Projects Category
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Flod 4 Released for JS and AS3 – New tracker module formats supported
4th Apr 201213
For those unfamiliar with Flod, it is a set of JavaScript and AS3 libraries written by Christian Corti, that can accurately playback lots of different Amiga, PC and Atari ST music formats natively. It supports all of the common formats: FastTracker II, Ultimate Soundtracker, ProTracker, NoiseTracker and lots more including DeltaMusic, David Whittaker, FredEd and Jochen Hippel format tunes.
There are download packages for HTML5/JS using the Web Audio API found in Chrome. Also available are the AS3 class files for Flash.
Check it out on the Flod page.
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Veracode Defender – from concept art to final game
1st Mar 2012
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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Play Jingle Balls – Our Christmas gift to you all :)
22nd Dec 2011
I felt like making a “Game in a Day” and this little Christmas mini-game pinged out the other end as the result. 6 hours last night, about the same again tonight and we’re done. And putting me to shame Ilija did the graphics in just 1 hour, on a lunch break at work. Damn his lightning fingers 🙂
You get 3 clicks (1 click per round). When you click it explodes a snow-flake which scales up in size a little bit and then fizzles out. If it touches anything while it exists, that item explodes, and thus a chain reaction occurs. Basically see how many items you can destroy per round with your single click.
Ok so it’s not exactly Skyrim, but see how high a score you can get anyway 🙂 and enjoy the cute music and fx from Olley Neale, who literally composed them in the space of a few minutes notice as a result of a tweet I sent around this morning. Ahh the power of twitter!
Anyway have fun and if you celebrate it, Happy Christmas!
(hit the jump to play the game, embedded below)
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Home Sheep Home 2 is out! Developer insights into the cross-platform build process
8th Dec 2011This has been a long time coming. Nearly a years worth of puzzle boarding, planning, animating, development, testing and packaging. But it’s finally out! Home Sheep Home 2: A Little Epic landed today across multiple platforms: Web (Flash), iOS (iPhone and iPad HD) and PC Download and is sitting happily on homesheephome2.com waiting for you to pay it a visit 🙂
The original game was something of a viral success story. Created in around12 days, primarily to promote new Shaun the Sheep episodes, it went absolutely ballistic on launch getting nearly 1 million plays per day at its peak. In 18 months it had managed 102 million plays and even today still pulls in quarter of a million players daily, with large clear peaks at the weekends.
It’s fair to say the success of the game took us a little by surprise. We knew it was good, we knew the concept was quite original, had nice cross-gender appeal and the puzzles were challenging without being frustrating. But we had no idea that so many people out there would agree! It was quite amusing at first when the clones started to appear. Somewhat less respectable companies ripped the game off and it was unofficially ported to iOS and Android.
A Chinese company even decided to steal all of the graphics and code, re-colour the sheep pink, throw in a few new levels and released it as “Home Sheep Home 2”. Somewhere around this point it was no longer funny any more and we realised it was time to invest in making a true sequel (and as a side note: In the PC version there is a cheat mode that turns all of the sheep pink, in a not so subtle middle-finger to the original rip 🙂
[ Read more for developer insight on the build process ]
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JavaScript Fast Tracker 2 XM Player
18th Nov 2011
Christian Corti (author of Flod XM) has been hard at work converting his AS3 classes to JavaScript. And here’s the first test from that work. Fast Tracker 2 XM replay via pure JavaScript and clever use of the new web ‹audio› API.
You’ll need Chrome to hear anything at the moment. I tried it with version 15.0.874.121 which is a standard release channel build, not even the beta channel, and it worked fine with lots of different XM files.
Click here to test it out. You need to select a local XM file to play. If you don’t have one handy there are thousands on modarchive.org (just make sure you filter by xm)
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