Posts Tagged ‘Retro’
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Veracode Defender – from concept art to final game
1st Mar 201211
I’m pleased to say that our latest game is released. Veracode Defender is a Flash retro-styled tower defence game. It was a departure from our normal titles in that we made it specifically for a client, something we’ve never done before. It all came about via a casual tweet between ourselves and Melissa, a chiptune composer and NES fan (yay!) who works forVeracode. They were looking for a tower defence style game to help promote their security services. The deadline was a bit insane, but we pulled it out of the bag and delivered on-time. Having never written a tower defence game before it was a challenge, but a good one to under-take. And I now have a new-found respect for developers who churn out TDs by the bucketful, because believe me – balancing those game is far from easy!
The graphics were created by Diego, who I had met at Aardman where I work. He was a matte painter there, creating stunning backdrop scenery for our latest film The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (do watch the awesome trailer! the film is out this month). Anyway he felt like taking on the challenge of moving from gigabyte sized Photoshop files down into 16×16 pixel sprites. So off we started and literally 10 days later the game was finished.
You can get some developer insights from me on the games page itself, but what I wanted to show here was the graphical evolution of the game from concept to final pixels:
Diego and I spoke about how the screen would be structured, I gave him some rough dimensions and he produced this first-pass concept sketch. We wanted the turret menu down the right-hand side, your available funds above it and the wave counter on the far right. The robots would attack from the left and be trying to get to your base on the right. The game turned out remarkably similar to this initial sketch, but went through a few iterations first. Especially the robots …
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Croco Magnet – HTML5 Retro Game Remake
1st Dec 2011Denathorn Games have released this sweet little retro-remake: Croco Magnet. Based on an Amstrad CPC original you control a blue ball that bounces left/right (rebounding off any wall it hits) and must clear the level of radiation, while avoiding the “nasty green blob things”. I really like the fact that the game flip-screens when you hit the edge, it means you need to really remember several screens worth of placement in order to angle the ball just right. Works very well!
The game appears to have been created using the JavaScript export feature of Monkey, a language we’ve blogged about in the past and has quite a following. I’m not sure of the current status as the official web site hasn’t had news posted to it for 9 months, but the community is alive and healthy. Performance for me was perfectly playable in Chrome and Firefox. There’s not exactly much movement going on, but that isn’t really the point. The point is that this is a fun, addictive little remake, the sort I loved creating in Flash, running purely in browser.
Play Croco Magnet or read more about the Monkey programming language.
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Infinivaders by Sosker (Stage3D game)
14th Nov 2011
In these days of Flash doom and gloom it’s nice to bring you something as sweet as this little game. Infinivaders is now up on Newgrounds and is a Stage3D / Flash Player 11 shoot-em-up. Graphics and level patterns are procedural generated. Coded using the ND2D library for visuals and Flod for that lovely chippy soundtrack.
Plays smooth, fast and furious here. Not a great deal of challenge until later on. But as the game is only 50KB in size I’m not going to complain. Stuff that one in your pipe OccupyFlash and smoke on it.
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Soundbytes 10 Poster
2nd Nov 2011
If you’re into retro gaming, chances are you like chipmusic (or chiptunes) as well. For a couple of years now I’ve been pixelling posters for the Soundbytes chipmusic event series in Melbourne, but this is the first one I’ll actually be attending, yay! You can see all the posters in the series HERE.
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My .net magazine “Build a Retro game in Flixel” article is now out
20th Jun 2011.net magazine is apparently the “world’s best-selling magazine for web designers” which may be of little interest to game developers reading this, however issue 217 just hit the news stands and it contains Part 1 of my article on building an 8-bit inspired retro platformer in flixel 🙂
The article starts from ground zero and builds up, covering sprite sheets, tile maps, cameras and collision. Written for almost total beginners, with lots of well commented source code (available as a download) to accompany, it should serve as a gentle introduction to flash game dev. I will post the article on my blog eventually, but not for a couple of months. So if you’d like to see it earlier take a wander into your local newsagents, or you should be able to buy the issue online from the .net site. Part 2 will appear in issue 218 (September 2011)
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