Thursday, November 09, 2006

Another Ashes Game

I remember how just before the world cup it seemed that every project I worked on was football related. It's the Ashes soon, and it's not quite that bad, but there's lots of cricket stuff knocking about. At Glue we've just released a cricket themed game for Sky, Defend the Ashes. It's based on all those 'Defend the Castle' games like this. But with the added feature that when you've thrown the cricketers into the air you can hit them with a bat for extra point.

I'm quite pleased with it. As usual I was given a vague concept be the creatives and asked to make it into a decent game. The brief this time was a lemmings type game, but I thought that would be too slow for a web game (or at the least too slow for the audience). So we came up with this game play.

The only thing that annoys me about it is that I wanted it to have an infinite number of levels that got gradually harder, but that would give the chance for a wide spread of scores for high score tables. My superiors thought that since there are 5 tests in the ashes it would confuse people if there were more than 5 levels and that a high score table wasn't necessary. So the game only has only 5 levels ( the 5th level could go on forever, but it get harder and harder, leading to people saying 'it gets too hard too quickly') and no high score table, which is a crying shame.