Games Category

  • Kyobi:Whirled Released

    Kyobi on WhirledWhirled is large social Flash world, full of multiplayer games, avatars, toys, rooms, furniture and all the usual kind of things you’d expect from a Flash MMO. Think Gaia / Habbo only looking like the complete visual mess of a typical MySpace page.

    Whirled run a developers competition. You can modify your game to work within the “Whirled”, upload it and be in with a chance of winning some real money. What’s more your game is up for sale in their shop, which means that other Whirled players can buy it and add it to their rooms, and you get a cut of the revenue generated by this.

    After some sweet talking by Chris of FGL I decided to port Kyobi to the Whirled platform. Believe me, it was not an easy task. The Whirled API is very easy to use, but the fact you are locked out of referencing the stage was quite a shock. When I went through my code and realised just how much I rely on it, and things it inherits (like mouse coordinates, width references, etc) it nearly put me off converting the game at all. But I perservered and after a lot of trial and error, I finally managed to get it working!

    I don’t expect to win the competition, but the more I worked with Whirled the more I liked its anarchaic and freeform nature. If I create a new Whirled game it’ll definitely be written to take advantage of their system from the start, not applied at the final stage!

    If you’ve got a Whirled account feel free to play / rate Kyobi here: http://www.whirled.com/#games-d_2076_c

  • Kyobi is now live on GameJacket

    It took a lot of work and coordination, but my latest game Kyobi is now live and starting to appear in the wild.

    In the end it was jointly sponsored by GameJacket, Kongregate, BigFishGames, Oberon Media, King.com and Bunnygames. Oberon themselves are responsible for the game content of MySpace Games, Orange, Yahoo Games and other big sites.

    Believe me it was hard work producing all of those variations of the game! But the end result was worth it, both in terms of combined income and exposure the game will eventually have.

    Right now you can play Kyobi on GameJacket (I’ve also embedded it below the jump), and it should start appearing on the other sites in the following days / weeks, as each site has a different release schedule.

    My thanks to everyone involved in the game (Alex, Lindsay, SomaTone), my beta testers and you. Feel free to leave your feedback here.

    Read More

  • Kyobi re-branded as “Touch & Go” and released onto iPhone

    Touch & Go

    I’m pleased to announce that my latest game ‘Kyobi‘ is now available for the iPhone / iPod Touch from the Apple AppStore.

    The iPhone version was developed by The Game Creators. It has been re-branded as “Touch & Go” with a new set of graphics more suitable for playing with your fingers.

    Touch & Go is available as a free Lite version and the full version costing ยฃ1.79 / $2.99.

    For those without iPhones this video shows how the game looks and plays:

    For those with iPhones here are some links ๐Ÿ™‚

    Lite Version (should be available any day now)
    Full Version

  • (Spoiler!) Play test my 4kb Game Competition entry

    My 4kb Game Competition entry is very nearly finished. I’m in the final “tweaking” stages, trying to get the last few small bugs out, and iron the gameplay a little so it’s less “random” and even more progressive.

    The game is a twitch shooter based (loosley!) on Geometry Wars and requires some pretty mad flying skillz to last more than 30 seconds. The idea is literally to see what kind of score you can get. Here’s a screenie:

    Infinite Ammo

    There are 10 different baddies, “boss waves”, bullet power-ups and particle explosion effects galore! (I went a bit over the top in all honesty). I’d love to have added sound, but I’m pushed to the limit of my 4096 bytes shackles already.

    I know the game isn’t quite as “playable” as it should be, and I’ll work on that in the final few days left before I need to submit to the contest. I also know I don’t have a chance of winning (having seen some of the other entries lined-up!), but it was bloody great fun to code anyway.

    And so as a sneak peak to you here’s the latest beta to play. Comments welcome (but please do bear in mind this whole game had to fit into 4096 bytes, so don’t go requesting anything insane ok?!)

  • My new game Kyobi released onto FlashGameLicense.com

    Kyobi Title Page (320px)

    Today I managed to get time to finish-off and release my new game, Kyobi, onto FlashGameLicense.com. The game is best described as a cross between Columns, Tetris and a Match-3, but with a big fat dose of physics thrown in for good measure. As the blocks drop you can grab them with the mouse, and fling them around. Match 3 or more of the same colour and they all explode in a shower of particles.

    Throw them together with real force and you’ll shake the screen and score bigger points. Chain combos can be obtained by smashing lots of colours one after the other within a set time. There is something very feng shui about the game. Watching people play is fascinating; some will try to organise the blocks into different stacks of colour along the bottom. Others will just slam them around with gay abandon! Personally, I’m a “stacker” ๐Ÿ™‚

    I am really pleased with how this game plays. I spent a lot of evenings working on tweaking the difficulty, so the first 20 levels guide you through the game. The pace ebbs and flows gracefully. After a really hectic level with 6 blocks falling every couple of seconds, the next level can often be far more sedate with a slow trickle to give you a breather. Basic game AI controls level progression there-after, ensuring the game doesn’t just get faster and faster (which would be no fun for anyone). The game uses my new PixelBlitz physics classes through-out.

    Kyobi In-game (320px)

    Kyobi In-game (320px)

    At the time of writing this Kyobi is up for bidding on FlashGameLicense.com. If you have a Developer account there (or are one of my FGL friends) you can play it here. Everyone else I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until it goes public, sorry!

    Right now I’m waiting for SomaTone.com to finish the music and sound effects for Kyobi, but hopefully that will be done soon – this will be the first time I’ve ever used them, but I’m sure they will do an excellent job, and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they come up with! In equally exciting news for me: The Game Creators will be bringing Kyobi to the iPhone this March. Can’t wait to see what they do with it too ๐Ÿ™‚