Here's a little clip of what to expect from "Destroy all Cars", which should hopefully be live by the end of the week

This is just going to be a short "So obvious maybe it's not worth saying" post, but lets face it, most of the posts here fall into that category.

The driving / crashing game I'm working on right now ( Look a couple of posts down to read very little about it. NDA's, they're like garlic to this vampire of a blog ) has a nice Star Wars wipe. I've used it a couple of times before, it's a simple yet effective transition, and it suits some games well.
In this case it fits as it reinforces the fast movement from left to right, which is what the game's all about. And you thought I just threw all these games together by blindly bashing on the keys until the errors stop. Ahem.

Anyway as this game uses box2D the results are very variable. A little tweak here and a little one there and it throws up totally different results, which in turn means a lot of testing. I must have seen the same screens thousands of times. I mean that literally.

The other day my beautiful Star Wars wipe got to the point where I couldn't take it any more. I imagine people who work in the porn industry get sick of it after a while, or a tour guide at the Sistine Chapel ( Now there's two extremes ). I'm going to shorten it to make it run quicker.

No.

Trust your instincts when it comes to the timing of things like that. If it looked great the first couple of times ( After tweaking of course. Nothing is right first time ) then it's right. Don't let your boredom get the better of you.
Many a time I've had to dig my heels in with clients where they've seen lots and lots of iterations of a game ( That's agile development for you ) where they've got sick of the same sequence I have, and suggested it be shortened.

Just say the same thing you would to a unkempt man with his arm in a sling asking you to just help him put something heavy in the back of his van, here, it's just up this dark alley. Just reach right in there and put it far at the back, whilst he stands behind you.

If you say yes to it, it will be the development equivalent of having to rub the lotion into your skin. And no, we don't want the hose again.

It's not just transitions, text too is something that it's easy to skip by too quickly. A simple rule of thumb, read the text yourself twice. Not coder read it, proper read it. Twice. Slowly. And that's how long it's going to have to sit there, no matter how many times you have to sit through it ( Before any one chimes in and says you just the reduce the time during testing and put it back to the original when the game's nearly done, I know, this is just design theory. Work with me here ).

Squize.

Our mate Ali has had his Mechanaught game reviewed over at Jay's. We really like the game.


I just finished Arkham Asylum the other day. Fantastic game, believe the hype. All the reviews said it's about 10 hours gameplay, but I've been off the xbox for a while so I'm a bit rusty, it must have taken me more like 12/14 ( I've still got to go back and max those achievements out. I'm a gamer score whore ). That didn't have lives, and just as well as it would be in the bin by now if I got a Game Over after dying 3 times and then sent back a fair way.
That's a 10+ hour game, not a 30min Flash game. A lives mechanic only really works if you can complete the game with the base number of lives, or you can either collect extra ones or have continues ( Or it's pure score attack, Geometry Wars being the perfect example of a popular console shoot'em up with a nasty ol' Game Over ) so you can actually complete it.

I think it's fair to say that there isn't a progressive Flash game with 10 hours playability before the job is done. Yeah you may have played DTD for 10 hours in total ( Which has lives in the form of energy ) but nothing that I know of that's 10 hours from the start of the tale to the conclusion ( Does Dofus count ? Feel free to correct me if it does ).

Lives are a valid mechanic for small Flash games. I'm not saying every game in Flash should use them ( Untold games shouldn't ), but a lot of games suit them, need them in fact. Just to repeat myself, they lengthen the game play ( The game play we can't lengthen with more real content due to budgets ). It may be a slightly artificial and forced way to do it, but in adding a clear risk and reward to the game it works well.
The alternative being ? Grinding out a victory ? I'm old enough to have used infinite lives pokes in games, and no matter how hard you try you soon succumb to the safety / apathy that offers and with no risk you miss out on that all important money shot that is reward.

Squize.

Figured it would be an idea to actually talk about Flash work on here for a pleasant change. I've been quiet of late as to be honest nothing much has been happening. I've been wrestling with box2D for one project, finishing off another and working on the TD as a personal release.

Here's a little grab from the National Geographic project ( I can't say anything more about it, NDAs = not the best subject for a blog post )

So, it's 21:11h here in Germany now and just 2 minutes ago I wiped off the last item on my todo list for Via Romanum, a word game I've been working on for the last couple of days.

There will be no public release for the next 2 weeks though (I'm on holiday, yehaaa!).

So without going into detail (I'll have to do a quick rant about creating and searching large lists of words and how to make that quick enough to test a whole 10x10 grid for left/right and top/down combinations of letters that might form words)



Off to the beach now ... nGFX