Aardman Category

  • Top Bun soars over Christmas period

    Back in early December we released a Wallace and Gromit game called Top Bun. It was a blatant promotion for the film that was on BBC 1 on Christmas day. Even so, it was a really quality game too – with some lovely designs and coding work. We seeded the game ourselves, partnering up with some large portals like Candystand, and it was incredibly well received.

    The ratings and comments from the Newgrounds players totally stunned me. I was expecting it to get a bit of a hammering there, but instead it had over 80,000 plays, carried a solid 4.05 rating for several weeks (now dropped down), won a Daily Feature award and has 142 reviews (mostly positive). Quite stunning.

    Kongregate actually gave us more plays, but the kids there were far less favourable towards, as the comments show. I think they’re just too young / American to appreciate W&G.

    Thanks to Jameson (CEO of Mochi) he pushed the game out via their Mochi Distribution network, which we thank him for eternally (as the game doesn’t actually carry any Mochi adverts). We used a Mochibot for tracking and the new Mochi Leaderboard 2.0 for the highscores / challenges. Both of these worked superbly and allowed us to track with great accuracy the travel of the game across the web. Oh and how it has travelled! Over 600 unique hosts carry it and in less than 1 month it has clocked up 2.1 million plays. Of course activity has dropped down now, but we’re still seeing a solid 30k to 40k plays per day. As a result traffic to our sites and especially to our YouTube channel increased by several hundred percent. All in all, a total success especially given the very short time we had to build the game in.

  • Wallace & Gromit Top Bun game released

    Those of you who know me know I work for Aardman Animations. Our biggest IP is easily Wallace and Gromit. This Christmas Day on BBC1 they will show the new film, a “Matter of Loaf and Death”. In it Wallace and Gromit are bakers, baking and delivering in their own special way.

    To celebrate the launch we upgraded the design of the official web site (which The Guardian described as a “magnificent spruce“) and also produced a Flash game. The game is based on the classic Diner Dash concept, but has Gromit trying to bake as many loaves of bread as possible, getting them out of the oven before they burn and into the delivery van. There are various oven upgrades to purchase between rounds, and it’s a time and score based challenge all the way.

    The in-house designers and developer did a great job on it, so I urge you to give it a play 🙂

  • New Game Released – Tractor Beams

    Today I released my latest game: Tractor Beams.

    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.

  • My new game Way of the Chook is out!

    All I can say is “phew!” – it was quite some work, and I actually finished this game over a month ago, but Cartoon Network have just released it onto their web site 🙂 Way of the Chook is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, in the same vein as Kung-fu Master.

    I created a new Games page where you can read all about the development process, obstacles I ran into, see lots of screen shots and of course find a link to play the game!

    Woohoo 🙂 Here’s a screenie to whet your appetite….

  • Chop Socky Chooks launched

    Last Friday the new Cartoon Network UK site for Chop Socky Chooks went live. This was a great feeling as we designed and built the site ourselves, put together all assets (wallpapers, clips, etc) and built a custom video player all in record time.

    Chop Socky Chooks

    You can visit the site at http://www.chopsockychooks.com

    I did all the xhtml/css/flash and our superb design team here did the graphics and assets. Believe me, IE6 testing was a joy… oh yes.

    The “Coming Soon” area you can see on the games page is my new project that started build today 🙂 It’s going to kick some! (quite literally)