talent displayed in some of them is nothing short of breath-taking. There’s a whole Flickr group dedicated to the Droplets.

The game was released onto the Droplet web site the day before the party. It was also mentioned on Twitter (lots!), Facebook (lots!) and best of all could be seen running on TVs in both the store and the gallery. The footage was from an earlier build, but it still looked great, and I got plenty of compliments

So what’s happened since then? Well there were a couple of bugs in the game, as is to be expected with the last-minute rush we endured. Most notable of which was that the scores didn’t reset when the game was completed! So people could work their way up the highscore board a little too easily Thankfully Katie spotted this one and I promptly zapped it.

There was also a display issue with the background sky scroller, that absolutely no-one noticed except me – but it bugged me every time I played it. iLKe also tweaked the level layout quite a lot, refining a few areas and making others cleaner. He also saw fit to redraw my Pause screen a little. Damn pixel gurus I also updated the Droplet page here on my web site, to include the missing Development details.

Anyway the new build is up on the Droplet micro site. And yes I wiped all the highscores to keep things “fair”. Enjoy!

This game was created to celebrate the launch of Series 2 of the awesome little Droplet vinyl toys. iLKke and I took the Droplet characters back into an 8-bit NES style era, complete with platforming action, colourful scenery and a truly micro bipbop vibe.

Read more about the game, and of course play it on the Droplet page

I’ve talked before about the kids virtual world called WebbliWorld that myself and the Aardman Digital team built. Well it’s been an extremely busy 4th quarter for us as we’ve been releasing hundreds of in-world updates, as well as producing a really excellent racing game called WebbliRacers:

The game has a dual purpose, and two versions exist. One to be released “into the wild” to entice new visitors to the world. And a full version that lives within WebbliWorld which has all 4 tracks and a comprehensive (and fun!) achievement system built into it. Do well and you’ll unlock special items of clothing to wear. Do very well and you can unlock items to decorate your pod (house) with. Do really well and you’ll get awarded special trophies to show-off to your peers

The game was developed by Julian Scott (of Drift Runners fame) with art and animation by the Aardman Digital team. It’s a really beautiful game, and takes the unique and wakky style of WebbliWorld and uses it to full effect as these screen shots show:

Track 1 – The cute little traffic cones blink and change colour when hit

Track 2 – Take the hidden routes for extra coins

Track 3 – Oh I do like to be beside the sea side!

Track 4 – Looks so yummy be careful not to lick your monitor!

I urge you to try it You’ll need an account on WebbliWorld, but that’s a 30 second process and is 100% free. Once you are in-world click the map icon on the menu and look for the arcade machine on the left-hand side. There you’ll find the “WebbliWhizzers” zone, which is the in-world leaderboard and place to play WebbliRacers.

The game has so many nice little touches, from the skid marks, puffs of smoke, jumps, extreme driving bonuses and excellent animation. Lots of what looks like 3D animation (spinning coins, rotating traffic cones) were in fact all hand-animated by the ever talented Robin Davey directly in Flash.

The 4th track is my personal favourite. Originally it was going to be a volcano level, with lava and tikki statues and the like. But it was rightly decided this was a little too dull for WebbliWorld, so the idea of a “chocolate mountain” was born. So the whole track winds around caramel, marshamllow, chocolate and sticky oozing syrup volcanoes. When you drive through the goo you leave a beautiful messy trail behind:

Click here to visit WebbliWorld – I look forward to seeing you on the leaderboard and if you see “WebbliMunro” in world, come over and say hi!

Developing games in your spare time is always troublesome when the real-life workload ramps up. And it’s no exception for me right now. But in between insane schedules and family commitments I am ploughing all of my free time into a new arcade action game.

The gorgeous pixel artwork is by Ilija Melentijevic, and we’ve got big plans for a series of games featuring our feathered game hero “Burd Reynolds”. This first outing see’s him rescuing cute green blobs from alien critters. We’re not actually sure why yet, but it’s fun to play all the same

Here’s a sneak peak of the game, grabbed from the version I’ve just committed to svn:

The Burd is coming… during 2009 hopefully, but I should know better than to ever quote dates in a public place

If you enjoyed playing Kyobi on the web, then why not download the complete iPhone version totally free of charge!

Kyobi on the iPhone is called “Touch & Go”, but it’s the same physics match-3 fun, with lots of added bells and whistles.

This is a fun and innovative “match 3” casual game that uses the touch input of your device to the max. The rules are simple, drag the blocks and throw them together. When three or more of the same color collide they all explode. Just don’t let the blocks pile-up too high. If they stack to the top then your game is over.

Smashing four or more blocks in one go will release one of three special power-ups – a time freeze, a stick of dynamite that blows up half the blocks on screen and a bomb that wipes out all the blocks.

Combo bonus points are awarded if you manage to smash blocks together in quick succession and multiplier points are awarded for four and five block hits. Each level has a set target of blocks to explode and when this is reached all remaining blocks will count against your level end bonus.

As the levels progress the action speeds up and more blocks will fall. From level five small blockers are introduced making the sorting of blocks trickier. From a gentle mind soothing experience the game will develop into a fast paced sorting crisis!

As the game plays you can organize the blocks by tilting the phone to move all the blocks to the left or the right.

See how many levels you can complete!

• Great Casual Gaming fun
• Total touch game play
• Tilt the phone to move all blocks
• Easy to play
• Great time filler
• Cool music track
• High score table
• Score combo bonuses

Touch & Go! is perfectly suited to the iPhone, a truly new touch game experience!

Overall, Touch & Go! is well designed and responsive. For a new take on the standard match and clear block game, the current sale price of just $.99 makes Touch & Go! a worthwhile purchase.

8/10 Appcraver

Placing a block is simple. All you do is catch a block out of mid-air, you then have full control of where you place it – and I mean full control. This is what sets Touch & Go! apart from it’s competitors.

www.148apps.com

Baldy Dash is a game myself and the talented crew at Aardman Digital built. It’s to promote the new Shaun the Sheep Nintendo DS game “Off His Head” published by D3.

It marks my second game released this month, and my 5th involving sheep, farmers and lots of grass

The concept is similar to Star Fish – drive around, collect the wigs and avoid everything else. The sheep amble around the farmyard, trying their best to get in your way, slow you down and end your game.

If you play this game on the official Shaun the Sheep web site (and are logged-in) it will enter you into a competition to win a Nintendo DS and copy of the game. Just make sure you have the highest score on the Competition leaderboard by the end of November.

Click here to play Baldy Dash and read more about the development process.

Away3D is an awesome 3D library for Flash. Flod is an awesome library for replaying tracker music in Flash. Throw those two things together with my inner-geek upbringing of the 80s and you get DarkCubes. I grew up drip-fed on ST/Amiga demo effects, and this random little 3D game is what I banged out during a couple of lunch breaks and some hours last night.

I actually wrote DarkCubes back in 2000 on the PC/Windows using DarkBASIC (hence the title of the game). So I had the code and figured it would make a good first experiment for Away3D. A bit of messing around, a bit of swearing, and lots of fiddling later and this tiny puzzler was born.

The logo is from the original PC game and was made by Yann ‘Kohai‘ Parmentier. The music is by Adam Sikorski (DSX of TRSI), 505 of Checkpoint and Toodeloo of the Dead Hackers Society. The rest by yours truly.

Lots of keys do stuff in-game, so have a fiddle! (1-5 changes the music for example, D turns on Debug info, 7-9 change texture, etc. Read the scroller for the full list).

I make no apologies for this beating shitty spec  Netbooks / PCs over the head with a giant CPU grinding axe. Deal with it. It’s hardly the end of the world.

Click here to play (sorry no pre-loader, but it’s only 1MB in size)

Enjoy

I’m pleased to say that my latest game Star Fish is released and ready to play. Enjoy some underwater aquatic antics in this mouse avoider / collect-em-up. Although the whole game was started and finished in a day, I’m still happy with the presentation and playability. If I had wanted to spend more time I would have introduced moving baddies and more levels. Even so, there are 25 to complete, which is probably 20 more than most people will ever see

The game uses artwork by the same artist that did the cute insects in my game Bug Box. I think the “cute factor” really played against me when the game was up for bidding on FlashGameLicense. Chris/FGL admitted to me that they don’t have too many “kid friendly” portals on there, which made the game a hard sell. Still, my thanks to RobotJamGames and BigFishGames for taking it on

I’m very pleased to have created another game this year. I reckon I’ve still got a few left in me, but the months are closing in, and I sense the proximity of 2010.

I’m pleased to say that my little “game in a day” creation Bug Box is now released and out in the wild! You can play it over on its games page. Or if you feel like giving it some rating love it’s also on Newgrounds and Kongregate. Quite why I uploaded a game featuring nature sounds, cute little bugs and pure cerebral gameplay to those two sites is utterly beyond me. Hopefully my sanity will have returned by the morning On the plus side it’ll appear on BigFishGames by the end of the month.

A week ago while chatting on a forum RobotJam inspired me by something he said: About how everyone should try and create a “one day game” at least once in their developer lives. As in a proper game, that you then go and and try to sell. And he gave some successful examples of his own.

I thought this was a nice idea. So now, a week later, mine is finished

It’s a simple puzzle game: Just get the butterfly out of the box. There are only 3 levels, easy, medium and hard. It is based on an old Japanese game played with wooden blocks called Hakoiri Shogi.

The core game was done in 3 hours, as you’ll see when you play it (it’s hardly cutting edge technology). Having done that I then set about on the graphics, which took me a lot longer. I bought some of the images from iStockPhoto and then built the scene-up the way I wanted it. The music is from SoundRangers.com mixed with some nature effects by myself. Also big thanks to Eric at Cavalcade Games for doing the great “Level Win” animation sequence for me.

Originally I only wanted the one puzzle (“Easy”). That’s all I had in place and I was pleased I had managed to create a nice little logic game so fast. But then I let my wife play it and she completed it instantly, so I figured it needed more! I added in two new puzzles, the leafy reveal sequence, the in-game buttons, etc. I just guess I couldn’t leave it alone, so I polished it until I felt it shined enough.

Having said that it’s still my absolute fastest game build ever: from concept to FGL in 5 days, working evenings only. Yes I am going to put it up for sponsorship, but I’m realistic and really don’t expect much. My hope is that I could make a few little sales that add-up. As long as I cover my $60 media costs I’m happy.

For now you can play the game only on FGL. My FGL “Friends” can see it right away, as can other devs of a certain level. At the time of writing it’s still pending approval for sponsor viewing. Obviously once it has been sold everyone can play it

On May 9th I posted the second part of my report on how my game Kyobi was doing. This is the final part of the report, nearly 2 months on.

Kongregate Summary

The Kongregate referral payments have now finished. When I sold Kyobi Kongregate were my Primary sponsor. They offered me $200 upfront on referral payments (basically any time someone clicks one of the Kong logos in my game, I got paid for it). The last time I wrote they had just paid me my first months worth of clicks (just under $800). Since then I received 2 more payments, one for the month of May at $1548 and June at $382. I know that if GameJacket hadn’t died then the June payment would have been a lot higher. That is now the end of the agreement I had with Kongregate, and it certainly was an unexpected bonus to the games earnings.

GameJacket RIP

Of course as we all know by now, GameJacket have gone bust. This means I never got paid the $1000 they owed me, so I have to deduct that from the previous total Kyobi had made.

iPhone Sales

Kyobi on the iPhone has enjoyed moderate success, and there is still a constant trickle of sales coming in. Between launch in late March and the end of May it has sold 5802 copies (an average of 77 copies per day). Because of the way Apple report sales I cannot give figures for June yet. But I do know that they are much lower than April and May. Summer time, plus now being an “old” game don’t help. It was fascinating to see how the sales changed. Some days it would shift nearly 300 copies, and then drop down to 100 the next day. Chart position played a really important role, as you can imagine. Right now it still enjoys a healthy ranking in European countries and, strangely enough, Japan. Bear in mind that I only get a percentage of sales (the lions share going to the publisher) but it still equated to $1563 to the end of May.

More small sponsor versions

I sold two more sponsor branded copies of Kyobi since the last report. Both were very small scale and only netted me $200 in total, but it’s still all helpful. Incredibly off the back of these sales I also sold two copies of one of my first ever Flash games, Abombinaball, so the knock-on effect was pleasant to say the least It also gave me two more portal contacts that I can approach when my new games are ready.

Final Summary

So how does it all stack-up now? Well taking the figures from the last report into account ($10,105). Deducting the $1000 GameJacket will never give me ($9105). Add in the new iPhone sales, sponsorships and Kongregate payments. And the total from my little game stands at $12,798. At the current exchange rate that’s £7833. Of course you then need to deduct the UK tax I have to pay from this.

In “real life” terms after tax that equals what I get paid from my day job over the course of a couple of months. So does this mean I could quit my job and do this full-time? Well, no. For a start I wouldn’t actually want to. While extremely demanding my job is also very satisfying. I work with a great team of talented people in one of the most creative places in the UK. That alone has value to me. The other important factor is that this money came in dribs and drabbs over a period of 12 weeks. That is not helpful when you have fixed mortgage payments, food to buy, etc. I know a lot of people who can and do work like this, and are very successful at it, but I just don’t really have the self discipline needed to stay on-top of all the paperwork. I admire greatly those that do.

And it’s a risk because not every game I make will be this successful. Perhaps I’ll never get this level of success ever again. Of course I’m optimistic that the game I’m working on at the moment is original and fun enough to do well. But that’s like saying I’m optimistic that my lottery numbers will come in next week. Granted it’s not a gamble on the same level, I mean you can’t sit back and look at your lottery numbers and go “damn, that’s a fine piece of work there”. But there’s an element of risk in all game releases, and logic or fairness doesn’t always win. You never know who you are up against that month. Or what the overall feeling of the gaming world will be. And you never will.

So to conclude I just want to say that whatever you do, keep on coding, and keep on making great games. Because there is definitely a market for them. Many people far greater than I ever will be demonstrate every day that there is a life to be made in building beautiful Flash games. And living from those proceeds. If you are one of those people, I tip my hat to you. If you aspire to be one, you have my best wishes for your success.

Despite an incredibly busy time at work I have managed to progress my chameleons game by quite a considerable amount. It’s an action / puzzle platformer and I’m using Box2D for all of the platform elements. It just feels lovely bouncing off the blocks, gliding, sliding and slinking about the levels. As a side effect of this I have learnt loads about the b2PolyDef, sensors and custom contact listeners. It’s all good stuff though – you can never stop learning

Fruiti Winnings

Since release Fruiti Blox has been going down well. Loads of plays, decent enough NG and Kong scores and it even won the Mochiland “Flash Game Friday” award (and $100 in the process), winning this is a first for me so I was really pleased about it Here is the review:

This puzzle game has you matching four corners of the same color and eliminating all blocks within that space. The gameplay idea isn’t new, but the execution is definitely top notch! I like how clicking on the color highlights the selected and dims the others (makes for finding corners faster). The bubbly graphics and smooth interface make it even more fun! You can’t just buy this kind of polish in a store, folks. With leaderboards and achievements rounding out the game, it’s definitely a great experience.

I’ve had some player feedback come through that I am going to implement in a new build that I’ll release to Candystand and BigFishGames next week.

The 8-bit Interview

I also finally managed to complete an interview with Jeff over at 8-bit Rocket. He sent it through to me around the start of May, and I only just got it back to him, which is incredibly slack of me. Hopefully it won’t take him as long to edit out my weirdness and get it live as it took me to finish it.

GameJacket

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know how disgruntled I was with GameJacket. Their recent collapse into bankruptcy has left a lot of developers out of pocket, myself included. I’m not going to dwell on this any further, a number of good people have lost their jobs there and a really well built system is now in tatters. I understand why it happened, what I will never forgive them is offering me the $1000 advance in the first place even though they knew full-well they could never afford to pay it to me. That just stinks. I’m even more annoyed by the fact that Kyobi was all set to actually make back that advance, and then some, had it had a chance. It had already earned nearly 60% back by the time they went under. With GameJackets collapse the game dropped out of hundreds of web sites across the world, which of course also effects the amount of referrals it can send to Kongregate (my primary sponsor), so I’m almost certainly going to loose money as a result of this too.

Still, life goes on. There’s no point even giving this any more thought. I recognised the “dying” signs of GameJacket a good month in advance of their death, and released Kyobi onto Mochi as a precaution and now I’m glad I did. Otherwise it’d be fighting for distribution against the rest of the wave of GameJacket orphans now hitting the service.

AS3 Atari ST YM Player

Christian Corti, the mastermind behind the AS3 Mod Player library Flod, has been working on a YM Replay library and it is sounding incredible! The YM format is a direct register dump from the YM soundchip found in computers like the Atari ST or the MSX. There are hundreds of YM tunes available (converted from classic games and demos). Although SNDH is the format of choice for chip-tune replay on real Atari hardware, getting that to replay within Flash means emulating an entire 68000 CPU, which is quite a tall order. YM replay at least means it’s “just”  having to emulate the YM chip itself.

How useful is YM replay in Flash games today? Virtually none unless you were doing a retro remake and wanted an authentic sound (without using megs worth of mp3 files, YM tunes are typically around 4k in size).

But how cool is the fact that FP10 is powerful enough to do this at all? Loads