Posts Tagged ‘SuccessStory’
/ ESCAPE \ Published and Released for iOS/Android
Hey guys, you may remember our game, / ESCAPE \, from Ludum Dare 21. Many of you seemed interested in a mobile version of the game, and now it’s here!
Kongregate has chosen us to be their first ever published iOS/Android game. We did most of the work porting the game to the device, but Kongregate was very accommodating about integrating the new API and offered us some amazing deals when it came to advertisement! Hopefully we’ll see more games with Kongregate login/badges in the future!
My (slightly delayed) October-Challenge-Game
Hi there,
A while ago the October-Challenge was held. It went over the entire month, with the simple rule “make 1$ with a game.”
I planned to enter this game, but unfortunately the port wasn’t ready in time. So now, with a slight (and very miniscule) delay I present my iPhone-game!
Unstoppaball DX is a marble-style puzzler, in which you roll a ball (by tilting the iPhone, no less) through 30 varied levels.
Check out the trailer if you’d like to know more.
Also features a new soundtrack and ball-customization, with 36 balls available.
It’s now up on iTunes. Some say it might be the Best Game Ever. (it’s not) (it’s still fun, though 
)
My Experience With My First LD
Hello! I am static_boy123 and I just wanted to share my experience in my first LD, and first game, with others:
I found out about this competition last year when Notch(The maker of Minecraft) entered Prelude of the Chambered, I immediately said to myself, ”I will do this next year.” So now I did it, I entered in my first, but not last, Ludum Dare.
I was watching tv one night when something popped into my mind, the Ludum Dare. I checked the website to see when it was, two hours. I ran to my computer and started memorizing my basic -5 file- library inside and out, after an hour I was able to repeat most of it from memory and the rest, thankfully, wasn’t needed. So I waited the longest hour of my life hoping the theme would be kittens.
Once the competition finally started I cursed everyone who voted anti-kitten, opened up handy dandy Visual Studio, and got to work. I typed out what I remembered of my library only two classes, but I was able to make a bunch of edits to one to make a new class. I had lots of trouble starting and coming up with ideas for what to do, but I did the basic things, like changing the screen size and creating the controls for moving.
After an hour of sitting and thinking I had an idea, a game that is more based on story than game play, but still has game play. I sat down and started, I added in textures, added a way to shoot, and realized just how inexperienced I am when it comes to game making.
Coding was crazy, I had tons of road blocks; bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I had to go into untraveled land to create the game, and I also spent plenty of time in well worn territory. Overall my game was very fun and frustrating to make, but it was well worth it.
Now a list of what was good and what wasn’t:
Good Things:
- It was fun
- I learned a lot
- I coded in XNA which I am very comfortable in
- Everybody was very supportive of my first game
- I am happy with my work
- My coding works
- Others enjoyed my game
- The ultra great graphics game “Real Life” didn’t distract me that much
- My entry has two huge bugs
- I didn’t get to finish
- My original texture looked more like a guy masturbating than holding a gun(tip: if this happens move the arm higher on the body and refine the angle
) - It was very frustrating
- The story wasn’t clear because it wasn’t finished
- I spent a lot of time doing nothing during the challenge(SLEEEEEEEEP)
Tiny Hawk – from LD to PSP
Thursday, December 15th, 2011 2:56 pm
Tiny Hawk was my entry to Ludum Dare 11 back in April 2008. The theme was “Minimalist”. What I made was a single-switch platforming game, inspired by the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series of games. It had a cute little combo system for getting high scores, and you had several context sensitive moves you could perform with just one button. I remember that when drawing the main character, I tried to keep the resolution as small as possible while still making it recognizable as a skateboarder.
Tiny Hawk didn’t win Ludum Dare 11, but I was very happy with how it was received. It was featured on the IndieGames blog, Auntie Pixelante called it the bee’s knees, a fellow called Palad made a couple of fan levels for it, and somebody even wrote a MobyGames page for it, with the absolute coolest description of the game; I highly recommend reading it.
Fast forward to 2010; PoV announces the October Challenge, wherein he challenges everyone to make a game or polish up an old one during the month October, and make just one dollar of revenue. I jump on it, and what better game to polish up than one of my most highly regarded LD games, Tiny Hawk? I figured that making a Flash game would be a good way to make a few dollars, because of the relative ease of making money through a sponsorship with the help from a site like FlashGameLicense. I end up tweaking the game a whole bunch even while it’s sitting on FGL up for grabs. This does end up improving the game’s look a lot, but eventually doesn’t get me many new bidders. I end up selling a primary license to the good folks at GameBods.
The Flash version does end up being quite different from the Ludum Dare version. The game now uses more than just one button, based on feedback received about the LD version, where people would sometimes get annoyed when they couldn’t turn around after they made a mistake. I also include acceleration into the game, which ends up being a core mechanic, as the player needs to make sure they have enough speed to make all the jumps. The visual look is of course also highly improved.
The Flash version ends up on many Flash portals around the world. It’s been played over a million times across different sites. You can play it on my own site TinyHawk.com, Armor Games, Kongregate, Newgrounds, etc.
After Tiny Hawk Flash is released, I start thinking about the possibility of making Flash games for a living. I sign up for some counseling on setting up my own business. Before I’m even through with that though, I get an e-mail from a representative of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and get into talks about developing PlayStation games. By March, I have set up a sole proprietorship, and have a PSP devkit ready to make games. I decide that Tiny Hawk would be a good first project to do. Mostly just to get my feet wet, and finish it quickly. I end up running into some problems though. I spend some significant time in the hospital, losing time and breaking my flow. I also end up starting the project in one of the dumbest ways possible. I decide that it would be good for productivity to use a high level scripting language to write the game logic, and only use C++ for the core graphics processing and stuff like that. This ends up not working out, as the PSP is not fast enough to run all the game logic in an interpreted scripting language, and I end up struggling writing all the necessary language bindings.
I finish Tiny Hawk PSP port in the beginning of December. I barely miss the deadline to get it out on PlayStation Network by Christmas though.
And here’s what the game is looking like right now. The graphics are all new, and there’s a new scoring system. Otherwise it’s very similar to the Flash version. It’s coming out on January 4th in the European region, which I believe in the PlayStation Network’s case also includes South Africa and Australia, at least. I do intend to get it out at least in North America as well, as soon as possible.
I’m not going to go into too much detail in describing the game right now, but I hope you guys liked this retrospective on Tiny Hawk, and I hope if it’s available in your region and you have a PSP or a PS3, you check out the game when it comes out January 4th! (Rated PEGI 3)
Life is great.
Life is so great. My Stage3D Flash11 gamedev book was just published today!
Easy-to-remember links for sharing with people verbally:
http://mcfunkypants.com/amazon
http://mcfu
Shortest possible links:
http://amzn.to/tYmiSf
http://bit.ly/ptMfmP
I’m listed on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Stage3D-Molehil
Here’s my page on the Adobe website:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/author_bios/ch
Here is the product page at the publisher with more information:
https://www.packtpub.com/adobe-flash11
Full table of contents with all topics listed:
https://www.packtpub.com/toc/adobe-flash-11
The free sample chapter PDF, chapter 8:
http://packtlib.packtpub.com/sites/default/files
Demos of each chapter including the final game I teach readers to make:
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/flash11-stag
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/201
http://www.mcfunk
htt
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/flash1
http://www.mcfunkypants.c
http://www.
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/flash11-stage3
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/
http://www.mcfunkyp
Anyw
I’m so grateful for all the good luck I have. I could not have done it without +David Barnes +Maitreya Bhakal +Terry Paton +Thibault Imbert +Ryan Speets +Alejandro Santander +Mikko Haapoja +Evan Miller and so many more of my gamedev colleagues here, on g+ and twitter. There’s a bit of each of you in the book.
I must have saved the universe in a previous life since so many good things simply fall into my lap. Okay, a little hard work doesn’t hurt… but overall I feel like the luckiest guy in the world on a daily basis. Perhaps just believing that you’re lucky makes it so.
Kind regards,
Christer Kaitila
aka McFunkypants
blog: http://www.mcfunkypants.com
twitter: http://twitter.com/McFunkypants
google+: http://gplus.to/gamedev
P.S. This is how I feel right now:
I failed…
I failed the challenge, I wasn’t able to get $ 1 USD out of Escaparazzi during october, the “get the app into the appstore process” is too damn long, and I feel that I have not finished the game yet, but…
I got a 100000% of that during november .
I entered my game to WorldMakers (the first Chilean game development competition), achieving the second place, so I won:
- A Samsung Galaxy 5 I5500 phone. These are pretty inexpensive, but hey, free phone
- Any course I choose to take at Academia MacPC Crossmedia Training Center (I’ll take UDK programming, with a developer from Ace Team). These cost around $ 1000 USD
- An Internship at Behaviour. Priceless
I’m so happy I could explode.
Monster Match Alphabet completed and submitted!
Friday, October 14th, 2011 8:14 amDream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I was younger that was the motto I lived by. Now that I am a bit older I am finding that there is definitely a place for small dreams. I’d say that small dreams are essential to my survival.
I saw the October Challenge 2011 page late last month and immediately start planning something awesome. I was going to use October to finally learn Flixel, put together something awesome, and submit my first app to the Apple app store. After a week I was still learning the ropes in Flixel, making random art assets for a new game that I hadn’t even finish the design on, and had yet to renew my Apple developer account.
It was time to take a step back and evaluate if maybe I had been dreaming just a bit too big for a 1 month project that was being done in between doing my full time job and raising 3 children under the age of 3. I dug down into my unfinished prototypes directory and found a match game that I had started building to get a free PlayBook from RIM. It was a simple match game that I had designed to help my son learn the alphabet (and distract him when he launched into a terrible-twos induced fit). It had fallen by the wayside because I had decided that I wanted to make an app for Empire Avenue using their API instead.
I converted Monster match Alphabet to an Android project so that it could be brought to market as fast as possible. Then I spent some time working with the art assets and made sure that it played fairly well both on small screens and on tablet sizes.
Some of the monsters in Monster Match Alphabet
Is it original? Nope.
Is it epic? No.
Will most people taking part in the October Ludum Dare want to play it? No.
Is it done? YES.
Will my son enjoy playing it? YES.
Is it available on the Android market? YES! Yes indeed it is.
Since there is still some time left in the month I think I might actually try to continue making some changes and testing with the Android version. If I can I’ll also submit it to the PlayBook and Apple app markets, too.
Overall I have to say that this October dare taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes it is better to achieve a small dream than to have an unfulfilled big dream.
Diamond Hollow II Released!
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 1:58 am
After a seemingly long process, Diamond Hollow II, the follow up to my Ludum Dare 20 entry, is finally released (click to play)! Please let me know what you think! I’m always looking for feedback to not only improve my current games, but also give me ideas to better craft games for the future.
If you want to see the process of how Diamond Hollow started, how it ended, and how it slowly evolved into Diamond Hollow II, check out my evolution post here! Thanks!
The Evolution Of Diamond Hollow
Thursday, August 18th, 2011 1:42 am
With LD21 rapidly approaching, I wanted to do a Post-Post-Mortem of my LD20 entry, since in addition to improving the game to make it ready for wide release, I’ve been working on a sequel for the last 4 months. Links for those who don’t want to read:
Diamond Hollow on Kongregate (380,000+ plays): Diamond Hollow
Diamond Hollow II: Coming soon…
So let’s get to it!
In the beginning (approximate 7pm PST on the opening day of LD20), there were a couple of block games. These block games were well intentioned, but I could tell they weren’t going in the direction I wanted them to, so I quickly tossed them in the trash (the last one actually went into a filing folder somewhere to deal with at a later date).
My goal was to make something that players would find fun. Being the superficial dev I am, I quickly took to the past winners pages, and found that players like platformers. Great! So I immediately switched focus from block/puzzle game to platformer. I decided to go with a tower climbing theme, and this was born:
It was very generic; it was very simple. Now that I had the basics down in a way that I thought I could turn into something fun, I began drafting out what features I wanted in the game. Among these were:
- Randomly generated infinitely high level
- Quick paced movement and jumping
- Gun shooting with the mouse
- Enemies to kill
- Something to collect
- Upgrades to spend your collections on
It was looking good! It was at this point I needed to choose a theme. While it was a tower climbing game, I wanted to do something not tower related. My first thoughts were climbing a castle (but that would have just been a tower so I threw that out), and climbing up through the branches of two large trees on either side of you. However, my powers of art are extremely limited, so while I would have enjoyed a tree climbing theme, it would have looked pretty terrible and have taken too much time. However, dirt was something I knew I could do easily (fill brown, add noise filter, DONE) in photoshop, and the first thing that popped into my mind was a cave. So quickly I hopped to photoshop, and the pictures above immediately grew into:
Awesome! But then I hit the “collect” point. What can you collect in a cave? Rocks? Bats? Diamonds! It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but with the clock ticking, I hopped on it, and it wasn’t long until I had cute little diamonds sitting to collect. At this point I also added my first enemy, the slime:
Things were looking great now! I could jump up a cave, collect diamonds, and avoid cute little slimes that liked to wander back and forth (why? because they are slimes of course). However, in order to hook players I needed upgrades. Many people find upgrades cheap and hate them, but they are like crack in the world of casual flash gaming (and I, like many others, feel drawn to upgrade anything and everything). However, in preparing how I wanted to do upgrades, I started thinking of other aspects of games that hook me. The main one that came to me was Achievements. Achievements usually mean nothing, but they can make a game much more fun by giving you goals, and goals in games are always great. For example, killing goblins for hours can be boring, but when you’re doing it for a quest or achievement, you feel driven to do it, and you feel like it means something. If I’m going to have you climbing an endless cave, I might as well reward you as much as I can.
So I took to photoshop, and in a surprisingly short amount of time (according to my timelapse), I had a protype mostly complete:
This is what pushed me over and kicked my motivation into overdrive. As soon as I had this working I blogged it. There was just something about it that made me want to play the game myself, and it sounded like others liked it too.
I continued to work to polish the game, add a few more enemies (plants that shoot at you), and get the game in a generally fun state. However, sunday morning at about 4am I ran into a hurdle. I had never actually used FLStudio before, and after downloading the demo, I found I probably should have practiced. I started putting random beats together, and would constantly start new projects because every song I tried to make was like terrible terrible noise. I googled some tutorials, but found nothing all that great. After looking around for something to save me, I found some videos showing how to put together simple beats and use instruments. I put together a basic background beat, threw in an obnoxious sounding tune on top of it, and called it good (it still kills my ears when I hear it though). When trying to save it, I realized it would be good if I could save the actual project, so I attempted to buy the full version to save my “creation”. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to like my credit card. I tried again. And again. Strange. The funny thing is, when I attempted to go for breakfast, my card was also declined. It wasn’t until Monday night that I learned that me trying to buy a strange program (FLStudio) on a strange website at a strange hour in the morning (5am) flagged the fraud check on my card, and they disabled it thinking I had it stolen. In the end it is for the best that I no longer have anything more of an mp3 for the “music” I made that morning.
After a nice 8 hours of sleep, adding sound effects went much easier thanks to as3sfxr. I got through that, balanced the game a bit, and ended up with pretty much a final product.
The last thing I needed was a name. I asked a couple of friends what they would call a game about collecting diamonds in a cave, and I got some absolutely terrible suggestions (that I’m happy I didn’t go with, because some were names of other games about caves they had played at one point but forget). Eventually, after using thesaurus.com for a bit, I settled on a simple “Diamond Hollow”. It wasn’t exciting, daring, or clever, but it got the job done.
And with that… It was complete! And before the deadline, even! Overly excited, I submitted it and took a sigh of relief.
The next day I woke up refreshed, pulled up the game and started to play. Immediately I realized my error. The game was not balanced at all. Knockback was frustrating, the game was hard in general, and some of the achievements were way overtuned. Fortunately, while it was too late to change for the contest, there was still a life that Diamond Hollow could take after the competition.
Wasting no time I immediately got to fixing things. The first thing was the music. It had to go. Without the restrictions of having to make it myself, I turned to music licensed under the creative commons, and found something upbeat and catchy. An instant huge improvement. I then started rebalancing things which turned out to be a much bigger feat than expected. Changing achievements to require less skill is easy, but when you make gameplay changes that affect how easy the game is overall, all of a sudden your rebalanced achievements need re-rebalancing. It was a headache, but it got done. I then adding more polish to the game, fixing things like spawning, diamond locations, just to make the game feel less “thrown together”.
My goto place for flash games is Kongregate, so that is where I settled on for a home for Diamond Hollow. I wasn’t expecting much, as this game was made in a very short amount of time (well under 48 hours, even if you count the improvements I made). I was thinking it would get a low to mediocre response, and it was going to be something I would just watch and see how it progressed so that I could learn from it, and use player feedback as a way to improve my game development skills for future projects. But it turned out very different.
As soon as I posted it, it got an “okay” rating, but I began getting tons of feedback. While I had intended to use the feedback for future improvement in general, it all felt like improvements that the game should have had in the first place. I began compiling the feedback, coming up with concrete things to change to address the issues, and got to work. Every couple days I would work on implementing the latest round of feedback, release a new version, and announce the changes. It turns out that players like it when a developer listens and implements their feedback, and the effect was incredible. My “meh” rating went up by quite a bit until it was a “pretty good” rating. My plays started growing quickly, I got featured on the front page, and soon enough I obtained badges for my game. At the time of writing, the game has over 380,000 plays on kongregate. This was really exciting!
Then the feedback changed into bigger things. People wanted to explore. People wanted bosses. People wanted an “ending”. At this point I had to start rethinking my actions. There were a lot of things I would have liked to put into Diamond Hollow if I had the time during the competition, and there were a lot of features that players think would improve the game a ton. However, these would require major rewrites of all the code, at which point I might as well just start over from scratch. And that is where Diamond Hollow II was born.
Like with Diamond Hollow, I began by drafting out the features I wanted. Given I had no time constraint, I was able to include a lot of things, but I also had to limit myself. Did I want to get myself into an overbudgeted project that I would never finish? That was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. Among the list of features, I had the following:
- An ending
- Multiple guns
- Bosses
- More achievements
- A story mode
- Particles
- Varied graphical environments
- More enemies
With these goals down, I got to work. Rewriting the engine from scratch, I was able to greatly optimize it, allowing me to implement all the features I wanted, without it being slower than the original. However, I hit some major snags along the way in the form of content. Creating levels was taking quite a long time and it was starting to make me rethink having a story mode with hand crafted levels. Perhaps I could randomly generate the levels? Would players know the difference? In the end I stuck with it, and eventually managed to carve out the shell of a story mode. Then I began to fill it with enemies (new and old), and tons of improvements including new graphics, powerups, more upgrades, story text, and bosses.
Thanks Ludum Dare!
Back in February, I took part in my first (mini) Ludum Dare. I created a game called “fishslap” which I was quite happy with. Simple, entertaining and fun… that was my philosophy.
Here’s a screenshot of the original version:
Here’s the link to the MiniLD-24 entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-24/?action=preview&uid=3007
I spent the next few months reworking an ActionScript3 version, then an ActionScript3 mobile version – but I found that when I compiled it to iPhone performance was not good! In the end, I came up with something “acceptable”, but every single line of code, every graphic, every effect had to be painfully scrutinised in order to get a reasonable frame-rate.
So I bit the bullet… purchased a cheap Mac, and got into Corona SDK. Corona SDK is highly recommended! The language, Lua, has a lot of similarities to ActionScript… and performance is BLITZING!
Just a couple of days ago my final, and by far best version, of fishslap was accepted into the (Apple) App Store! WOOHOOOO!
Check it out…. there is a FREE version and a cheap .99c version.
Here’s some screen shots:
Here’s a youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAR3o9ia-qc
iTunes Link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fishslap/id454943320
My website Link:
http://www.pellenproductions.com/fishslap.html
I still find it amazing that this game originally appeared from 48 hours work, with such competition limitations as “2 colours”, “1 button”, “fishing” and “reverse”(?) . This made me think of fishing, but from the fishes point of view. It motivated me to save up for equipment and software and get into mobile development, which (early days) I’m loving!
Hoping to be a part of LD21
Thanks Ludumites!,
Cheers,
fishbrain
PRIOR – Post-Compo Awesomesauce
Also, check out the PRIOR Post Mortem to see how the development of this thingamadoodle.
My entry for Ludum Dare 19 – PRIOR – has gotten some love post-compo, both in development and in release. After another 100+ hours of work (updates, tweaks… BUG FIXES! >_< ) I released it on FlashGameLicense and was sponsored by Armor Games. Since then, the game has received a ton of plays on portals all over teh interwebz, and I’ve been blown away by the community’s reception to it.
PRIOR's "Box Art"
PRIOR also got nominated for the Canadian Videogame Awards – I didn’t see that coming, but it was a huge honor. Of course, this was after a few hundred hours worth of post-Compo updates, but this was mostly bugfixing and gameplay tuning. The game overall was largely still the same as at the end of the LD48 
Overall, I think Ludum Dare 19 was the most productive 48 hours of my life – it’s certainly paid off! Thanks again to the Ludum Dare folks for setting up an excellent Compo
And feel free to discuss the storyline. As the developer, my absolute favorite part of this game is watching people figure out what the hell is going on!
HackBotz – Post Compo Release
Saturday, March 12th, 2011 7:06 pm
My LD#18 game, HackBotz, was the first game I did using Flash. I felt like it was a pretty good concept, and so when the October challenge came along I was motivated to polish it up a bit, add some levels, and release it into the wild. A couple of months on Flashgamelicense.com and a few sponsorship offers later, I managed to get a non-exclusive with addictinggames.com which was pretty cool. It was a good learning experience, and I owe it all to the Ludum Dare compo. You can play the game here.
