davidn: (Jam)
After an unusually sane Friday night, I had a dream this morning about a Mister Man called Mr Leap, who was in the shape of a forward triangle like Mr Rush. His story was a Dr. Seuss-like poem about successfully making a litiguous business out of the safety record of various bridges and the experience of jumping from them, and it ended with some sort of wonderful punchline - sadly, even though I had it right in front of me at the end of the dream and I'm sure it was all composed of real words and made perfect sense, the moment I woke up I found I'd forgotten the entire thing and could no longer write it down to preserve it.

That, together with the appearance of the world's largest scone in the kitchen, means the weekend has been sufficiently strange already.


However, I can say that Running Free now has a free version on the App Store - it's got fifteen levels that are unique to it, so even if you're one of the, er, unspecified amount of people who already have the full version there's something new there. The Flash version is doing very well in China, but unfortunately nobody seems to buy iOS games there...
davidn: (prince)
My latest game has actually been on the App Store since the start of the week, but I waited around a bit before announcing it - I wanted to be able to get the site together along with the Flash version, so it can be fed to the awful cretins on Newgrounds and then distributed further into the Internet in general. So now, at least, I can say - my first iPhone game Running Free is out!


You can try it out in Flash form here, with 15 specially-made levels - the full game on iOS has a further 71. (Why the weird number? Because the winning screen's counted as a level and eight of them fit on a page of the menu.) Your aim is to guide the perpetually running stickman - arbitrarily named Geoffrey by Whitney - around a set of increasingly dangerous sheets of graph paper by using the four arrow keys to change the direction of gravity.

It's evolved quite a bit since the first prototype I put up last year... thanks to everyone who posted there, and... actually, especially [livejournal.com profile] ravenworks for inspiring me to put this on the iPhone at all, now that I look!

So here it is on the US app store (the in-game link should open it in iTunes in the correct region automatically) - I'd recommend a 3GS/3rd generation Touch or later, as I think it'll perform slowly on earlier devices. If you give it a try, I'd really appreciate any reviews, as they boost my visibility in the store. (Unless you hate it, in which case you don't have to bother.)

The game has no music - here's some.
davidn: (Jam)
I think I might have just spotted an oversight in the iOS exporter's sound code and solved the mystery of how to allow iPod music while a game is running - something which I'm really rather pleased about, seeing as I'm working in a language that doesn't make sense in an IDE I don't understand on a computer I can't use. But I'll have to see if it's verified by someone who has at least one of the above qualifications.

So I've been ploughing ahead with Running Free and adding the few more elements that I wanted - here are some levels played when run through the standard EXE exporter.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpHwOQZucp0


I think that the ghost is my favourite bit, especially his "chomp" noise. And he's an all-new one, rather than the sprite from Treasure Tower that I've been using for the last six years.
davidn: (prince)
In August last year, I posted a Flash prototype called Running Free. Some experimentation with Clickteam's iOS exporter led to it being adapted into an iPhone game, and then like most everything I create these days it got left on a shelf after that. But now I've picked it up again and it's looking like it'll be the next game I release - the first on iOS. Then I can adapt it into a Flash demo.

I've been making a serious attempt to do what I utterly failed to with Crystal Towers 2, to get the game into an actual finished state before spooning in the content - in this way, it can be released in the event that I get sick of it. The game's main problem before was that I really didn't like what I'd done with its interface, but after passing my phone around to a few groups of people and seeing how fascinated they all were with the way you could manipulate the gravity, I knew I had to finish it - and after spending some time this week trying to understand the utter tangled mess of events I'd left myself, I've wrestled it into something much more pleasant to use.



In the last post about it, I had a list of possibilities for what the objective of the game would be, and in the end I sort of went for all of them. The idea of collecting stars stayed - in each level, you have to collect three red stars and get to the exit by changing the gravity to guide your blindly running man to where he needs to go. Turning the phone when on the ground changes the direction of gravity in 90 degree increments - to change 180 degrees at once without it interpreting it as a 90 degree turn halfway through, you can either tilt the phone backwards, or pause the game first.

Each screen also has a yellow star, which is usually trickier to get to - and you can earn a blue or a green one for completing a level quickly or within a par number of flips. Collecting stars advances you through the levels - just getting the three standard red stars will open up the next level, but you can skip ahead if you've collected some of the special stars as well.

Other game elements you encounter on the graph papery levels are curves, which force you into changing the gravity and prevent you turning around - and red Xs which I tend to refer to as 'spikes' but my mum called 'barbed wire'. There will possibly be some sort of moving enemy as well, but I'm trying to keep the scope of it down now - every time I try to make a simple game it becomes complicated very quickly.
davidn: (prince)
It must be the time of year for miracles - I've just released something, and further, something that isn't a platform game. It's a smaller project, though - it's called FISP, and three of the letters stand for Impossible Sliding Puzzles.


Good luck.


This was a quick project born as a result of Professor Layton 2's final stages, where you're put through a variety of absolutely sadistic puzzles, a couple of which involve sliding awkwardly-shaped pieces around a board. When I gave up on being able to do them, I didn't turn to a walkthrough, and instead - being who I am - wrote a solver to find the solution for me. And a couple of months later, I realized that this was the perfect tool with which to construct my own horrific challenges.

And I remembered about it last week and finally stuck a full game together around it. Go in, slide things around, get in a rage, spread the pain around on Facebook and help me get some advertising revenue.
davidn: (Jam)
In any area of coding, there are some things that you just can't do deliberately, no matter how hard you try. Such as collapsing your level into a black hole when you try to slide a piece:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgRdOV73D_c

It's nice that it still recognizes your effort and achievement - however, I'd better go back and try to find the exact point where I managed to break this quite so badly.
davidn: (rabbit)
Over the last few weeks, I've been doing an interview with Tisnart from the Clickteam boards, as part of an ongoing series where he talks to people about their involvement in the community and their current projects.

I had first thought that there would be a few questions back and forth and that would be the end of it, but things got rather carried away and I would now estimate that it contains everything that I've ever done in my entire life. If you're interested in finding out about how I got to being where I am in terms of game-related projects, and details of the other various things that are currently weighing on my conscience, the interview will explain more than you ever wanted to know. Most of it is about the stuff I do with Clickteam, but my music and ZZT get honourable mentions.

It also concludes with a notably bad photograph, a property I seem to manage to lend to all my photos simply by being in them.
davidn: (prince)
After a huge lull, I seem to be entering a new era of enthusiasm and productivity! It'll probably last another day or two. But at least I got another Flash sketch out of it:


Running Free - a mini gravity-switching platform/puzzle game


Almost uniquely among my experiments, this one actually has a title, so hopes are high for it actually becoming something. The idea is that gravity is the only thing you have any control over at all - use the arrow keys to switch its direction and guide the stick figure into collecting the red stars (to be rewarded with nothing happening just now). He'll turn when he hits a wall, but after a gravity change, he'll always continue in the same direction he was going - play about with it for a bit, you'll get the hang of it.

This could turn into a game limited by your number of lives, to collect stars within a time limit, complete levels with a limited number of shifts available - or a variety of all three of those and more. Already I find it quite satisfying to just zoom around, which feels like a good sign.

You can drive yourself mad working out where the sound effects are from if you choose to. (I've just downloaded a new sound package.)

Saira free

Jul. 1st, 2011 11:20 am
davidn: (prince)
Back to something more relaxing for a moment - Nifflas has just started a giveaway of Saira that'll last for the next 24 hours (and it'll be 75% off on Steam during the summer, as well). He's one of the most successful MMF developers, and his previous titles include Within a Deep Forest and Knytt Stories - games set on alien worlds which focus on exploration rather than reflexes, and have atmosphere as their strength through their graphics and music.

To get Saira for free, you just need to give your email address to his site and you'll get a serial number during the weekend. From what I remember of the trial version a while ago, it's an exploration platformer that uses an in-game camera as one of its primary puzzle-solving elements.
davidn: (savior)
Something that I'd been thinking of doing for a while:



The graphics (the good ones) are taken from Tyrian, but the main idea of this experiment is that the behaviour of the enemies and the level are generated from the music that's playing. I'd had this around as an experiment for a while and had abandoned it because I couldn't get consistent data out of a music file each time it was played, but I suddenly realized that I could do it by reading from the file itself, instead of relying on the current position of the music.

This Flash demonstration just uses one music file (and even then it's a bit of a cheat, as the data is pre-loaded instead of actually read here) but it's already quite fun to zoom around and watch the fireworks. It's going to be interesting to see if I can get appreciably different levels to come out of different songs.

Music shooter (yet another product of my lack of good name ideas)
davidn: (prince)
Watch this!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GwhMvMQEJI


It's crawling slowly closer all the time... now, all that really remains is to do the ending and some more general touching up to things I've been ignoring like the final boss. Then I'm going to see if Steam are interested.

I am indebted to each and every one of the testers who have gone through this over the last few months - they've really helped make the game what it is now. And of course to J Freude for the better-looking graphics throughout.

You can download the demo here, though it's a bit out of date now.
davidn: (Jam)
I am now at the dizzy height of three levels of procrastination away from my main project, having put Boxplode on hold as well for the moment to see if I could rework Special Agent into a Flash game. It's going quite well, though I have to resist the temptation to just strip out the bits that are slightly awkward to port over - I'm changing the percentage completion into a concept of 'agent points' that can be recorded on the Mochi scoreboards.

I'm not entirely sure whether I should keep the Democratic and Republican bonuses in it, because those words are far, far more loaded than they were at the point when I made the game five years ago - it was an idea that I got from Rise of the Triad, and the bonuses are achieved for sparing use of your handgun and for destroying all the plants on the level, respectively. Although I think, now, that it would be equally appropriate to get the Republican bonus for destroying all health powerups and the Democratic one for standing around for ten minutes without doing anything.

Besides, if anyone complains, as an independent I'm in the enviable position of being able to tell them to get stuffed.
davidn: (rabbit)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7rHVacT6Nw


I've got a game running on the iPhone now (through the slight abuse of an Apple developer account from work). This is Boxplode from last year, which I had stopped working on when I realized how good a mobile game it would make - with Clickteam's iPhone exporter now well on its way, I've been converting it over from its original version and it's already looking pretty workable.

The game's heart, the detection of blocks to destroy and everything, remained exactly the same - what I did to convert it amounted to halving the horizontal size to fit it on the screen, reworking the way that levels were stored and loaded to avoid the use of List objects or the String Parser (creating an editor for them along the way, so that step is much easier now) and changing the controls to make more sense for a touch screen.

Now all it needs is a heap of levels, some presentation improvement, and for me to get my head around the mathematics of doing a touch scroll menu.
davidn: (prince)
Continuing my attempt to highlight MMF success stories here, The Infinite Ocean is something that its creator made seven years ago and that never got much attention at the time. However, now that it's been retooled with the Flash exporter, Armor Games have picked it up and showered boatloads of cash on to it, and it comes recommended by Terry Cavanagh QC as well.

One of the more cheerful rooms. Just wait until you see it without the brightness turned up.


It's a sort of bleak Mystalike adventure game, with you starting in a room in a bad state of repair with very little idea of what's going on, and with the storyline gradually revealed through the discovery of records left on the various computers. The interface is simple enough, with you being directed to pick up objects and then use them from your inventory while being chanted at Gregorianly, along with some password finding and manipulation - this and the narrative style of your character may well conjure up memories of MOTAS. Except darker. And just in case you're rubbish at adventure games, a guide is provided right in the bottom right corner.

The Infinite Ocean

It occurs to me that the name "Fusion" is getting more and more appropriate all the time... I don't know of anything else where you can have one source file and export that to EXE, mobile Java, Flash and (soon) iOS, with just the device-specific limitations to worry about.
davidn: (prince)
In an unexpected and rather exciting move, Clickteam have released a free version of The Games Factory 2 specifically for Newgrounds. This free copy has all the functionality of the full version (which is all the functionality of MMF minus third party extensions), but will only allow you to publish SWFs that are site-locked to Newgrounds. So now, even if you haven't ever picked up Actionscript, you too can put together a game, submit it to the site and get it completely savaged by protozoa - I'm hoping that with the introduction of a free copy, the possibilities of the full package will be drawn more to the attention of independent developers who are more used to free environments or pirating Flash than actually having to pay for something.

Since I started publishing Flash games made with the Click range there, the number of views that I got for my creations has been staggering to someone used to looking at figures from downloads alone - a couple of thousand views in a weekend is not uncommon by any means, and with these MMF-made creations already there in disguise as Flash files, nobody has expressed any revulsion towards them at all. Now that the secret is out, the community aren't sure quite what to think of it yet, but among the occasional fears that it will marginalize actual coders are encouraging comments like "I really really like this program a lot. This is how I always wished how making a game was" and "I must say im impressed by this suckah, I thought it would be bad, but looking at some games made with it, this is great day for animators!". Whatever a "suckah" is. But I think it's probably good.

Direct download
davidn: (ace)
Yes, quite. Of all the games to make "extreme", I think that Noughts and Crosses would be fairly near the bottom of my mental list, just behind Diplomacy and hopscotch.

But this attempt at it in the MMF Flash runtime by Achronism Studios has taken an unexpectedly interesting approach. The game starts off as you would reasonably expect, with the traditional placement of Xs and Os against the computer - but instead of the game stopping in the inevitable draw when the board fills, another set of squares is added around the existing board and the game continues. The gradual addition of space changes the game a surprising amount, with the need to plan ahead to squares that are about to become available, and I actually felt quite determined to beat my silicon opponent during the board's later tricks.

Part of that was because I was also rather impressed with the AI - I definitely felt like I was competing against something that knew what it was doing rather than a computer taking stabs at random, and it seemed to handle the whole aspect of forward planning rather decently.

Noughts and Crosses Extreme (honestly)
davidn: (rabbit)
Have I mentioned how much I love MMF recently? Ever since I discovered it through its predecessors, I've just taken it completely for granted that I can put sketches of applications together almost instantly without needing to worry about the underlying engine, and it can do a surprising amount in terms of complexity before it begins to get unwieldy. If regular programming languages are a blank canvas with which you can do anything, and most game creation systems are colouring books, MMF just hands you some brushes that might be a tiny bit large for very specific situations. (While ZZT gives you some potatoes.) And in theory, soon you'll also be able to change the export settings and have things immediately in Flash and Xcode (although the instantness of them may be some way off yet).

Blame it and the fraction of a gestalt entity known as [livejournal.com profile] teogames, then, for this (if it makes you or me feel any better about it). When a discussion about a sliding puzzle on Professor Layton got started, I recalled that I had gone as far as to write a tree-based solver to get past it for me. I then realized that in the solver, I had the perfect tool with which to create my own diabolical challenges and verify they were at least possible, and a competent recreation of the puzzle style was done in just over an hour.


I'm not really sure how I got here


I have called this FISP for now. Three of the letters stand for "Impossible Sliding Puzzles". Drag the shapes about with the mouse, with the aim of squeezing the yellow one around to the goal space - the one available level is what I would consider one of the easiest puzzles that I'm going for with this project, and it's solvable in at most 19 moves.

The dragging of the shapes is still a bit tuggy if you get caught on other shapes... I'll have to put a bit more effort in to get rid of that.
davidn: (prince)
This is something I wrote for Clickteam's site as a summary of what people could expect from the Flash game sponsorship market. I should warn that it's fairly immense even by my usual standards, but if you're not interested in the process - I sold a Flash game! CannonBob is the first game-related thing that I've sold on to a larger entity.

ExpandAnd this is how it happened... )
davidn: (prince)
Marking about the fifth game that I've released since starting my alleged current project, I battered this puzzle/observation thing out in MMF over the last week after taking the concept from a game that I was doing for another site. Buying the Commodore 64 book had got me in something of an 80s mood - I came up with the entire "storyline" for it on Tuesday morning and it was done by Friday. I wanted it to be a bit... crazier and take itself less seriously than some of my other games, striving for a mood that was something like the random shareware games that I was fed on while growing up.


Special Agent Bunnet versus Doctor Dishwater


The aim is simple, as described in the story - deactivate the bombs by finding the buttons that don't have duplicates anywhere else - but the field you have to search through gets gradually larger throughout the game. About ten people have reached the end so far - one of them in four minutes, which surprised me as my own record's closer to five. Hopefully it's the kind of thing that you can use to distract yourself for lunch - then to forget that lunchtime ended an hour ago.

What I'm interested in is whether this sort of anti-pairs game is something that anybody's done before - it's such a simple idea that I feel that they must have, but I can't name anything myself (though perhaps you could argue that it's just a variant on the hidden-object click-em-up genre).

I'm also aware that this game's title starts with "Special Agent", further cementing the theory that I only have three game titles that I'm going to be using for the rest of time.
davidn: (ace)
It's been about a month since I released the Flash version of Treasure Tower, and since then, I've developed a hopeless addiction to the MochiMedia statistics pages that are graphing my life out Dave Gorman-style. The trouble with them is that you can see exactly what's happening to the game and where it's getting views from as it spreads around the world, and so I can hardly tear my eyes off them. I included their adverts in it as well, which pay you a fraction of a cent each time the game is viewed. Here's what my latest obsession looks like:


This is the summary graph that shows the views per day - it doesn't directly indicate money made on that day, because the payment made per thousand views is different depending on how expensive it is to buy advertising in the country that the game was viewed in.

There's a pattern to the graph as it gets submitted to various sites, resulting in a spike of views that then diminishes over time as the game makes its way off the front pages and down into the archives. In the beginning, I submitted the game to be distributed by Mochi and also put it on Newgrounds, and most of my views came from Newgrounds at first - today there are six thousand views there in total, which is a completely unprecendented figure for my EXE games. However, after four days, China and then Korea got hold of it, and the view count rocketed to 15,000 per day (but, as I mentioned above, this didn't mean I was rolling in it because the money made from adverts there is very little). I've no idea what the next sort of gentle curve is, because it's notably un-spike-like - but just as it seemed to be going down again, the game was featured on a site that's visited a lot by people from Argentina and Spain, and that caused another spike with a bit more revenue to go with it.

As you can see, it's not a replacement-career-level money maker or anything, but it's nice to get a little extra back from putting a game out on to the Internet, and also to be able to see just how many people are playing something that I've made.

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