Thursday, November 01, 2007

9 Ball connect
I've just finished another game (yay!), and here it is, 9 Ball Connect. After the hellish, 8 month long slog that was making Toytown Tower defense I decided to do something smaller. I've always been a fan of the casual puzzle game type thing - tetris, bejeweled, that kind of thing so I thought I would do a quick fix casual game.

I've tried this before with Presents Panic, and that was a bit too complicated to be that successful so I wanted to do something that, at least on the surface was more straightforward. This is the result.

It's really easy, you connect balls in numerical chains to remove them. Depending on the size of the chain you get points and extra time with which to play. I wanted it to be relaxed and chilled, so I got some laid back blues music, then created some notes runs that went with a demo version of fruity loops (not sure about buying it if this kind of thing is all I use it for, but it's a neat program). The pool theme was suggested by a guy at work (thanks mike) and I really like it.

All thing considering I'm really happy with the game. But then I always am immediately after making a game. It's only after a few weeks that I can really look at it and assess it properly.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Toytown Tower Defense
This is my tower defense game. The one that I've been working on since january. It's a flash game, based on the tower defense maps from warcraft III, where you have to defend your castle against waves of monster coming along a set path by building towers to kill them. Unfortunately, in the time I took to polish it up and actually get my arse in gear and finish it a glut of this type of game have appeared on the web. Oh well, it serves me right.

It's still a really nice game. The graphics are all pixel animated and there are lots of gameplay additions to the general formula - a hero you control, power ups, bosses, auras you can activate on your towers that boost surrounding towers. Have a go. It's fun.

I actually finished this a few weeks ago. I spent a couple of weeks touting it around various games portals before deciding to self publish it on my website. So I redid my site and slapped some google adsense stuff on it (see previous post) and put it up there, then I went on holiday to the US for 2 weeks. I've just come back and been able to assess how it's done. In terms of plays it's done ok - it reached the 6 figures plays that I was hoping for. In terms of revenue, not so good. Don't laugh, but I made the horrible discovery that I missed out a question in the profile section of mochiads, so it's only been showing the free ads. Basically it's spent 2 weeks advertising other people's game sites for free. Ad sense has been better (of course), but still the money made hasn't been that great. I'm deciding what to do about it now.

Well I do it for the love of games anyway, right? Right?

(America was great btw.)

Sunday, September 16, 2007

New site design!
I've finally gotten round to redoing my site. The previous incarnation, which I still have a lot of fondness for was done as a portfolio site, back when I still did some illustration/animation as part of my job. I haven't done anything like that for ages, and it's become clear that the only people going there are going to play the games. I decided to try to make a bit of cash out of it by trying to turn it into a games site, hence the redesign. My new game, Toytown Tower Defense is finished and ready for release (finally) so this seemed like a good time.

Since I might potentially be making money out of this I've also had to remove a load of games which had dodgy, copyrighted content in them. Shame. I plan to remake some of them, when I get time.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Toytown tower defense - Alpha
This is the first alpha version of my current games project, Toytown tower defense. It's one of those tower defense games, which wouldn't have looked quite as generic if I'd bought it out in January, when I started it rather than now.

As you can probably see it needs a lot of work, but most of the features are in there. It has 4 different types of towers, each with different abilities and shot type, hero units, boss units, flying units, upgrades and auras that give bonuses to towers.


In the actual game getting different combinations of the auras will give cool bonuses, so as to stop people choosing one aura, but that's not in this version.

Anyway, I'm waffling. The main purpose of this alpha is to get feedback on the balance of the game - is it too hard, too easy? Are the towers evenly matched and priced? Are the heroes broadly matched? Also if you find any bugs I need to know, and whether it runs OK on your PC.

Hope you enjoy it.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Thin White Rope

I just found some great live performances from one of my favourite bands, Thin White Rope on youtube. Decent quality sound and real energy in what looks to be a minuscule venue. Not sure how I would describe them, psychedelic rock maybe. The way the two guitars work together is amazing. It looks like they have most of the gig up there, but these are two of the best.

Red Sun


and Take it home

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

New game project - A tower defence game

I've started this game so long ago it's not funny, but I've been really, really slow. It's finally getting to the stage where it's nearly playable.

It's a tower defence game, provisionally titled 'Toy-Town tower Defence', though it's becoming less and less toy town the further I get into it. In this type of game you get swarms of enemies coming along a path to invade your castle (or whatever) and you have to build towers that kill them before they get there. You get gold for killing them which you use to build new towers. Successive waves of enemies get progressively tougher and harder to kill.

I've got all the usual things - arrow towers, aoe towers, slowing towers, flying enemies, immune enemies, upgrades, power station and tech centers. I plan to put in a hero unit that the player can control, otherwise I find that this type of game can lack interactiveness (is that a word?).

As soon as I can get all the core elements in and a decent interface I plan to start releasing betas. With this kind of game the balance of ho the units react is crucial. At the speed I'm going in now maybe by the end of the month.

Monday, February 19, 2007

God I'm slack

Sigh. I haven't posted anything new for ages, mostly a result of not doing anything new for a while (can you have a creative block on a web game?) and to be honest I'm not sure what I'm doing with this blog.

I could just make it a diary type journal, but what's the point? Almost all of my friends and family are in London to, so if any thing interesting happens, they'll know. I'm tempted to use it to catalogue all the funny links I get sent every day at work, but there are several million of those types of blogs out there, and it seems too much like taking it seriously. According to my stats I get 3-4 hits a day, mostly from my website (if you've just come from there, hi!), and I don't think it's going to increase, since I don't have any meaningful content.

So, if you're reading this, sorry. Maybe I'll have something interesting to post in a month or so.