I’ve brought back the webplayers for the game, “Save The Princess” again. And if that wasn’t enough, I even added in “Boomshakalaka” and “Escape” webplayers, too!
Here’s the links!
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Return Of The Game Webplayers!
Read more: Return Of The Game Webplayers!
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Google+ Games Review
Read more: Google+ Games ReviewI figured for studying purposes, I’d play the Google+ puzzle games, and see how they were like. I’m a sucker for puzzles game, after all, so I figured I’d play the following games: Angry Birds, Bejewled, Diamond Dash, and Bubble Island. In each game, since I’ve already played a game similar to these games already, I focused on the methods they seem to either monetize or advertise.
For advertising methods, Angry Birds was easily my favorite. By starting a level, you’ll immediately notice a friend’s avatar on the upper-right-hand corner, indicating his/her best score, along with your own. It creates a friendly sense of competition with your friends, as everyone tries to beat everyone else’s score. If you complete a stage, and manage to topple your friends score, you’re given an opportunity to share that score, and/or brag to your lesser friends how you’ve managed to top their high score. The social aspect is beautifully integrated into the game, managing to be inviting and competitive, without being annoying.
Bejewled was comparatively interesting. The game lists a few power-ups right from the get-go, though only one is available. By playing a brief 10-seconds game, you can gain a few coins to purchase the listed power-ups, and try again. Reaching a certain score allows you to share that score to your friends. Also, if certain items seems too expensive, it seems you can pay-up real dollars to obtain more coins. I personally liked how the system doesn’t prevent you from obtaining power-ups; but you can get them faster if you pay. Since it doesn’t penalize non-payers, nobody gets left out.
Bubble Island, a Bubble-Bobble clone, plays pretty much as expected. It’s cluttered high scores UI, though, attempts way too hard to make you invite your friends. Practically every button (and there’s a lot, let me tell you) except one attempts to spam your stream or invite your friends directly. The last button leads you to the next stage. Perhaps the worst annoyance is the “retry level” system. While the game occasionally rewards you a free retry, the rest must be regained by inviting your friend. Essentially, if you fail a level without a retry, you can’t play the game anymore. This annoyance is somewhat disheartening, especially since the level progression was carefully calculated.
Diamond Dash, though, manages to make things worse. The Collapse clone requires that you pay one heart to progress through the game. Play enough games, then it’ll prevent you from playing further until you invite another friend. To play further without invites, you’ll have to refresh the page again, making the game go through the excruciating load screen. It’s high-scores panel manages to look exactly the same thing as Bubble Island as well. This was, by far, the least pleasant experience I had with these Google+ games.
Overall, I think Angry Birds shows the best way to implement Social competitions. The invites or share requests are non-intrusive, and context sensitive. Beat someone else? Brag about it! Can’t solve a puzzle? Ask your friends! Or, of course, just buy the black eagle (skip-level item). It encourages collaboration and creativity without being annoying about. This design is extremely encouraging, and I hope to see other games follow suit.
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Digital Art Gallery
Read more: Digital Art GalleryI’ve been recently practicing on drawing digitally this past few months. The fruits of my works are here:
I’m not going to pretend that it’s great or anything. I’m a programmer first, game developer second, and artist at distant third. Nonetheless, I thought it’d be nice to share it around.
All artworks are licensed by Creative Commons.
Thanks in advance for checking it out!
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Boomshakalaka Postmortem
Read more: Boomshakalaka PostmortemI know this is very, very late, but here’s a look back at how our Global Game Jam 2011 game went. Rather than focusing the advantages and the disadvantages in our final product (which I describe on another webpage, anyways), I’ll be evaluating how we went through the development process for this game.
The Team
To me, the most important part of any software development process is how well the team works together. Frequently, the smallest things causes development to halt, such as miscommunication between two members, the lack of trust, perfectionism, or straight-out laziness. All too frequently, I’ve worked with teams that were heavily demoralized by a single team member, who refused to cooperate. As such, I strongly value a team who’s communicative, ambitious, friendly, but also self-critical.
In this sense, the team I worked with–Ruben Brown, Carrington Dennis, Damion Jackson, and Marcus Whitfield–was excellent. Everyone was ambitious, but at the same time, understanding. The artists, Damion and Marcus, were right there when I needed them. Although we’ve had a few arguments here and there, rarely did I feel that our team was uncooperative or lazy. I have no regret with working with you guys, and I definitely look forward in teaming up in the near-future.
The Process
A good team, however, is nothing without a plan or a process. Unfortunately, this was where I think we started faltering.
The first problem we had was the plan. Ruben began by outlining several meanings of our theme, extinction, on our white board. From there, we’ve pondered for about 3 hours on how to make any of the written keywords into a game. My first red flag.
In most game jams I’ve went to, I found it easier to come up with a gameplay mechanic first, then eventually cover it with theme-related story, artwork, and music. This proved itself once again when, out of impatience, I pitched an idea about a game that initially used an entire keyboard, but gradually reduced the number of usable keys. Within an hour, we were able to agree upon an intriguing idea to develop on: a tower-defense game where each defense, the limited-use ground mines, was detonated by a key on the keyboard.
To be fair, I was the only one in the team that went to game jams before. And four of them were eight hours long.
For the process, we tried to get immediately started. Sadly, the majority of us didn’t know how to use Unity 3D, the game engine we decided to use. While I was able to get started immediately, both Ruben and Carrington had to go through a number of tutorials to get themselves oriented with the tool. While this wasn’t detrimental in the beginning, it certainly had an impact towards the end, where weird bugs started cropping up.
On the good side, we did get a prototype working within the middle of the second day. It wasn’t a particularly fun game, however, and Ruben pitched a different idea: a game where you drop a ball onto the keyboard.
Towards the end, where we started working on this idea, weird bugs started happening. Certain folders didn’t appear to be committed in subversion, despite adding them at least twice. The explosion assets that made the first prototype visually entertaining stopped working entirely on our shift. Perhaps the worst moment was when the operating system boot-loader GRUB suddenly stopped working on my computer, and I had to ask another kind person burn an Ubuntu image to fix it.
The Presentation
Given a small presentation window we were given, I think we’ve largely succeeded in selling our idea. Many people were intrigued about our unique control scheme, and within the casual audience, I think we’ve garnered the most attention. That said, it wasn’t without faults. For whatever reason, the game was unusually unresponsive on Carringtons laptop, and we had to switch to Ruben’s instead. Some people also were cautious about how they dropped the ball.
Despite this, things did turn out for the better in the end. While I admit our game is in desperate need of re-analysis and re-exploring, the controls was enough a selling to catch attention.
Also, Ruben, please don’t make up a story at the top of your head. That wasn’t necessary.
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Added Boomshakalaka
Read more: Added BoomshakalakaAdded a new game entry, Boomshakalaka. This was our entry for Global Game Jam 2011.
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Removed “Save The Princess” Webplayer
Read more: Removed “Save The Princess” WebplayerI recently removed the web player for Save The Princess, since it doesn’t look like it’s compatible with Unity 3.2 webplayer.
Sorry for the inconvenience.