Dave has been too busy in the game development trenches to update this blog recently so as an ambitious underling I am stepping up. If I do a good job perhaps I won’t be vaporized at the end of the day!

What has been going on lately? Well–many things!

Hybrid Mind Studios is now officially an LLC. Dave was excited to take that step this February after a successful first year in 2009 that saw the release of six Flash games and one iPhone game.

Since his return in March from the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference Dave has been hard at work on three new games.

Two of these games have been finished and will be launching any day now.  The third game still requires a bit more time in the oven though.

Dave did have a chance to tell me that both the Flash Gaming Summit and the Independent Games Summit in March really inspired him and made him thankful to be part of such an exciting profession!

He got to meet many fellow independent game developers as well as meet many of the publishers that have sponsored or licensed his games over the past year. That was quite a treat as normally there is little face to face contact when working from a home office.

Well–that’s all I have time for this morning. There will be more updates soon as the new games fire from the studio launch tubes. Let’s hope I don’t get vaporized for taking the initiative and updating this blog for Dave!

PLAY:

Play Blinkout

DESCRIPTION:
How good is your visual memory under pressure? You’ll have to use both your agility and good resource strategy to navigate your spaceship through an increasingly hostile dimension. How far can you get?

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Move ship with ARROWS
• Illuminate levels with the SPACEBAR (costs energy)
• Find the key and go to the gate
• Regain energy by picking up charges
• There are 8 levels that will repeat for 6 rounds. The charges are persistent across all rounds, so don’t use all of them the first time around…

MORE INFO:

I hope you’ll find Blinkout to be a fairly original game. The game is designed to challenge the player on quite a few levels and we believe that if players spend a little time with it they will find an interesting experience as the game mechanics change over the 6 rounds of 8 repeating level mazes.

The player will have to use their visual memory as most of the game is played in complete darkness. Illumination of the levels comes through collecting energy charges along the way. The catch is that these charges are persistent across all the rounds so a charge collected earlier will no longer be available when encountered again. Charges picked up later are worth more energy so the player will be able to manage their resources accordingly to make it to the harder rounds. In these later rounds the player is faced with greater energy costs for hitting a maze wall as well as greater costs for illuminating the level. The level time limit reduces and the movement speed increases. We realize this game is quite challenging and will likely intimidate at first as using visual memory, keyboard agility, and resource management together may prove to be a new experience for many players.

I worked on Blinkout with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell. It marks my first collaboration and the experience was quite enjoyable. Jeremy took lead on the art direction and level design for the game while I took lead on the programming side of things. We worked equally on the game design and iterations of all the facets through kicking ideas and changes back and forth.  We were also very happy to get the game sponsored by King.com and they have been great to work with.

We hope you enjoy the game!

I spent the weekend competing in the tri-annual Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition.  This was the 14th competition the site has hosted and there was a record turn-out!  121 games where created and submitted in a 48  hour period.  The theme was Advancing Wall of Doom. This theme was picked by the community through a system of voting during the week leading up to the competition.  Once the theme was announced on Friday night participants had 48 hours to create an entire game from scratch.  All content had to be produced by the participant during the competition.  The event ran from Friday night on April 17th through Sunday night on April 19th, 2009.

Fleedom is the game I managed to finish as my entry.  It is a Flash game so you can play it in your browser here. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out think it is a great base prototype for further improving into a really great game.  I will continue to work on it and turn this prototype into a finished Flash game.  I won’t know the final results for two weeks on how it did but the competition is so much fun that the results aren’t really the point.  I have participated now in about 5 or 6 of these 48 hr Ludum Dare competitions and I am the most happy with this game than any of my past ones.  I actually enjoy playing this one a lot so that is a good sign indeed. Creating a game in under 48 hours can teach you a lot about game design.

One of the last Ludum Dare contests I entered was a smaller version called a “Mini” Ludum Dare.  These happen in the 9 off-months that aren’t hosting a normal Ludum Dare.  They are hosted by veterans of the LD community and can have customized house-rules depending on the host.  A prototype I created for the theme Cryptozoology eventually became my first published Flash game TurnStyle.  So, I hope to take Fleedom Flies into a similar published future.