Posts Tagged ‘abombinaball’
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Abombinaball Fix
9th Jan 20090A keen Abombinaball player emailed to say that level 22 of the game was impossible. I checked it out and sure enough he was right! There were two missing blocks that were essential to completing the level. I have fixed this in the version spread via Mochi, and also hosted on Newgrounds and Kongregate. I also sent new XML files to the sites that sponsored the game, so hopefully this won’t be a problem any longer. Sorry about that! Just incase you’re playing an “old” version of the game, the password for Level 23 is “AFRICA”.
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First two weeks Abombinaball stats
5th Dec 2008
As I wrote about previously SpilGroup released my game Abombinaball on November 20th, so today I wanted to catch up and see how the stats were going – and to see which country was the most popular.
Sadly when they released the game they got the width/height of the SWF wrong, which meant the graphics distorted and it was really hard to play (as you couldn’t even see your status bar). I think this has had a negative impact, and while they fixed it on their own portals, the fixes didn’t carry to all the other sites that seed from them.
That aside I was happy to see that since November 20th (2 weeks ago today) the game has been played just short of half a million times (490,044 to be exact). That’s a healthy 35,000 plays a day. For me personally this is fantastic. The very thought that I took a really old and mostly forgotten Atari ST classic and bought it back to life so vividly makes me giddy with pleasure 🙂
Strangely which country do you think liked the game the best? UK? US? Actually it was Spain, easily in the lead with 22% of the total plays. Poland came a close second with 17%. The worst performing country? Malaysia with a lowly 117 plays. Awww!
As Spils exclusive deal is now over Abombinaball has started to be featured elsewhere, including being today’s top featured game on the excellent Gamezhero.com site. It’s only been live for a few hours but has a 4/5 rating from 80 votes already, which is great. The Gamezhero team did a wonderful job of making the game feel special on their site, so full credit to them. I have not included stats from this version in the above total, so it’ll be interesting to see how it compares.
I’ve also submitted the game to GameJacket and Mochi today. I’ll add all of these figures into the next update when one month is up, so we can see how standard distribution via Mochi compares to the likes of heavyweight portal owners such as Spil.
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My new game Abombinaball finally released!
20th Nov 2008
Well I’m glad to say that after several months Abombinaball is finally out for the public to play! I put the development version on Flash Game License, eventually sold it to SpilGroup, had to translate it into 16 different languages (a hell of a lot of work) and it went live across the world today.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.
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Abombinaball development post-mortem
12th Sep 2008Well it was quite a hard slog, but in the end I finished my Flash remake of the Atari ST classic game Abombinaball. I am extremely happy with the end results. It’s polished until you can see your face in it, and has gone down really well in the final round of beta testing.
Here are a couple of screenies:
Read my full development post-mortem here. The game is currently in the bidding process on FlashGameLicense.com (3 bids and counting!) so once this has finished I’ll of course release it for everyone to play 🙂
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Abombinaball Level Editor 90% finished
20th Jun 2008Right now I’ve got 3 new Flash games in active development. Two of them are being developed at work because they tie-in with TV properties we own. The third is a remake of an Atari ST game called Abombinaball. This game is an arcade puzzler. You control a small bouncing ball that must bounce across a playfield to defuse bombs before they countdown to zero and explode. As you move across the playfield the grid blocks fall away behind you. So you have to plan your route carefully, but also quickly (because the bombs are constantly counting down).
It’s a great game 🙂 So far I am about 3 days into development on it (that’s just working a few hours per evening). I have grabbed all the graphics from the original, resized them, played the whole game from start to end (grabbing each level) and have built a level editor in Flash. I’m really pleased with the level editor, it’s pretty easy to use and let me re-create the original levels with ease, but it also means I can create new ones too.
I’m going to release this with both the original Atari ST graphics (doubled in size) and with a brand new graphic set to give it that shine and polish todays gamers expect. I’ve not yet decided if I will keep the name of the game the same or not. It’s quite a cool name, so probably 🙂 I’m trying to track down the original author (Martin Brownlow), but am not having much luck. I really want his blessing on this project before I release. Fun fact: He was the lead developer on Shiny classics such as MDK and Sacrifice. He’s released a book called Game Programming Golden Rules which is a good read and contains some great coding practises that apply well to Flash (such as BSP Trees and Hash functions). Anyway here are a couple of grabs from the original:
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