www.zombiegecko.com

Well, i’m almost done with Iceblast:LC and I thought I’d give you guys a look. Here is a screenshot of the game now:

See anything different? He he… Well creating a online game you have to make sure to have the single most important function to your game. The Mute button. You should always add in the mute button so that your players won’t be caught by their boss/teacher/parents!

the other new thing you can see is the combometer & the pow button. The combo meter fills up when you create combos and once you have it filled, the pow button appears. Click on it and you’ll get a surprise that will help you get a higher score.

I’ve also added a ranking system based on the score, to encourage players to explore the strategies needed to get a higher score and in turn achieve a higher rank.

Now the rest of the stuff I have to do is a leaderboard. I’m probably going with Mochileaderboards because I’m way too lazy to create my own, and since i’m going with mochiads anyway.

So keep your eyes on this blog, Iceblast:Level Challenge will be out any day now!

I’ve recently had the pleasure of being an Alpha tester for a new game created for Kongregate by Flipline. Called Remnants of Skystone, its one of the recipients of Kongregate’s Premium games sponsorship where they sponsor up to $150k for developers to create a multiplayer game. Skystone is a MMORPG wrapped in a platformer with a pretty unique art style. That’s my Crag class character Burberry there by the way.

You start off in the character creation screen and can create 3 different classes of characters. One can fly, the other can climb walls and the third uses a grappling hook. The world is set in a steampunk environment where Mimics(monsters of the world) threaten the inhabitants and there is the all too prevalent threat of the haze, which can only be held back by Ether. I’ve only played for a couple hours so I don’t know too much of the story but it seems interesting so far.

I have to say I’m very impressed with the way flash games are headed. Imagine just a few years ago, a game like this played on your browser would be unbelievable! Hats off to Flipline and also to Kongregate for putting money into innovation!

Check out Remnants of Skystone at www.remnantsofskystone.com.

Hi Everyone, if you don’t know, Iceblast is now selling only for $9.95! Get it here! Now if that’s too expensive for you, GameDuJour will be having a discount on the 22nd of November 2008 which will make Iceblast 50% cheaper! It will be only for 24 hours so if you really want to try out Iceblast for the low, low price of $4.97 check out www.gamedujour.com

Ciao!

Well, progress has been good and I’ve got the main file down to 3.3mb. The gameplay is now an unending style. You get around 2 minutes to destroy all the crystals and when you do, the field is repopulated and the time reset. I’ve got this working but after playing Bejeweled Twist, I feel that I need to add a hook to keep people playing longer so I’ve decided to add a combo meter. When you reach a 10x combo you get a special burst that destroys all of the ice crystals on the field by one. I’ll put up a version for trial soon on the main site.

In other news, Iceblast will be on www.gamedujour.com on the 20th of November with a 50% discount. So those of you on the fence on buying it, this is the perfect time!

Well, for those of you keeping up to date on casual games, Bejeweled recently released an updated to their Bejeweled franchise with Bejeweled twist. Anyone with even a vague interest in casual games should know Bejeweled and I think this new iteration brings with it a fresh new…dare I say it…trick(ha ha, you thought I was gonna say twist right? Oh darn…). The key difference is that now, instead of swapping gems, you rotate 4 gems in a clockwise direction to get the matches. This is a brilliant move by Popcap as with one change of control, they keep the game familiar yet oh so different(but did you know they were developing it for 4 years?). All the patterns that you learned to recognize to swap gems must be relearned to new patterns for the rotation mechanic. Something seemingly so simple can proved a whole new experience. 

Here are my thoughts on why Bejeweled Twist works:

1) Rotation mechanic is fresh & new, provides new challenge

2) Combo meter, each match you make increases the meter. When it’s full, you get a special fruit gem. Its relatively hard to max out the meter as you need to make something like 50 matches in a row to get it. It adds to the challenge, I know I was intent on maxing it out to try to get the fruit gem.

3) The only way to lose the game is through bombs, they have a countdown that reduces each time you rotate a crystals. Gone are the time limits. They are encouraging more cerebral thinking which the players will appreciate.

4) Cheap. Its retailing for around $10 USD which is half the price of other puzzle games on the portals. 

5) Unlockable game modes. This time you have to unlock 2 other game modes. One is Blitz which is is a speed challenge and the other is called Challenge, where you have to solve puzzles.

I think Popcap have got another hit on their hands and as a game developer I keep notes on what they’ve done right so that I can incorporate it into my games. I applaud their efforts and have to say good job!

Check out Bejeweled at www.popcap.com

p.s - I’m not a Popcap fanboy by any means. I don’t really like Peggle, their other mega seller and have no Idea why people like it so much! Oh well, just goes to show that they are one of the masters of casual games!

Well, I’m currently converting the full version of Iceblast into something light for the web. So how do I turn 27mb into a 3mb online flash game? By stripping out all levels but one, including the music and art related to it. Also exporting as a mono channel mp3 with lower quality AND exporting with jpeg quality around 80%. Since I initially created it as a download, the resolution of 800×600 is pretty large for a webgame so thats why i have to resort to such drastic measures to reduce file size.

Iceblast:Level Challenge will be a sort of unending play type where the goal is to score as many points as possible before the body temperature reaches 0. Everytime the game field is cleared, the temperature will be reset to full and the field will be repopulated with more crystals. I want to put a leaderboard so players will be able to compare their highscore with other players, hopefully this will drive them to replay the game.

The purpose of creating this webversion is to promote my game, and hopefully get some money through sponsorship from portals AND/OR though ads in the game. Once its done i’ll put it up on www.zombiegecko.com for free play!

Just to be clear, I’m using Flash CS3 right now using AS3 to code my games. There were several reasons why I chose to use Flash as the platform of development.

1) I hadn’t programmed in a long time and was familiar with Flash from my animation job

2) I felt that learning AS3 would be easy(ier)

3) Ability to create a web version and downloadable version

4) Easy publishing to PC & Mac and if I wanted to even Linux

5) Felt that it would be easier to hire Flash programmers

My other choices were to go with C++ and do a heck of a lot of research to find out just what libraries and tools I needed which I felt would take too much time.

I also tried Torque Game Builder (www.garagegames.com) and although it seemed nice and easy to use, in order to get it to do what I wanted to do for Iceblast, I would have to put in a lot of coding work anyway. 

So, I ended up using Flash. After 1 year of coding with it, I feel that Flash AS3 is like a hyperactive child that’s just finished 5 packs of M&Ms. Sometimes I have tons of fun playing with it, enjoying the ease of use and the fun factor. Other times, I want to flip it over and smack it while it bleats in pain because it just did something really really stupid!

Admittedly, some of the problems I encountered weren’t Flash’s fault but the 3rd party software I used to create the final game. Also, using AS3 when at that time people were just migrating from AS2 was quite a headache as a lot of the tutorials and books were geared for AS2.

The Good:

• Fast prototyping 
• create art in the same app 
• AS3 is pretty easy to understand 
• publish to multiple platforms 
• lots of tutorials and examples online

The Bad:

• Not a performance powerhouse(which I learned to my detriment)
• Mac version is a bit laggy when drawing compared to PC
• strange ways of doing things(create a sound object to play, but it doesn’t have a stop()….what!!!?!!?)
• I had a strange problem when publishing if I used mp3 sound compression(it sometimes corrupted the sound so instead of a sound effect i’d get white noise)
• 3rd party software to create the final exe/app has its own sets of idiosyncrasies
• couldn’t find qualified Flash AS3 programmers(here in Malaysia most of them are still using AS2)

Woah, seems like there are more cons than pros… It’s not so bad though. I’ll still be using Flash for my next projects, now that I’ve learned what all the negatives are and how to work around them!

Hi everyone! So I’ve decided to blog about my experiences making games, playing games and talking about games! Right now i’m creating a free-to-play version of Iceblast that will be out soon as well as my next game.

It’ll be a much slower paced, puzzle game called Ember. I’ll give you more details in the coming days, so keep this blog bookmarked!