Festival Pro
At Anorak we've just release a cool game for Pro plus (you know the caffeine pills). It's a video based rhythm game with some great music, and it has the neat feature that it resizes when you embed it in a blog. It's been a long slog, but it's come out really well.
One warning - if you have an ad blocker active you won't be able to play it, because the assets are hosted on a media serving company that's been black listed by most of the blockers.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Presents Panic: A Christmas game!

I've been very slack - I should of posted about this game weeks ago, but I've been putting it off.

The game was finished weeks ago. I did it in my spare time, a combination of time off with no money to do anything and the gaping hole of free time that giving up warcraft has left. I submitted it to a flash games competition, which I didn't get a prize for. Unfortunately this meant a week of dicking around waiting for the judging to be finished before I could do anything else with it. So I've only just put it up somewhere.

So far the reaction has been fairly luke-warm, which is frustrating because I really like the game. The most common complaints have been that it's too hard and the controls are confusing. In it you have to use the keyboard and mouse and I think that's just a bit much for people when they are coming into it for the first time. The fact that it looks very familiar to other games also means that a lot of people don't bother reading the instructions, then find out that they don't know how to play.

It's a common problem with web games - people don't give them as much time as they would if the game was offline, so you have to design them a little differently. Put it this way: The competition I entered, I fully believe that my game was much better than any of the other games (well, I haven't seen the 1st prize yet, but the other entries anyway), but I can understand why I didn't win anything. With web games they really have to be instantly accessible, and if someone doesn't get the game in the first 30 seconds you've probably lost them. I'm not sure what my next game will be. I have some ideas for some one liner gimmick games. At least then I won't be conning myself into thinking I'm doing something good.

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.

Halloween, and music in games

So Halloween is come again, bring with it many things, chocolate, pumpkins and all that. Unfortunately I have a mild case of food poisoning, so I can't indulge in all that :(

It also means a yearly surge of traffic for one of my older flash game, Graverobber. I did this back in 2002 and it was one of my first attempts at flash programming, being an alteration of another game for which I had only done the artwork for. It's showing it's age and the highscore table broke when my hosting provided upgraded my database, something I haven't gotten around to fixing yet. Despite this it still has a real attraction, and my stats have already shown a jump in the number of people viewing it over the past few days as it get linked for it's Halloween theme.

The gameplay is fairly sluggish and the art isn't my best work. What make the game in my opinion is the music, which is a loop of 'Monster Mash' by 'Boris' Pickett and the Crypt-kickers. It's a loop I shamelessly stole, which has meant I haven't been able to try to market the game and make any money off of it myself, and it makes the game far more fun than it would otherwise be. You can see the same effect with another of my games, Sperms which is really jus t a one-liner with the music as it's pivot.

The throwaway nature of flash games means that a good/catchy soundtrack can easily make or break a game. (Indeed, a bad or obnoxious soundtrack combined with the absence of a mute button will have people closing the game quicker than nearly anything else, and for the last few years I've made sure that there is a sound toggle on every single game I produce.) You only need one aspect of the game to appeal to people for it so be successful, be that the main character or the gameplay or the sound. To be playable a game needs coding and artwork, but the sound is an extra. Because of this it is often left till last, but it shouldn't be.

Giving up Warcraft

I've just taken a momentus step and cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft.

I haven't cancelled my account, so I can still play it until my present subscription expires (not til the end of december. damn them and their 'save £3 when you buy in 3 months chunks' deal!). I'm going to try just not playing it, but so far it's been a ravenous monster which has sucked up most of my free time for the last year, stopping me doing anything remotely creative or productive outside work, and I'm not sure if I trust myself. If it doesn't work out and I can't restrain myself I'll have to take some drastic measures like ceremonally destroying all my gear then deleting my characters.

The problem with warcraft is that it's a game that you can never win. There will always be something there for you to do, some way to advance your character and some people who have better gear because they put more time in than you. If you have 30 minutes before you're going to bed or going out you can go grind some money or go farm some herbs or something else. It's almost like having a job. This means goodbye to doing anything productive when you're at home. No reading or writing, no drawing or painting, and for me the most damning thing is that I stopped making flash games in my spare time. It has also stunted any impetus I might have had to sort out my poor situation visa vi women, since it kept me from getting bored and thinking about it. (not that I'm expecting making flash games to do wonders in this regard...).

The other thing that make it so addictive is the guilds. When you have a group of 40 people all doing the same thing as you it feels like it's normal, like there's nothing wrong with spending 4 hours every other night playing a computer game. There are several people who I genuinely liked and who I'm going to miss, and that makes it slightly more difficult to leave but then I did some calculations:

In the past 2 year I have logged nearly 60 days played time over several different characters (my main character has 47 days played). Think about that - there are 730 days in 2 year. You'll probably only be awake for 2/3 of that, which is 486.66 recurring, or which I spent 60 days playing World of Warcraft. That's nearly an eigth of my waking time spent playing a computer game. I could be fluent in a foreign language by now.

Anyway, it's over. I'ts been fun but this feels like the first day of the rest of my life.