Posts Tagged ‘droplet’
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Our new 8-bit inspired HTML5 game: Droplets
8th Aug 201215The problem with working so hard on a framework and client projects, is that you have precious little time left for your own games. I felt the need to correct this. So I spent a day converting one of our Flash games to HTML5:
Droplets is a simple little game based on the range of vinyl toys created by Jam Factory. Just get the 5 droplets home, collect as many hearts as you can on the way, and avoid contact with pretty much everything else! The mobile version differs from the Flash one in that you slide left/right and have a lot of bounce – if you aren’t too careful you can end up ricocheting around the place like a pinball. Get home to the factory at the end to complete the level.
Simple, but still quite fun 🙂 And I’m very happy with the way it resizes intelligently on most devices. I’ve tested it on a variety of phones and tablets, from an iPhone 3 up to a Nexus 7, and it ran ok on most of them. Some (like the Samsung Galaxy S3) don’t cope with the canvas scaling too well and thus the frame rate suffers, but on the whole it’s about all that the ImpactJS engine can handle.
Point your mobile browser at http://gametest.mobi/droplets/ to play. And if by some fluke you’re a portal looking to license it, drop me a line.
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Check us out in Computer Arts Projects Issue 144
2nd Dec 2010
I’m very pleased to announce that Issue 144 of Computer Arts Projects magazine went on sale today. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be anything I’d blog about, but this issue is a little bit special. It carries a full-page feature on Photon Storm.Entitled “From online to mobile” it talks about 4 of our games, and how we approach game development with mobile in mind.
There are some lovely screen shots of the Droplet game sprite sheet, Quartet, our new game Cat Astro Phi (which will be front-paged on NewGrounds next Wednesday) and the coming-soon Chickaboom.
While the article itself is a bit tongue-in-cheek, some of it clearly made-up on my behalf, it’s still nice to be represented in the mainstream press.
And even nicer to see Ilija’s awesome artwork in full colour display.
Computer Arts Projects 144. You can buy the single issue (soon) from here.
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Sketch-A-Toe Fluff is out!
18th Jun 2010
We were contacted a week ago by Steve Rack, who had designed a character called Toe Fluff. He decided to open the character up to any artist who fancied creating a customised version. And let’s just say it all went a bit mental from there! It grew into hundreds of quality customs, a big feature in Digital Artist magazine, and an exhibition to show off the best.
Steve had seen the work we did on the Droplet Series 2 game (indeed Gav has created his own spirograph inspired Toe Fluff for the exhibition), and he wanted to know if we’d be interested in creating a “retro art package”.
Now dangle anything “retro” and “art related” in front of us, and we’ll most likely bite your hand off while pixelling and coding you a new one. And thus, Sketch-A-Toe Fluff was born! You get a blank Toe Fluff shaped canvas to doodle on, all set in a nice retro homage to etch-a-sketch (without the complexity of the dial controls!). Pick a crayon, and get drawing 🙂 Click the logo to find the “hidden” credits screen, with a new 8-bit tune from Ilija.
Steve would love it if you sent your best bits of work to him via email.
Full details, and the tool itself, are on the Sketch-A-Toe Fluff page. Have fun!
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Droplet Game Updated
9th Feb 2010
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!
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New Game Droplet Released
6th Feb 2010This 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 🙂
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