The new game from Brian and myself is called Burney.
A relatively short turn around for this one, only 4 weeks, forcing us to stick to a simpler idea and building it the best we could.
The gameplay based on the notion of burning things to gain points but in a very non-serious manner. With a simple idea we also kept the controls simple, using just the space bar to jump. Some of our previous games have been faulted for being difficult or frustrating to control, so I pushed the concept of a single action key that has proved successful for a few other games out there. There’s also no way to ‘die’ in this game so it’s accessible for anyone to play and allows them to run right through the level and improve on their score.
Limiting the game time to 60 seconds was in line with the MochiAds 60 Seconds to Fame competition, which requires a limit of 1 minute of game time.
Anyway, enough with the words, Play Burney now.
One month in and ’some’ progress has been made. A fulltime job and no set due date means things are being developed rather slowly.
Our concept is now well rounded and we’re in the stage of prototyping the various types of effect we wish the throw in. I’ve got a fairly solid physics sandbox setup with a character running and jumping around, and B is scribbling away with more character designs and environment designs within the technical constraints of Flash. I suppose that is a mantra that we’re strongly adopting for this project… “embrace the constraints”
Nothing that we’re ready to reveal yet, as things could still backflip from here.
No sooner has Brian and I finished off Haku, we’re looking forward to our next big thing.
Enter Project: Grande
This project is a bit unique for us, as we have no deadline or contest in mind. It’s all about aiming bigger than before, with a stronger story and pushing the limits in Flash.
We’ve spent about 2 months so far just concepting and experimenting, trying to find that winning idea to run with. I’m not going to give out many specifics yet, but we’re pretty sure we’ll be leveraging the Box2D engine. For a bit of a teaser check out some early concept sketches from Brian:
Well finally, it’s complete. Our latest game, Haku: Spirit Storm
Two months in the making, the game centers around Haku, a dragon, and his quest to find his true spirit.
Once again there was a heavy focus on player interaction and immersion, as we strived to achieve an engaging feeling of flight using motion, sound and graphics. The black and white art direction from B plays on the whole good versus evil theme whilst desperately trying to keep processor usage down. As for the coding, nothing too special here, although it does integrate a 3rd party plugin named FreeSpin3D which, you guessed it, handles the 3D models for the body segments. The motion of the dragon was my proudest break-through, with a combination of a chain setup and an animated sine wave allowing Haku to animate smoothly and seamlessly between turns and idle movement.
Check it out
Well 1,000,271 to be exact. The ad requests occur once or twice while the game is loading.
What that roughly translates to is the game has been downloaded at least 500,000 times which doesn’t include multiple plays from the one download or sites that have blocked the MochiAds service.
Q-ball was the second side project Brian and I completed. The key objective of this project was to convert a simple 2D game into a Papervision3D app.
The process went similar to Skyro, in that I started with the mechanics and interaction, then the graphics were built on top. The interaction I wanted to focus on was the rolling 3D ball following the mouse, but in fact the majority of the game mechanics are processed in 2D and then rendered with 3D models.
Q-ball started with some other characters inside the ball, as the development was based around a competition to integrate user generated characters. At that stage it was called Feezball, but did quite poorly in the contest and the reviews weren’t great so we re-branded it to Q-ball. Development took about one to two months, however 60% of that time was spent debugging and optimising the 3D rendering.
We managed to get out a fairly solid PPV3D game, but the major downfall it the awkwardness of the controls. The ball-following-mouse action is great until you actually need to aim, and no matter what I tried it didn’t get much better. After you play for a bit things get easier to control, but people probably dropped it because of the early difficulties. Even though it didn’t go so well with the masses, I’m pretty happily with the technical achievement and B’s graphics weren’t too shabby either.
Check it out
