Oops!..I Got Married Again

Aw, Britney – ready for love again! And only two minutes to make it to the altar! But what is all this…baggage? Cheetos, ex boyfriends, and delicious snacks! Fortunately, there are a few powerups to make this wedding happen. All the cheezy puffs in the world can not stand in the way of love!

I finished up a contract viral news game for MTV’s Addicting Games portal this past week. The topic of the game was Britney Spears’ upcoming wedding tomorrow on Valentine’s Day at an undisclosed tropical destination.

I was responsible for creating all of the art, as well as any programming required for the game engine.

One of my favorite highlights was getting to create a power up where Britney gets to surf on the famous snake from the VMA music awards! There are three other silly power ups as well that were modeled from her various music videos and tours.

The fine folks over at Addicting Games provided some humorous voice acting for the various in-game characters too.

Give it a try over at Addicting Games and see if you can get Britney to the “altar” in time.

The seeds of this project began from starting my daily drawing routine back a few months ago on October 4th. I kept it up each and every day and found that I was getting more and more inspired about illustration again.

Illustration is what I originally went to art school for even though I never finished that degree. It has been very rewarding to reawaken a latent passion of mine to tell stories and jokes visually.

I’ve been focusing lately on the one-panel style of comic, usually with a line of text beneath the drawing. Similar to the Far Side in format.  I grew up on a steady diet of off-the-wall Far Side calendars from 1986 onward, though until recently had completely forgotten about Gary Larson’s masterpiece.

I have been creating a new offbeat cartoon each day and have been having so much fun.  It is my hope that this is something I can grow slowly over the next year or two as the fan base and content increases.

I’ve gone ahead and setup a facebook page for Morbid Holiday so fans can get daily updates as well as leave posts or comments on the wall.

I’m also starting to build out content in an online store to offer greeting cards, prints, t-shirts, and other products to the folks requesting them. It has been very touching to receive requests for various art and designs of mine and I look forward to creating even more humorous content that will let people get a glimpse into my twisted view of the world.

I haven’t stopped working on games. I actually have two games finished and currently moving through the sponsorship and licensing process over at Flash Game License. It is also the holiday season so things get hectic and jumbled for myself and the portals and contracts I work with.

Well, I hope you check out the Morbid Holiday comic website and add the RSS feed to your reader or follow the facebook page.

I’d greatly appreciate any help reaching a larger audience for sure, so if you like what you see please share with your friends and followers!

Korrode is a brand new game that I have just finished. You get to play the part of entropy as a racing rust spot zipping around corroding metal bolts. It’s a level based racer that combines aspects of puzzle and time trial agility games.

My initial seed of an idea for the game was about crossing a 2d Katamari Damacy with Flow. The game has also drawn heavy comparisons to the excellent game Osmos but I had never heard of that game before beta test players started pointing that out. I wanted to explore the fun level design that would occur in a game where the level topology is constantly changing based on your scale.

The game isn’t released yet but I created a video game trailer so players and potential sponsors could get a sneak peek at what it is all about. Sponsors with an account on Flash Game License can also play the game here to consider placing a bid on it.

I’ve worked on Korrode on and off since January of this year. It is the largest game in both scope and time commitment that I’ve developed yet. I was very inspired by some entropy-themed texture photos a good friend of mine (Jeremy P. Bushnell) took from his travels around Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. He gave me permission to use these photos as the base for a lot of the photo manipulation work I did to create both the UI and the levels for the game.

I also had the pleasure of recording the game’s soundtrack which was a refreshing break from coding. I was able to create 9 unique music loops using the sounds of factories, metal clanging, machines, and other industrial ephemera to build the rhythm tracks. I then composed some simple melodies to go over them. The trailer features a longer version of one of the songs from the game.

The game uses a pretty cool technology from the Playtomic analytic service I use that allows me to embed player replays in the actual highscore data for a level. This means that when a player finishes playing a level their new best time is automatically submitted to the global leaderboards for that level. Then when players view the leaderboards they can actually watch the replays from anyone’s run in the score charts. It’s a great way to encourage competition and allow the players to race each other’s replay “ghosts” after they finish watching the replays. It also provides a built in walk through of sorts if player’s are just curious how other people solved a level in the quickest time.

I’m pretty excited about this game and I really can’t wait to see the replays that top players will generate. I’ve already learned a bunch about the levels I designed by watching the beta testers solve them! The sponsorship process can take awhile though so I have to be patient. I’ve got plenty of other projects to keep me occupied anyway!

I had the good fortune to be able to attend GameLoop in Boston again this year. It was held at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA and about 150 folks attended. This was GameLoop’s fourth year and it continues to draw a great group of participants interested in all aspects of game development–both digital and non-digital. The event is priced ridiculously low for the amount of value you get out of it in both shared knowledge and networking. The $40 ticket price even includes a kick-ass T-shirt, breakfast, and lunch!

GameLoop was founded by Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan and they continue to help both organize it and refine its unconference style process.

For those unfamiliar with the unconference term, the gist is that an unconference is a type of conference that self-organizes during the day of the event.

The participants of an unconference are active co-creators of the session content. Sessions are proposed in the beginning of the day with attendees gathered in a large room.

This year we all had a chance to say three tags that represented topics we were interested in. There was a 10 second time limit and it only took 15 minutes to get through us all. This helped gauge the potential topic interests in the room.

After all the proposed sessions have been written onto large pieces of paper the boards holding them are then moved out to the hallway. Participants then get to vote with 5 individual stickers on which sessions they might want to attend.

This was still a bit of a bottleneck but I felt it worked better than last year. I hope next year they have 3 boards instead of 2 and keep the notes to the top halves of the boards so you can preview the topics from further away.  I also think putting more space between the boards will help spread out the crowd a bit.

After we all voted the organizers then curate the most popular sessions to form the schedule by distributing or combining the topics in an intelligent manner to get good coverage throughout the day. I thought this curated approach worked really well this year. Each slot had something I could find that interested me.

Sessions tend to be a round-table conversation-based style where everyone can have a chance to contribute to the topic being discussed. The session leader is whoever proposed the topic and moderators are available to help out just in case things veer too far.

This whole process works surprisingly well! There is even a brief wrap-up session at then end of the conference where the whole group is able to provide feedback so that iterative improvements to the process can made for next year’s event.

The three tags I announced at the beginning of the event this year were web, mobile, and small studio business.  I then attended sessions that largely related to these topics. I enjoyed two different sessions related to indie business and marketing lead by Ichiro Lambe and Leo Jaitley of Dejobaan Games. I find a lot of useful stories and information in what those two have to share about their long term experiences with being an independent game studio that has released a lot of very original games over the past twelve years. The sessions they lead were titled Platforms That Make Indies Money and Staying in Business as an Indie Forever. Other useful contributions came from participants like David Carrigg of Retro Affect and Alex Schwartz of Owlchemy Labs. They all had experiences to share and it was very useful to hear what various studios are doing to stay in business and try and make money from their games.

I also attended a more tech oriented session lead by Sean Flinn of GameSpy Technology (thankfully a long term GameLoop sponsor) about online analytics, multiplayer, and distribution needs of game developers. I have a very big interest in game analytics and currently use the Playtomic service but it is always good to keep an eye on the various technologies out there. GameSpy Technology doesn’t currently have an ActionScript API but I was able to share some of my needs, concerns, and requirements with them about being a game developer on the web.

Of the two final sessions I attended, one was a session on Building a Personal Brand by Kwasi Mensah of Ananse Productions and the other a session on Prototyping by Caleb Garner of Part12 Studios. I find these conversation style sessions so helpful to hear other game developers stories and experiences. Afterward you can approach and followup with someone based on what you heard them talking about in the session and that is an excellent chance for further building connections.

After a long but incredibly rewarding day about 70 of us headed over to Cambridge Brewing Company for dinner and locally brewed beer. A perfect way to end the day!

Once again I would like to thank the founders of GameLoop–Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan. I think the following photo may hint at where they get all their incredible energy from!

All photos used by permission of Michael Carriere.

These games have been available as free downloads since the store launched with the release of the new PlayBook tablet.

I ran a report on the total number of downloads from all six games over the past three months of time. I also gathered my analytics data from the Playtomic service which I used on each game to track views, plays (number of plays per view), and average playtime length per view. I also used Playtomic to provide the global leaderboards.

Using this data I built the following graphic (click to enlarge):

I should also mention that five of these six games have been fairly popular and all within the top 25 lists of their respective free categories. They’ve all been well reviewed (when reviewed at all) and I’ve done next to no promotion of them. These downloads basically represent players discovering the games through the PlayBook AppWorld interface.

You’ll note that I tracked the review percentage. This represents the amount of reviews I received per game based on the number of downloads.

It was pretty easy to convert my existing Flash games over to work on the PlayBook. Besides receiving a free PlayBook for the first game as part of BlackBerry’s launch promotion I was also fortunate enough to be compensated as part of a contract for my conversion on the other five games too. This allowed me to release them for free to study the market in the most favorable of download circumstances.

That said, if I wasn’t being compensated for my efforts I would not find these numbers to be very encouraging at all! Each game was only downloaded an average of 1300 times.  That number would be far, far smaller if I was charging for these games. That is not a good indication that I’ll be attempting to pursue this market further unless new changes or information comes to light–I simply can’t afford to make that kind of super risky business decision with my time.

I’ve enjoyed the free PlayBook I received from BlackBerry. It is the first tablet I’ve owned and it seems to be a fine enough device. I am not a heavy tablet user though and have little to compare it to besides having used an iPad for a bit. I’d be curious to see other developer’s download numbers (and even sales data) on the PlayBook device. Anyone making any money?

Game Description:

Good Prince William is to wed the darling Kate this very day. But he is on the other side of town! This simply will not do. Run to meet your bride, ducking old girlfriends and paparazzi on the way. Be sure to grab your princely powerups. Release the Hounds!

Additional Screenshots:

Here William leaps over an ex-girlfriend. He’ll have to dodge that paparazzi too!

William has reached Kate with 22 seconds to spare. The crowds at Westminster Abbey go wild!

Background:

Royal Wedding Run is a viral news game I was contracted by MTV to make for their AddictingGames arcade portal. The news event was the wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29th, 2011.  The game is extremely silly and had a lot of humorous voice acting performed by various folks at MTV. I was responsible for the programming of the game and the artist was the talented Eric Falk.

Come2Play and the Linkedin Flash Game Developers Group are launching the 2nd ‘Games that Challenge the World Contest’ for multiplayer games. Cash prizes totaling $10,000 will be awarded to contest winners.

Developers keep all rights to the games they submit and even previously released games can be entered.

There was only a handful of entries to last years contest, so the chance of winning a serious cash prize is very high. Check out the winning entries of the 1st ‘Games that Challenge the World Contest.’

If you’ve got a multiplayer game and you think you stand a chance of winning, why not submit your game?

Prizes:

• 1st Place – $5,000
• 2nd Place – $3,000
• 3rd Place – $1,250
• 4th Place – $750

Contest Genre & Judging:

The contest genre is Casual Games and submissions will be judged on the following criteria:

• Multiplayer playability for new and return players
• Replay ability of the game
• Design, sound and effects
• Concept and execution

Deadline:

All games must be integrated with the Come2Play multiplayer API in order to be officially accepted into the contest. All games must be submitted by April 15th, 2011 at 23:59 est. Games submitted on this date must be the final version of all games.

The full details are available at the official contest page.

Robot Reaction was one of my Flash games from 2009 that I completely rewrote to work with the Flash CS5 Beta program. I was able to use the iPhone Packager for CS5 to get my first game into the Apple App Store.  It was a great learning experience in old school optimization techniques like bitmap blitting as well as a sobering business look at how hard it can be to make any money in the App Store vs the Flash business space I was familiar with.

Play Robot Reaction!

While I was out at the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference I got to meet up with the fine folks over at the Kongregate office in San Francisco to hatch out plans for an advergame for Cheetos and Frito Lay. It was my first foray into contract advergame work and I had a great time working to create this game.  It was based off of my Orange You Glad game that people at Cheetos had spotted over on Kongregate and wanted me to create a custom version with the Cheetos theme.

Play Mouth Full of Happy!

Feeling a lot of inspiration after my return from the Indie Gaming Summit at the Game Developers Conference I wanted to get more involved in some of the online game competitions that were run monthly over at the Experimental Gameplay Project. Contentric was created in a week for the EGP theme of You Only Have 10 Seconds and I was quite happy with the result. I was even more pleased when Armor Games decided to sponsor it!

Play Contentric!

Next on my hit list was the desire to finally participate in one of the competitions over at the TIGSource forums. There was a new month long competition being run with the theme of A Game By It’s Cover that had a fascinating concept to me. We were to pick a fake game cartridge whose art inspired us to think up an actual game based on the fake art. For The Twin was what I managed to come up with by using this case art.  Besides creating a lot of creepy cute art and backgrounds for the game I also composed seven faux chiptune loops in Reason for the game that came out quite well. The game ended up being sponsored by Spil Games and was played over one million times in the first month alone–a new milestone for me!

Play For The Twin!

The last game I published in 2010 was initially created for the 18th Ludum Dare 48hr game competition theme of Enemies as Weapons and polished up for the Experimental Gameplay Project theme of Zero Buttons. I went with a retro look and classic arcade gameplay for this challenging avoider collector mouse skills game. I then spent the month of October working on a final version of the game for the Ludum Dare October Challenge to sell a game in a month. Newgrounds ended up sponsoring AVOIDAL and I got to create a bunch of medal achievements that were pretty fun to try and win.

Play AVOIDAL!

I also found it insightful to take a look at all the games I worked on yet did not manage to publish for one reason or another. Many of these games are still on my todo list for 2011 and will see the light of day eventually.  Digging through my directories I discovered that I had worked on a total of 12 games this year while only publishing 5. I’m not sure if that is good or bad but it is worth keeping on eye on since I do believe in trying to finish games in order to get the most experience and value from them.

I had attempted to learn an early version of Flash Punk and I found it to be a really great Flash game framework. My efforts stalled out though with this untitled retro dodge game and I still have to learn the newest version.

I made a game in two hours for one of the crazy Glorious Trainwrecks Klik of the Month Klub #35 events called Wizards vs Ghosts which I find amusing.  Creating a game in only two hours is truly mind breaking!

I”m still actively working on a final expanded version of my 2009 Ludum Dare game called Angry Caverns and a 2009 Ludum Dare game called Fleedom. I’m still developing a pixel art arcade game called Bomb Diver as well as collaborating with another game designer/artist on a ridiculous game about pooping pigeons and bicycles.

A few of the random things I am happy about from 2010 include finally getting to go to my first Game Developers Conference as well as attending the Flash Gaming Summit the Sunday before GDC. It was a truly inspiring week spent in San Francisco and I met so many awesome game developers and Flash publishers. I am really looking forward to returning again this year.

Another great milestone was getting a New Hampshire LLC for Hybrid Mind Studios so it is all official and everything.

On the competition side of things I managed to host my first Mini Ludum Dare event around the theme of Constraints which I felt had a great turnout of submitted games and was fairly well received by the community. My game Alien Flight Academy – Graduation Day was the result of that competition. A bizarre experiment in alternate keyboard controls.

As I mentioned previously I finally had a Flash game break the one million views mark. It was a simple milestone I had looked forward to finally achieving.  2010 marks my second full year releasing Flash games and it is so amazing to look back at my first Flash game TurnStyle which was released in Feb of 2009 and only ever got about 150k plays total and compare that to my more recent games that reach millions. That fact just continues to floor me. I never dreamed that I might be able to reach such a large audience with my games, art, and music! The Flash game space offers game designers an amazing distribution opportunity that I find very inspiring, humbling, and flattering all at the same time. I look forward to trying to reach more and more people as I improve my craft.

Determined to get more involved in the local game development community around Boston I started attending monthly Boston Indies meetups and the local Boston Game Loop conference. I even started up a weekly game development co-work meetup down in Cambridge, MA at Sprout for three months to help myself meet other area game developers. It’s been great getting to know so many fine people in my neck of the woods.

Along the same lines as getting involved more locally–near the end of 2010 I had the good opportunity to take part in my first team game jam too! I was at a Boston Game Jam event called Lunar Jam and I helped out primarily as the artist doing many black and white illustrations for a choose your own adventure type visual novel game called Perchance to Dream that is still in development.

I’ve managed to work with great portals like Armor Games, Big Fish Games, Newgrounds, Kongregate, King, Spil, Addicting Games and many others. Each new relationship I establish helps me to feel more comfortable that I’ll be able to continue doing independent game development full time–my childhood dream!

Looking at what I have planned for 2011 is pretty exciting to me. There are many games I’ve been working on that are nearing completion that I can’t wait to publish to see what the players think. I also want to collaborate more with other game designers, artists, musicians, and programmers. I plan to keep attending conferences like the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference as well as other regional and local events. I hope to keep learning new technologies, skills, and game design techniques. I look forward to building my relationships with other game developers. I have so many game ideas that the lists are growing out of control. I hope I can manage to stay focused and driven enough to get even a tenth of these new ideas out. I can’t wait to see what 2011 holds for myself as well as the other game developers out there.

Bring on the games!

AVOIDAL placed 14th out of the 172 game entries submitted to the the competition.

Ludum Dare is a solo game making event where participants have 48 hours to create an entire game with all content from scratch after the theme is announced. This time the theme was “Enemies As Weapons.”

I wrote up a detailed post mortem about my experience creating AVOIDAL and created a timelapse video of the entire process.

This was my most successful Ludum Dare yet and I am happy to continue to meet my goals when I participate as I try to raise my personal bar for success with each event I enter. I wanted to get a top 10% finish again and I was able to get top 8% so my goal was met.

I’ve been able to predict pretty well how my games will place each time which I think is a good exercise in trying to be self-aware about your game and the potential audience for it. This can matter when you are trying to make a Flash game that you want to stand a chance of being enjoyed by millions of players rather than thousands.

I can see a definite trend with the games I have entered over the years in Ludum Dare. This is my fourth game submitted to the regular competition and I feel it is my best so far:

• Ludum Dare 11 – Minimalist – 2008: MinMo 32nd overall out of 71 entries (top 45%)
• Ludum Dare 14 – Advancing Wall of Doom – 2009: Fleedom Flies 19th overall out of 123 entries (top 16%)
• Ludum Dare 15 - Caverns – 2009: Angry Caverns tied 10th overall out of 144 entries (top 9%)
• Ludum Dare 18 – Enemies as Weapons - 2010: AVOIDAL 14th overall out of 172 entries (top 8%)

I believe this not only shows how participating in regular game development competitions can help you create better games but also that it can teach you how to work better within constraints so that you can make better games outside of competitions too.

I am really happy with the way AVOIDAL has come out and I look forward to it finding a sponsor before I release it globally. I have a good feeling that it could be my most popular game yet.

I have the new polished up post-competition version over for bidding on Flash Game License and it is already receiving good bidding interest of which I am most thankful.

I have been playing this game quite often as I worked to improve it after the competition and it has been in my subconsious a good bit.  On Saturday I spent about 3 hours creating a concept art illustration based on the game.  I decided to have fun creating it in a very different style than the one I used in AVOIDAL. I also recorded a complete timelapse of creating the illustration since I’ve had a lot of people contacting me lately that were quite curious about my drawing process and tools.

What would happen if you took almost 200 people with an active  interest in game development and provided a great location and an informal structure to self-organize around?

Boston GameLoop.

I had the opportunity to attend the third iteration of this quickly growing game development unconference. Organized by Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan it is likely the best bang for buck currently out there in the game development industry. Cost to attend was only $40 and included a great t-shirt, breakfast, and lunch! The best value of course was getting so many incredible professionals together to share their knowledge and experience on a wide range of game development topics.

The basic concept was that the morning started out with all the attendees in a large conference room and the moderators helped to gather possible topics for sessions onto a board at the front of the room. People raised their hands and called out the type of talk or topic they would either like to lead or that they  hope someone else might lead. This first pass existed to provide everyone in the room a basic idea of what possible subjects people might be interested in.

Once this process completed the group adjourned to the accompanying hallway to allow people to write the potential talk titles on a secondary white board. Attendees then showed their support for multiple talks by taking a dry erase marker and leaving a tick mark to cast a vote next to topics of interest. The moderators culled the popular topics onto a third and final board–the “big board” which was to act as the final schedule for the conference.

Topics I saw posted ranged from Level Editor Technology Demos, Women and Sexuality in Games, Interactive Fiction via Inform7, Combat Level Design, Serious Games That Are Fun, Prototyping Games, Indie Game Marketing, How to Approach the Press and Media, and countless more. I was pretty amazed by how many subjects were represented.

The morning session basically filled out the conference schedule up until lunch. The afternoon slots were left free so that popular topics spawned by the earlier sessions could be explored later on in the day.  The types of session styles varied as well. There were the more traditional lecture style with a single person or team speaking about a topic and there were round-table discussions that were far more inclusive. The unconference culture was encouraging people to vote with their feet. If you didn’t feel the topic ended up being of use or interest you should get up and leave to find something else. Session speakers were cautioned to not feel offended if people moved about as they tried to find the right topic.

For the most part I think the conference logistics worked out pretty well given how many people were attending. There were some obvious growing pains going on and simple personal space constraints making voting and placing topics on the secondary white board quite difficult at times. This can all be addressed pretty easily next year by just having a second or third staging board for proposed topics.  Growing pains are a good kind of problem to have.

I think the other thing that caught me off guard was that I was in a bit too much of a receptive mode for an unconference. Some of this could be attributed to lack of sleep but I think it hadn’t really sunk in how DIY this conference was.

I should have proposed some talks of my own but instead I was relying more on the posting of others. This wasn’t so bad in that I did find sessions of interest and round tables where I got to share my knowledge but I am going to be more prepared next year to propose some of my own sessions.

I found that the Flash game and business topics were not represented very well at all and it was only my own fault for not bringing some of my experience to the table. I found out later that there was actually a good bit of interest in what I might have shared. I look forward to giving back more next year!

Some of my favorite highlights from GameLoop were getting to check out Retro Affect’s current level editor from their game Snapshot. I also attended a useful session by Pete Jones from Retro Affect on automating the 2d animation pipeline using PhotoShop. After the conference a good time was had when 40 plus game developers headed over to the Cambridge Brewing Company for some rowdy beer drinking and food. Once we wrapped up dinner it was time for board games and chatting over at MIT’s GAMBIT game lab.  Gambit is used as a game development internship program for MIT and it is even rumored to have been designed to withstand a zombie attack!

All told GameLoop was definitely a win. I met a lot of really cool game developers on Saturday and look forward to strengthening those contacts in the future.  Boston has an incredible game development scene going on and I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface. Come on GameLoop 2011!