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.

I’ve been developing my own basic platformer engine which is more lightweight than Box2D and it also means I’m not fighting the engine as much to do simple things. It only has the bare basic stuff for block-shaped tracks, but it does the job. I’ve learned quite a bit about using the hitTest() method in Flash through hours of debugging. Odd things like easing the virtual camera can cause the player to go from ‘grounded’ to ‘airborne’ without moving its x and y coordinates. Probably something to do with shape testing against fractions of pixels.

We’re still working out the core story behind the game, but the mechanic is almost done with some placeholder graphics. Hopefully I’ll be able to update soon.

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.

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:

Check out the contest page and the other winners here
For the press release on Reuters go here

If you’ve not yet given Haku a try, find it here.

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

I won’t reveal too much, just that it’s interactive and set to be some of our best work yet.

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.

• The biods fly towards the center of the flock’s mass
• The boids move to avoid each other
• The boids move towards the average velocity of the boids in the flock

If you follow one boid it may seem like they have a death wish with the sharpness of they’re turns, however, we must bear in mind my simulation only uses two dimensions and not three dimensions as is the case with real birds.

Download Source here.

Find out more about Boids here.

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