String Thing

Just created my entry for the Mochiads 60 second game design contest, its called String Thing - let me know what you think. Just click the thumbnail below to launch the game!

My new game - Match n Slide Aqua preview!

Here are a few screenshots of my new game, a Match3 style game with an underwater theme.

So far I've just been working on the graphics and I'm quite pleased with what I have so far. The first image is the main menu, and the latter is the in game view. Next job, draw some fish! Any feedback would be very much appreciated.

Here's a little update - I'm looking at porting this into an iPhone up as soon as the CS5 beta becomes available, stay tuned!

Fluid Dynamics using AS3

As a physicist I find things like this incredible. Fluids are extremely complex mathematically, so when I came across Eugine Zatepuakin's work on fluid dynamics I was amazed by the speed and accuracy of the simulations!

Just click the right image for a full preview, you'll be blown away! When I've got a bit more time I'll write a thread explaining how fluid dynamics simulations work, and explain the basic principles of coding something like this in flash, but for now check it out!

Move your mouse around to create dense regions and click to change the rendering mode. I love that flash is capable of handling these kinds of calculations. I remember playing a game called plasma pong which used very similar fluid dynamics to Eugine's model. Unfortunately the game is no longer available for download because pong is a trademark of Atari but here is a nice little video of the game in action.

Here is a little youtube clip of the game, just click to launch it! :)

Enjoy!

Nitrome - Some featured games!

I've been getting really addicted to games by Nitrome recently, a flash game company based in London, England. I thought I'd feature a few of my favourites on the site.

First is Snot Put, a cute and equally gross take on the shot put event where you have to swing the main character as fast as you can in a circle, the aim of the game being to throw it as far as you can. Its a small game, but the physics are good and its really addictive!

Next is Twin Shot 2, a new instalment from the design team. This game is beatifully made, and has done an incredible job of recreating the magic of games like Bubble Bobble in the late 80s and early 90s. From start to finish the character and level design is gorgeous, the music is great and not at all repetitive, there are loads of levels (including a bonus pack of 50).

As always just click the thumbnails to play or you can catch them on facebook on The Game Portal.

I'm sure you'll love these ones, Enjoy!

Buzz - New Game Project

I'm currently building a new game, so I thought I'd blog at each stage of the way. The game I'm working on is called Buzz and its a game about bees. You control a swarm of bees as they fly around levels trying to pollinate flowers as quickly as possible. I decided to write this game after hearing about colony collapse disorder - a relatively new term given to the phenomenon where bees abandon their hives. The disorder only effects honey bees

and has confused scientists everywhere.

I think that the most likely cause is environmental changes and not a viral conditions as some scientists have speculated, but what do I know, I'm just a flash developer haha...

So first of all I've been working on the game engine. I'm building the game tile-based just to make level creation a bit easier to handle and to keep up the retro feel that I'm going for.

Click here for an initial shell of the engine.

I'm having various issues with hit detection in the tile-based format but I will soon sort it out, You'll see what I mean. The engine runs quite nicely on my computer, let me know what you think. Enjoy!

Mochiads and Mindjolt

I have never made money out of the games and experiments that I have created over the years. In fact I had absolutely no idea how to get ads at the beginning of your games. Last week I stumbled across Mochiads, a service which does exactly that.

It provides an API and hosting service for games which includes relevant adverts at the front of your games, in a similar way to google ads works, for a small percentage of any revenue gained from advertisers and sponsors. Mochiads also distributes your games to its many partners, for example King.com among others. In the last week I have had 30,000 plays of my games, and although I'm sure thats not a huge amount its nice to see people the world over playing your games. The amount of revenue for this number of plays is tiny, but there are ways I have found of improving this. You only make money from adverts which are not skipped. Of my 30,000 I found only 1/5 of these weren't. So for 6000 unskipped plays I made about $1.50. After a bit of research I came across the Mindjolt developer page, and found people were increasing there plays to about 40,000 unskipped plays a day (After some simple maths thats about $12 a day) which isn't too shabby.

If a popular game could maintain this for a long time, or if several quick to make games could maintain a fraction of this it would be quite a nice steady source of income. Not $1000s or anything but a nice little bit extra to pay for the odd pint here and there.

Below is an example of seesaw, a little game I made last night. The increased loading time due to the slightly larger file size has definitely increased the unskipped plays. In the few hours since I published it early this morning it has already had 400 plays and I'm going to estimate it will peak at about 4000 plays a day and level off at about 800 (about $00.10 a day indefinately). This is without the massive traffic from Minjolt but unfortunately the games approval wait is lengthy (about a month) so I have a few in the pipeline which will generate more revenue in the future.

Just press below to try out Seesaw...

Try out both mochiads and mindjolt anyway. In my opinion they are both invaluable tools.

Cheers

Sam