My latest game For The Twin has finally been released!

It features seven original chiptunes I composed for the game and countless animating backgrounds and alien creatures.

The basic gameplay is one of finding the identical twin to match the goal but it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Their are six different challenges with highscores and medals to win.

The alien twins dance to the music as you attempt to identify the correct match.

My goal was to make a game that would have appeal to more than just teenage boys–I wanted both women and children to enjoy the game as well–hoping that each would be able to take something different away from it. So far feedback from all demographics has been really good!

For The Twin was originally developed for the TIGSource “A Game By It’s Cover” competition. The artwork in the game was inspired by this fake Famicase game cover by artist Kayo Tamura.

I even kept a complete development diary for the game.

After the competition was finished I put my game up over at Flash Game License to find a primary sponsorship.

I was pleased to secure a nice sponsorship from Spil Games for their Family Portal Group. I handed a massive translation file over to them and they had my game localized into 13 different languages for distribution across their 50 or so arcade portals worldwide.  The exposure potential is huge to say the least.  The game has already received almost 200K views since it started being published by them yesterday.

I have also put the game up over at Newgrounds so feel free to stop by and rate and review it over there if you feel like helping out.

All told I’m quite pleased with the game.  I decided to take a genre I didn’t really like (find the match) and make a game that tried to explore it the best I could given the 1 month competition time limit.  I am also very thankful that I was then able to successfully monetize the game as well which is critical to my small game studio.  Besides the primary sponsorship I have already begun lining up secondary non-exclusive licenses which is quite exciting to see so much interest so soon.

Give For The Twin a play and I’d love to hear any feedback–thanks!

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!

TurnStyle is a unique visual and memory based puzzle game where each of the 15 puzzles are original illustrations that follow a complete story arc over the duration of the game.

Every puzzle is made up of individual pieces which have been randomly rotated so that they are scrambled each time. You must work quickly and efficiently to rotate the individual pieces into the proper alignment before the timer runs out.

There are easy, medium, and hard difficulty puzzles mainly guided by the amount of individual image pieces that make up each puzzle and the way that I break up the images into pieces.

Personal best records are stored locally for score and rotation count per puzzle. Global high scores may be submitted to the Mochi Leaderboards at any puzzle progress screen. You are able to retry a level if the time runs out.

The original game play idea came from my Cryptid Puzzle Challenge entry in the Mini-Ludum Dare #7 competition back at the beginning of the month.

I will try to post more about my adventure in creating this game and learning Flash but for now this is finished!