Projects Category
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My New Game “Bug Box”
7th Aug 20092A week ago while chatting on a forum RobotJam inspired me by something he said: About how everyone should try and create a “one day game” at least once in their developer lives. As in a proper game, that you then go and and try to sell. And he gave some successful examples of his own.
I thought this was a nice idea. So now, a week later, mine is finished 😉
It’s a simple puzzle game: Just get the butterfly out of the box. There are only 3 levels, easy, medium and hard. It is based on an old Japanese game played with wooden blocks called Hakoiri Shogi.
The core game was done in 3 hours, as you’ll see when you play it (it’s hardly cutting edge technology). Having done that I then set about on the graphics, which took me a lot longer. I bought some of the images from iStockPhoto and then built the scene-up the way I wanted it. The music is from SoundRangers.com mixed with some nature effects by myself. Also big thanks to Eric at Cavalcade Games for doing the great “Level Win” animation sequence for me.
Originally I only wanted the one puzzle (“Easy”). That’s all I had in place and I was pleased I had managed to create a nice little logic game so fast. But then I let my wife play it and she completed it instantly, so I figured it needed more! I added in two new puzzles, the leafy reveal sequence, the in-game buttons, etc. I just guess I couldn’t leave it alone, so I polished it until I felt it shined enough.
Having said that it’s still my absolute fastest game build ever: from concept to FGL in 5 days, working evenings only. Yes I am going to put it up for sponsorship, but I’m realistic and really don’t expect much. My hope is that I could make a few little sales that add-up. As long as I cover my $60 media costs I’m happy.
For now you can play the game only on FGL. My FGL “Friends” can see it right away, as can other devs of a certain level. At the time of writing it’s still pending approval for sponsor viewing. Obviously once it has been sold everyone can play it 🙂
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FlodPro – Awesome Soundtracker Replayer – Sneak Preview
5th Aug 2009Christian Corti has been hard at work on the Flod Replay library, and Flod Pro incorporates the latest version and a whole lot more, wrapped up in a sexy ProTracker style interface! He gave me permission to show you a demo of it, so have a play with this:
[swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/flod/FlodProSneakPreview.swf” width=”568″ height=”477″]
Click “Browse” and select a soundtracker module (.mod file) then hit “Play“. Some features work, some don’t. The two sliders on the bottom right are for volume and stereo separation. The numbers 1-4 at the top enable/disable the channels. Clicking through the sample names often reveal hidden messages from the composers 🙂
Just check out the replay quality! It’s now playing back a lot of mods better than even ModPlug can, all from AS3 / FP10.
If you don’t have any soundtracker modules to load into it then here is a little zip (655KB) with 5 classic Amiga tunes and the FlodPro SWF. Or you can downloads thousands of tunes from sites like Amiga Music Preservation.
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Awesome game artist wanted for partnership
28th Jul 2009I’ve a number of games in development at the moment, and I am looking for a quality artist to work with.
I’m happy to consider either direct paid-for work: You give me a quote, and I’ll pay you for your time (and I don’t mind paying a % upfront either). Or we can do something on a game royalty basis (50/50 sponsorship split, ad share, etc). If you are good enough, I’ll even consider both.
My only criteria are that you’re available to actually draw, not just once per quarter! And that you really understand game artwork requirements. So tile maps, explosions, characters, in-game GUI / HUD, buttons, etc.
As you can see from the games I’ve released I need bitmap / pixel art style. But I am not limited to it. If you find it easier to create models in 3DS Max and then render them out to sprites, that’s fine by me. I just want quality end results, I don’t care how you get there. But you must be comfortable working on the pixel tweaking level as I am not looking for a Flash “vector style” artist, sorry. Ideally you probably worked in creating artwork for mobile phone / GBA / DS /16-bit games, or have a style similar to this.
Hopefully this can be a long-term partnership rather than just one game, but we can see how it goes 🙂
My deadlines are flexible and my requirements are nearly always small and manageable. I am far likely to be asking you to “Please draw me 6 different coloured 32×32 gems in the style of Columns” as opposed to “We’re remaking Metal Slug with twice as many levels / animations“. I’m realistic. I want to get games made quickly, so my artwork requirements reflect that. You won’t get drawn into some mammoth long project.
If you are interested please send me your portfolio (or links to games that feature your artwork) to rdavey at gmail dot com . Thanks!
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WebbliWorld is live!
23rd Jul 2009
After a manic “finishing off” period the brand new version of WebbliWorld finally went live today. It’s out of beta and open to everyone!
We’ve added loads of cool new features including a huge stack of new items, pod colours, t-shirts, hair styles and more. The in-game currency is working and you can buy new items for your house (or yourself).
Lots of other little fixes, updates and changes were added – but best of all did I mention that it’s LIVE! Almost a year of work and now the general public can charge around and explore for themselves 🙂
There will be a special promo video going up on the home page tomorrow, but in short feel free to register and play (especially if you have young kids who may enjoy it).
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WebbliWorld Public Beta is Go!
10th Jul 2009Today was pretty momentous for me to be honest.
We finally, finally, FINALLY launched the true public beta of the kids virtual world I have been working on since December 2008.
Called WebbliWorld it’s aimed at young kids (5 years+) and offers a hybrid Flash / HTML multi-user world. You can run around the Flash world, chatting, playing and customsing your space. While checking out the new site content through HTML links. It works in a similar manner to Whirled really.
You can access the beta at http://beta.webbliworld.com
Feel free to register and play. You will need to have your account manually approved before you can “buddy” with other people in-world, but the moderation team are working flat-out this weekend to ensure there isn’t much delay.
While it may look a little “sparse” at the moment, there are some really cool things coming on-line shortly (yes, including games!)
The Technology
It’s built on ElectroServer 4.0.7b, which the ElectroServer team supported excellently. There were quite a few issues with http connections that they worked diligently to resolve for us, so hopefully other ES users will benefit from those fixes too. We’re running on a pretty meaty server that should be able to cope with thousands of connections.
We had a soft launch of the site today, promoting it just on a few dedicated forums that Aardman run (Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit) and we’ve seen a flurry of users registering, walking around and chatting. This is the first MMO world I’ve built, so there was something quite magical about seeing a room full of users all charging about, that knowing that they weren’t fellow office staff 🙂
Development has been a truly mammoth task for me. I did all the AS3 code, platform design, server plugins, all of the AMFPHP gateway work, web site php/html/css/javascript, MySQL structure, stored procedures, debugging tools, logging tools, numerous utilities and admin systems… the list goes on and on! Now you can see why I’ve been so utterly frazzled and haven’t released a new game in the past 4 months 🙂 Thankfully a few weeks ago we hired a really good AS3 developer to help with the project, and his input has been invaluable. You can see a lot of his handiwork in-world, and in the exciting new features we’ll release soon.
Feel free to register and have a play. There are lots of hidden things in there. Click around, as lots of objects do stuff you may not expect. At the very least please edit your pod 🙂 Wake the pod up by clicking it, then click the “Edit” icon on your toolbar to start placing items. Feel free to post screen shots of your pod designs here!
Oh and if you see “WebbliMunro” charging around the world – that’s me.
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