All is quiet on the Eastern front
There’s been some radio silence on the blog but Brian and I been tapping away on a top secret project, codename: Haku
I won’t reveal too much, just that it’s interactive and set to be some of our best work yet.
Skyro reaches 1 million ad requests
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.
Flock theory
This is a graphic representation of ‘Flock theory,’ that is, the theory of how birds interact and fly together in a flock. The theory I followed was the Boids theory, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. This theory follows three main rules:
- 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.
Q-ball
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.
Captain Skyro
Captain Skyro: The Cloud Climber was the first side project by Brian and myself. Once again I built the physics and game logic while Brian handled the graphics and animation.
The project was built with the MochiAds Rockstar competition in mind, and start to finish it took a little over a month. Unsure of what to make a game about, I started building a few varying game engines with no graphics, just a proof of concept. We decided upon a sling-shot interaction which we were later accused of ripping off a game called ‘Sling’ which we hadn’t heard of but was a good lesson to do some more thorough research before claiming an idea ‘original’.
With an engine decided upon we began building a story and graphics around the gameplay and were soon faced with an age old question: Ninjas or Pirates?
I soon conceded defeat and pirates won, but I guess who am I to fight with the guy doing the graphics?
Because all side work was done after hours, there were many late nights but we got it all out in time for the contest. A month later and results were in and we had won 1st place in the judges votes.
Since then, Captain Skyro has had 963,076 ad requests, with one or two ads per game download.
Paintball
The Men’s Performance Multi Paintball Challenge was developed for Blackmores by Bullseye, with the aim of increasing Blackmores subscribers, promoting the vitamin product and reaching the male target audience. One of the key features is the ability to create teams, upload your photo and your friends become your targets. The game was fairly successful, reaching 100,000 odd plays in just a few weeks.
My role was to do the all the game coding and logic, with Brian handling the graphical treatment and animation.
Although the campaign is over, the game is still available to play. Check it out.
The Assigned Paintball Challenge was a rebrand of the Blackmores paintball that Bullseye developed for Relentless, a Coca-Cola Company energy drink in New Zealand. The change of graphics and swapping out koalas for sheep were made in accordance to the rest of The Assigned site and the Relentless drink. Unfortunately the game is no longer live but there’s a screenshot below.
