Time Flies:

It’s time for my year end summary! Yeah, I know we’re half way through February but what can I say? I guess I haven’t been doing a great job at keeping folks up to date on what I’ve been working on. I am aiming to get back on the blogging horse (is that a thing?) in 2013, but I better start off with reviewing what has transpired already:

Game News:

It turns out that 2012 was a busy year for my studio and it also marked the fourth year that it has been in business. I released two original games, Bomb Diver and Korrode. I also worked on two contract games, Britney Spear’s Wedding – Oops I Got Married Again, a small viral news game for MTV’s Addicting Games portal, and a much larger contract social game with Zapdot for the BBC show Dancing with the Stars.

Near the end of 2012 I partnered up with Zapdot and Dejobaan to work on another large game project called Drop That Beat Like An Ugly Baby. I’m still working full time on that game and will be posting more about it here in the near future.

Tech News:

I’ve spent almost a year now working with the excellent game engine, Unity3d. It has been a very smooth transition over from Flash game development. Using C# for scripting has been very easy to work with and not too different from using AS3. Plus, the metaphor of using scripts to control game objects you create in a visual editor is extremely similar in both environments.

Life News:

One of the biggest changes for me has got to be leaving the deep forests of New Hampshire (which I definitely loved) and moving down to the Boston area. I really needed to start getting more involved with other game developers and Boston has an amazing game development community. Two of my favorite monthly meetups are the Boston Indies and the Boston Unity Group.

I also joined up forces in October with a new game development group called the Indie Game Collective. We are currently sharing office space together in the co-working space Intrepid Labs in Cambridge, MA. It’s been a much needed inspirational boost to have like-minded folks to bounce ideas off of and to work alongside during the week.

The other major milestone I accomplished was finishing up with my daily drawing project. The challenge was to draw at least one drawing every day for a year and I ended up launching a dedicated webcomic called Morbid Holiday to host them all.

Favorite Games of 2012:

I played quite a few games this past year, but a handful really stood out to me as personal favorites: Super Hexagon by Terry Cavanagh, FTL: Faster Than Light by Subset Games, and XCOM Enemy Unknown by Firaxis Games.

What’s Next?:

I’m continuing my work on Drop That Beat Like An Ugly Baby with Zapdot and Dejobaan. We’ll be getting it ready to show at the Indie Mega Booth during PAX East in March. Then we’ll all be heading off to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

It is definitely going to be very busy these next few months. With my remaining time I’m continuing to work on small game experiments in the evenings and weekends as well as playing the hell out of my banjo!

Time to get your rust on!

You are rust racing to corrode all the bolts in the fastest time possible. Watch other players’ replays and compete for the fastest time!

You can play Korrode here.

Korrode is the largest game that I’ve released yet! There are 32 levels in total and quite a few months of work went into this game. I first started work on this project back in January of 2011 so it is amazing to finally get to release it.

One of the main reasons I love to make games is so that people can play and enjoy them, and it isn’t until I get the players in the door that I feel the most satisfied.

I created everything for this game myself except for the base textures. Those were taken by my good friend Jeremy P. Bushnell from decaying industrial sites around the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. I absolutely love the look of rust and rotting paint and metal, so getting to use his amazing photographs was quite a treat for me!

The music sound track features 9 different loops. All of which were constructed from various samples of clangs, bangs, and machinery. It is some of the most fun I’ve had composing a soundtrack in a long while.

I’d also like to thank Justin Wong of Mochi Media for sponsoring Korrode, I really appreciate it!

I hope you give it a play and let me know what you think, thanks!

Got a new game launching today! This one is called Bomb Diver and it’s a fun little NES-inspired retro game that combines aspects of Missile Command with the avoider, collector, and chain reaction genres.

One of the aspects that I think is fun about this game is it is broken into three different fast-paced stages:

First, you start off with a jetpack way above your city–collecting ammo and avoiding falling bombs. Second, you pull your parachute and float down collecting more resources while avoiding other obstacles. Third and finally, you land on the ground and use the ammo and power ups you collected on your way down to shoot the bombs that are now falling on your city.

There are 10 increasingly difficult waves to defeat as well as a modest upgrade shop in between waves.

Here is a gameplay trailer:

Give it a play and let me know what you think, thanks!

(You can also play the game on Kongregate or Newgrounds if you’d like.)

I’d like to thank Rick from Hairy Games for sponsoring the viral version of Bomb Diver. He has been great to work with!

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.

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!