Author Archive
-
Nectarine Radio is Back!
10th Nov 20092
Sorry if you already knew this, but out of pure chance I thought I would check to see if one of my favourite web sites – Nectarine Demoscene Radio – was back on-line today, and lo and behold, it was! Nectarine had been streaming classic and modern demo scene tunage across the tubes for years. Site admin Yes had built up an awesome collection (18,000+ mp3s!) and like lots of other people I had saved hundreds of favourite tunes on there, voted on thousands, and listened to probably weeks worth of tunes!
And then some script kiddie went and ruined it for us all. He found an exploit in a script, and wiped the whole database and back-up. The site died and the scene lost a little bit of its heart the same day.
Lots of people wanted to help bring it back. I offered my services (as did many others) but the events obviously took their toll on the Admin, and the site was destined to be nothing more than a fond memory. I would check back every 4 months or so, just in case, and today I struck gold 🙂
So I putting a shout out – if you used to listen to Nectarine, or are just interested in 24-hour streaming demo scene coolness, then go over there, register and help to breathe life back into the site again.
-
Enjoy Kyobi on the iPhone for Free
1st Nov 2009If 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
-
Flod Beginners Guide now available for easy .mod replay in AS3
30th Oct 2009
As the AS3 Soundtracker replay library Flod gains traction, so I have been receiving more emails saying “Help!”. Apparently people are having trouble dissecting just the replay sections from FlodPro (the full player interface). So to address this I have created the Beginners Guide to Flod. This download offers you source code that does nothing but replay a mod file. No file browser, no FlodPro, no UI, no hassle!
The guide includes source for both FlexSDK + FlashDevelop users, and also for Flash CS4 (if you really must code on the timeline.) I have included examples for plain vanilla replay, and also replay with the flectrum active: the funky looking vu-meter seen in the screen shot above. Pick whichever is most useful for your production.
You can download the Beginners Guide from the updated Flod page.
-
Play & Vote the entries in the $10,000 Muse Games Unity Challenge
23rd Oct 2009
Back in August we wrote about the $10,000 Unity 3D Indie Developer Challenge that was being run by Muse Games. All they were looking for was “A Working Prototype demoing your game concept”. The prize was a healthy sum of money and a distribution contract. Although obviously they were looking for games made in Unity and not Flash, it was still great to see a company supporting indie game devs, regardless of their choice of language.
Well it’s now time for you to play and vote on the games you think should win! There are 35 entries in all, and as you’d expect the game genre and quality of finish differs wildly. A couple of games caught my eye immediately – the first was Water Mania, which was supposed to be all about racing a speedboat against opponents around islands. Lovely stuff. Except it wasn’t. What it really was was a single boat zooming across a flat water plane with some terrain. Zero collision, zero opponents, zero game really. Still, it had nice music.
A bit upset I moved on to the game Wings of Rage. It looked like a 3D WW2 combat flight sim. I’m a die-hard WW1/WW2 flight sim fanatic, and thankfully this one was at least playable. The flight mechanics didn’t feel like you were flying a plane at all, but the gameplay was fun, and I enjoyed blowing the enemy planes and turrets up. It had a lot of niggling issues, but we can forgive that seeing as they only had to enter a prototype.
Feeling buoyed by this experience I tried another, the lovely named SpringyTurret. This involved dragging and sticking gun turrets onto walls, and chaining them together to blow up everything. Despite a quite difficult control system, once you got into it there was a true gold nugget of a game idea there. With more refinement I could see this one being really fun indeed.
That was just 3 out of the 35, sadly I ran out of time to play any more but they did all look interesting for the most part. RPG games, puzzle games, racing games and several FPS style are all represented. The quality of them is no higher than the sort of games I have judged many times in TGC competitions over the years (the Alienware compo being an especially good one). But it’s still early days for Unity in the browser, and it’s exciting to see where it may be headed.
-
Baldy Dash is released – play it to win a Nintendo DS
19th Oct 2009
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.
Hire Us
All about Photon Storm and our
HTML5 game development services
Recent Posts
OurGames
Filter our Content
- ActionScript3
- Art
- Cool Links
- Demoscene
- Flash Game Dev Tips
- Game Development
- Gaming
- Geek Shopping
- HTML5
- In the Media
- Phaser
- Phaser 3
- Projects
Brain Food
