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!

I also created an animation of the five drawings called “Five From Five” as an interesting way to present how all the drawings relate to each other:

You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

Here are the starting lines	“Yellow Dog” – Oct 10th, 2011
“Southwest” – Oct 11th, 2011	“Horncordion” – Oct 12th, 2011
“Hold On Tight” – Oct 13th, 2011	“Just Keep Swimming” – Oct 14th, 2011
“Fall” – Oct 15th, 2011	“Eggplant” – Oct 16th, 2011

For Saturday and Sunday I decided that five days of using the same lines was enough and just drew whatever I wanted. I’m trying to experiment a bit more with light and color as demonstrated in “Eggplant” above and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I’ve spent so many years mainly drawing in black and white pen or pencil that I’m really excited to finally be pushing my color skills and learning.

Not sure what this week holds for the daily drawings. It was really nice to have some constraints or guidelines so I may have to think of something to provide a bit of structure. We’ll see!

Now I do use a Wacom tablet and I normally do all of my drawing in Photoshop because for whatever reason I’ve never really enjoyed drawing in Flash. I felt I spent most of my time fighting with it in fact. Well it turns out a lot of the problem was just some basic misunderstandings of the brush tool along with also learning some nice simple coloring, shading, and highlighting tricks using a few basic layers.

I corresponded a bit with Marcus over G+ to ask him some further questions about things I saw in his tutorials but then it was time to put my learning into action!

Below are the results of my first week. Six drawings in total since I started on Tuesday. I figure I’ll post the montage once a week on Sunday with the week’s drawings. I do post the daily drawings over on Twitter and G+ though.

You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

“Banjo Farmer” – Oct 4th, 2011	“Loquacious Mime” – Oct 5th, 2011
“Focused Frog” – Oct 6th, 2011	“Red Robot” – Oct 7th, 2011
“The Loneliest Puppeteer” – Oct 8th, 2011	“Tree Beast” – Oct 9th, 2011

Some of these drawings just came from my subconscious when I sat down with my coffee in the morning and tried to imagine something to draw. A few of them though came from friends when I asked on Facebook for some random character prompts to do some improv. My friends suggested both “Loquacious Mime” and “The Loneliest Puppeteer” and I’m pretty happy with how they came out.  The other interesting fact is that “Banjo Farmer” came from a creativity exercise that Marcus posted about where you draw a random squiggly line and attempt to build a face out of it.

There was another creativity exercise Marcus posted a few days ago where you draw five squiggly lines and attempt to build an entire composition using them. I think as a challenge this week I will be using the same squiggly lines all week long but drawing a different drawing from the same lines each day. I’m excited about this challenge and we’ll see how it turns out!

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.

Playtomic is a great way to understand how playertesters are playing your games during the development phases of your game and then to further study how your game is being played and spread around the world once you release it.  Beyond the real time analytics tools it also offers global leaderboards, heatmaps, custom game data, and level sharing APIs.

I can’t recommend Playtomic enough as it has really had a large and beneficial impact on the way I approach my game development, playtesting, and publishing. I’m not the only one enjoying Playtomic either–over 2,000 developers are currently using the service to track over 3,000 individual games, and logging an amazing billion combined real time events per day!

TUTORIAL

This tutorial will focus on the basics of getting your account setup with Playtomic and getting the basics of the analytics working in your game SWF.  I’ll be using the latest Playtomic API version 3.15 for ActionScript 3.0 (though Playtomic does support ActionScript 2.0 as well.) I’ll also be using the Flash IDE to create the game project but the code I’ll be demonstrating will work basically the same if you’re not using Flash. I’ll provide the source for the demo above saved as a Flash CS4 project in case you haven’t upgraded to the latest version yet.

 REGISTER FOR YOUR ACCOUNT AND CREATE YOUR FIRST GAME

Register:

First step is to simply register your account on Playtomic. This is pretty basic and you don’t even have to wait for an email for your account to activate.

Create First Game:

The next step is to create your first game in the system. I’m just using a ‘Test Game’ for the purposes of this tutorial.  The important part is to hit the two radio buttons. Select ‘Casual/mobile game’ for ‘Game Type’ and ‘Web’ under the ‘Flash’  platform area. Then just click the ‘Create Game’ button and the system will bring you to the game overview screen for API setup.

First Game API Overview:

You should now be looking at the API information for the game you just created. The most important information here is the game credentials area that lists your SWFID and GUID.  You should keep these numbers private since they are the way the API will communicate from your game to the Playtomic system.

The other important areas are the documentation and downloads areas. I’ve marked everything on the screenshot to the left that you can click to enlarge. You can get to this screen by clicking on ‘API Setup’ in the vertical nav menu at the left when you are logged in on the Playtomic website.

Download the Tutorial:

Normally you’ll click on the download link for the latest Playtomic API zip file on the Playtomic website. You’ll then extract the contents of the zip and find the folder called ‘Playtomic’ inside the folder called ‘gameapi-as3′.  You’ll want to copy the ‘Playtomic’ folder into the root folder of your game project so that the folder is at the same directory level as your FLA file.

This time though I’ve already included the latest Playtomic API within the tutorial download. At the time this tutorial was written that was version 3.15 for ActionScript 3.0.

You can download the tutorial here. I saved the FLA as a Flash CS4 FLA for people using older versions of Flash still.

Extract the tutorial zip and then open up both TestGame.fla and TestGame.as in the Flash IDE.

I’m only going to point out the most important parts from the source. The tutorial TestGame.as source file itself is heavily commented and should be fairly self-explanatory. This tutorial also assumes you know the basics of ActionScript 3.0.

In order for everything to work you are going to need to have already setup your new game on the Playtomic website from the instructions further above. If not go ahead and do that now because you’ll need your unique SWFID and GUID to plug into the TestGame.as config area.

// Playtomic API constants
// NOTE: CHANGE THESE TO MATCH YOURS OR IT WON'T WORK!
//
// SWFID from Playtomic API Setup screen
private static const PLAYTOMIC_SWFID:String = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";

// GUID from Playtomic API Setup screen
private static const PLAYTOMIC_GUID:int = xxxx;

Before you can use the API you'll need to import the Playtomic classes. You'll see I do that near the top of the source file with the other standard Flash imports.

// import the Playtomic API
import Playtomic.*;

You need to init the Playtomic API as soon as possible in your game code and definitely before you call any of the Playtomic services. I usually do this with an init function of some type called during my FLA Document class constructor phase.

// Init the Playtomic API as soon as possible and
//   before you call any other Playtomic services!
private function init():void {
  // Initialize the API by logging the view
  //   this registers a 'view' on the server
  Log.View(PLAYTOMIC_GUID, PLAYTOMIC_SWFID, root.loaderInfo.loaderURL);
}

While we have now logged a 'view' above we want to track how many times the game will actually be played during that view session. In other words there should be more 'plays' of your game than 'views'. If not, the view to play ratio is a great indication that your game could use some improvement!

I typically track the 'play' event when my gameplay assets are being instantiated.

// Play the game
private function playGame():void {
  // Registers a 'play' event on the server. There can be multiple 'play' events per 'view'
  Log.Play();
  // do one time setup for game
  setupGame();
}

Another very easy and powerful thing to do with Playtomic is to track custom counter metrics. I have included an example in the tutorial. Whenever the player clicks on the 'Credits' button on the main menu we track a 'ViewedCredits' event. You can use these events to track all sorts of handy data. I usually track common things like every time the credits are viewed, the instructions are viewed, the sound or music is toggled on or off, how many times the game is restarted or paused. Basically any handy data point you'd like to gather to start understand how players interact with your game or the menus surrounding your game.

// Listens for mouse click on credits button
private function creditsButtonClickListener(event:MouseEvent):void {
  // Track a custom metric on the server so we know a
  // player viewed the credits screen
  Log.CustomMetric("ViewedCredits"); // metric, names must be alphanumeric

There are many other types of metrics you can track too. I like putting in tracking for average score so that even if players aren't submitting a score I can see how players are doing with the game. You can do this with a level average metric call. When your game doesn't have individual levels you can just feed in the string 'Game' (or whatever you want) that represents the entire game and not a specific level.

In the tutorial I track a level average metric when the player hits the 'Quit' button.

// Quit game button click listener
private function quitGameButtonClickListener(event:MouseEvent):void {
  // Track the current score as a level average metric event
  //   You can track averages for specific levels or the entire game.
  //   Here the string 'Game' represents the entire game not a
  //   particular level string.
  Log.LevelAverageMetric("Score", "Game", score);

That's about it! The Playtomic website documentation is pretty decent and the community forums on the site are starting to mature a bit so that you can often get help from a question posted up there before too long. Once you integrate Playtomic into your own game you'll start thinking up all kinds of great uses for it. I've used the global leaderboards and level sharing APIs and will start experimenting with the heatmaps soon. I will use this base tutorial code to write up a few followup tutorials on Playtomic soon.

Let me know if I can improve this tutorial and if you have any questions at all!

[DOWNLOAD FLASH CS4 VERSION OF TUTORIAL]

I want to provide the best experience I can to my players within a reasonable amount of effort while at the same time I also want to make sure my game is going to provide as little friction as possible to potential sponsorship or licensing.

To that end I have 5 tips I wanted to share for dealing with audio in your Flash games that I’ve found helpful:

Tip #1 – Normalize your music and sound effects

This is a very simple tip but it is too often overlooked. Normalizing is basically just making sure that the loudest volume levels of all your sound effects and music are at a consistent and good target peak.

Normalizing your audio assets before you import them into your Flash library is a good way to improve your workflow. You know that all your audio is within a consistent peak range and you can balance further with your software volume settings.

You can use a free program like Audacity to provide normalization. I’ve found the default setting of normalizing to -3dB works well.  If you are using Windows 7 you’ll want to get the beta for Audacity.

Tip #2 – Individual controls for sound effects and music

Why provide two controls? A nice thing about having independent controls for sound effects and music is that it can give the player more freedom over the experience of your game. It can allow them to keep your sound effects playing but still jam out to their own music. Another reason is sometimes the player doesn’t mind the sound effects but maybe the music is starting to get repetitive the 100th time they’ve played your chain reaction game. I look for any little tips to keep players happy and in the game and I’ve had many positive player comments from implementing this feature.

Tip #3 – Provide common key bindings for audio control toggles

Setup a keyboard listener in Flash to respond to some common keys. I like to bind the ‘S’ key to toggle the sound effects and the ‘M’ key to toggle the music.  This is a real simple touch that allows your players to quickly mute your game when they can’t find the onscreen audio controls. Remember to provide text somewhere to let your players know these settings controls!

Tip #4 – Use volume sliders for sound effects and music

The good thing about providing volume sliders over a simple mute/un-mute toggle is that your players can mix the volume to suit their individual speakers or headphones. It can be incredibly hard to master and mix your game volumes correctly so that it will sound decent and in balance across the many audio systems it will be played through. Volume sliders give the power to the players to tweak one up or down to get that balance that is pleasing to their ears.

Tip #5 – Save sound and music settings in a shared object

This last tip I have implemented most recently based on some player feedback I got. I really like this tip because it never occurred to me until I received a story from a player. The player got busted by their boss for playing one of my games in the office because they were surprised when they loaded it up again and the audio of both the preloader intro movies and the main menu music was still enabled.  They had just assumed that since they had muted the game audio the last time they had played that it would have remembered!

Well I had never really thought of this feature before but it was quite easy to implement and has been really awesome. You can use a Shared Object in Flash to track any changes to the audio controls.  You might be using one already to record local highscore data and you can just record your audio settings to this object.  Then when your game loads you can check the Shared Object to see what the audio settings were (if any) the last time they played. If there isn’t any data then you can just enable it as as default. This allows you to mute the preloader intro movies and menu music when they return if they had disabled it in a previous gameplay session!

Got any other good audio related tips? Share them below in the comments!

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:

Angry birds? Try angry pigeon! You play a French pigeon that has had it with all the crowds and traffic generated by le Tour de France. You set out to disrupt the last two minutes of the bicycle race the only way you know how–by pooping all over the place! Cause massive pileups with the power of pigeon poop!

Play le Turd de France!

Additional Screenshots:

Here you have just acquired the Mega Poop powerup!

Unleashing the fury of the Mega Poop!

Scoring a sweet triple direct hit! Direct hits increase your multiplier and let you score big.

The race is wrapping up! I’m pretty sure you made your point with the bicyclists…

The race has finished! Here you can review all those critical race stats.

Background:

This game was a very silly collaboration I did together with fellow game designer Joshua A.C. Newman of the glyphpress. It was inspired by his friend Judith Shaw who got pooped on by a pigeon while riding her bicycle. Joshua is an avid bicyclist and he contacted me to see if I wanted to help bring that incident to life as a video game.

We thought basing it around le Tour de France would be a funny way to provide a setting with plenty of opportunity for humor.

Of technical interest would be the fact that the peloton of bicycle racers is controlled by a heavily customized version of Boid’s flocking algorithm. Each biker dodges the poop splats on the ground as well as the road edges and the other bikers–all the while trying to reach a target point toward the right of the screen. I also added a 5-state internal bicyclist model that controls their stamina and energy and allows them to try to reach the front of the peleton before tiring out and drifting to the back of the pack.  It took a few days of heavy playtesting to tune the flock algorithm just right to make it fun but it is so great to watch that the intense effort was well worth it!

Give it a play over at AddictingGames!

This game is my most ambitious so far containing 40 levels arranged into 4 different difficulty groups.  This is also the first level design I’ve done for a game as most of my previous games have been more on the procedural or arcade side of things where game variables just sort of change over time to introduce new enemies or difficulties but there aren’t distinct levels. The gameplay combines aspects of puzzles, agility, and time trials.

I wanted to post some composite before/after screenshots I made of the new graphics overhaul:

Level 2-5

Level 2-8

Level 3-6

Level 4-3

I’m now getting into the “last 10%” stage of this game. There are still many miscellaneous tasks for me to complete like sound effects, music soundtrack, social features, menu features, further testing and polish.  It is getting close though to the point where I’ll be able to present it to sponsors. Always an exciting stage for a game to be at. I can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel on this game and I can’t wait for the day when I can let the players in!