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!

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.