Fledgling Videogame Developer

This is just to inform, that " DualBall " flash version was released yesterday to Newgrounds (click picture to access the game). Judgment process has already been passed, and users have rated the game to 2.88 stars (out of 5) currently. But it is a bit different story if this was worth all the effort. For some reason, this game has several setbacks during the development process (HDD failure, migrating from Linux environment to Windows, some lack of motivation, lost asset library, etc.). Anyways, we were able to finish and publish this game. We started developing this game somewhere in the beginning of August. I had an obsession to try how two objects could be controlled by turns using just one mouse button (or touch on mobile device). Even if I have not yet released any mobile games, I have spent lot of time thinking the UI for them. Anyways, when you are planning a game for mobile devices, you should keep in mind that controls should be as simple as possible. The...

I've been bit busy with my daily work for last couple of weeks, so gamedev activities have got less attention than normally. But still there has been some progress since my last update. My original plan was to finish and release "Dualball" flash game in the end of September, but now it seems to take some more time. Game itself is in pretty good shape: the mechanics works, there are no detected major flaws currently, and 75% of planned levels are ready and tested quite well.  We have done thorough testing ourselves and a number of serious bugs have been found and corrected during the process. Gameplay tests have been run on both computer and touch-screen tablet to get some extra coverage. It has been interesting to see that some bugs are not easily visible on both platforms: E.g. "ball ground check" routine worked fine on computer, but on tablet there were strange malfunction with it. So I strongly recommend you to test your games on multiple platforms in...

I am sharing one more chart showing the daily " Turbomole Trial Run " views over last 61 days. So it's about 2 months since we released this flash game to Newgrounds. Total number of views is at the moment 46082, so there has been in average 755 views per day (source of data: Newgrounds Statistics). The number of daily views has varied between 35 and 3620. I am pretty happy to these figures, because two months ago we were expecting no more than 5000 views in total. Ad revenue has been very modest for "Turbomole". There is just one ad shown before title screen, and that's all. I didn't want to irritate players with large number of ads, so there are no between-scenes ads at all in this game. Also, the eCPM seems to be quite low for flash ads. Pre-roll ads would provide better eCPM, but the number of those has been disappointingly low... What makes the chart interesting is the recovery that has happened couple of times: The number of daily view...

We have been working on two separate game projects in parallel. Now one of them is in quite mature condition and it is likely that it will be published in a couple of weeks. So it maybe is time to shortly introduce the game concept? Working title for the game is "Dualball". This is a platform game where player controls two balls at the same time with single click (or touch, depending on the device). The challenge comes from the parallel nature of this game: you must be able to do some multi-tasking and time your clicks correctly. Timely performance is rewarded with coins that are spread on the levels. Collecting all coins is not always straightforward, and you have to carefully think what kind of a sequence is required to clean up the level. We have been testing "Dualball" on flash and Android platforms, and it seems that the latter one is bit more convenient for this concept. However, game will be released in flash format first. Android version will follow ...

Edit 13.7.2017: This article is bit outdated, because nowadays Android Studio provides tools for recording video from Android device. And also Google Play Game Services app has a way to record your game directly.  I tried to find video capture program for the Android tablet to get better quality gameplay videos from our own game projects. Unfortunately, it seems that there are not so many solutions available, or at least I was not able to find any suitable for my needs.  Most of the Android video capture tools seems to require rooting, and I was not willing to do that right now. As far as I understand rooting will void the warranty (according to this article ), and my Tab3 is approx 3 weeks old. So it was very easy to decide that rooting is not a solution here. There were also some video capture tools that were told to be "no-rooting-required" (according to their developers). But I did not manage to get any of them working in my tab. I also found couple of tools ...

We have been working on two new game concepts for a while, and introduced the preview video of the more mature one for couple of days ago. At this point game has a working title "Dualball" and that describes quite well what the game is going to be. In short, the target of the game is to control two balls with single button (or touch, depends on the device). There are lots of obstacles and traps inserted to the route and balls should be steered past them. Naturally, rewards are not forgotten and there are certain number of coins on each level to be collected. Basically "dualball" is very simple and easy to play game. The challenge comes from the fact that player has to keep two separate objects in control using single click (or touch) as an user interface. It is far more difficult than you would think in the beginning! Currently, we are generating more levels to the game. Target is to have 24 levels in the first official release later this year. As you might...

Here's the latest chart showing the daily " Turbomole Trial Run " views over last 38 days. Total number of views is at the moment 36105, so there has been in average 950 views per day (source of data: Newgrounds Statistics). Still going strong, although the momentum is gradually slowing down. I decided to publish this game also on Kongregate, because it required very minor modifications. Basically, all I had to do was to remove Newgrounds API stuff and replace them with Kongregate equivalents. Since game was created with Stencyl, it was just matter of removing some blocks and selecting the new ones from the list. Another thing to do was to setup the Kongregate Statistics for the leaderboard implementation. And, of course, you had to remember add the block called "Setup Kongregate API" in the startup scene, to make sure that everything works as expected. BTW, there has not been too many views yet on Kongregate, but at least one comment was already receiv...

Most of the negative feedback on our games has been related to the poor quality of graphics and/or animation. I have to admit that these comments are appropriate: Our gamedev "team" currently has no artist at all, and actually all graphics are so far been drawn by me. And I'm really bad at drawing. Anyways, there has been a need for graphics and animation in our games. So I have tried learn to draw at least something using Gimp, Inkscape or Aseprite. Tools itself are not an issue here: there are plenty of tutorials and online manuals available. But even if you could use all tool features perfectly, it does not help a lot if you have no eye for art. I thought at some point that pixel-art would be a solution for me, and I dug out this tutorial:  Pixel Joint forum: Creating Pixel Art . Basically this tutorial was fine and everything was understandable, but I did not have enough perseverance to follow the guidelines. The theory of anti-aliasing and dithering was qu...

The updated version of " Turbomole Trial Run " flash game was released to Newgrounds about 4 weeks ago, without much expectations. However, today game exceeded the limit of 30000 views, which is in our opinion pretty good achievement for game like this. I have to admit that I have no idea what is the typical number of gameplays for the average flash game. However, the predecessor games " Turbomole Xmas Run " (Dec 2013) and original "Turbomole Trial Run" (Feb 2014) were released using already deceased MochiMedia's distribution network. In principle it was possible to get game distributed to thousands of flash sites. But in the end the number sites was something between couple of tens and one hundred for both of these games. The life span for Xmas version was about 2 weeks, and for normal version bit more than a week. Also, the number of players was around couple of hundreds for each of them. So, nothing special to mention with these ones. For update...

It is hard to know without prototyping how game concept would work. So during the past week I have built several prototypes to find out if I have something useful in my mind. This process takes some time, but at least for me it is important to get some kind of a visualization how things work on the screen. Static modeling with paper models, sketch drawing, or even using Lego bricks may also help to visualize game mechanics or rules, but I need to have something more dynamic to see the full picture. At this point, few ideas seem to be better than others, so they probably are worth further development. Although we are planning to move gradually out from flash games, it seems that we will still create at least one new game for that domain. The reason for this is that we know the tool (Stencyl) quite well and we are also familiar publishing flash games through Newgrounds and Kongregate. Publishing games to mobile and/or HTML5 is mostly unknown territory to us, so why not try to sta...

Ok. After lots of debugging, fixing, and other hassling we finally got Turbomole Trial Run flash game reproduction published at Newgrounds. Although to-do list was quite short for the day (only 3 items left), it took surprising amount of time to sort everything without breaking anything. The judgement phase was passed quite fast, and during the first 7 hours there were over 300 views. Average rating is currently around 3/5 stars (about the level I was originally expecting). Gameplay seems to be working and major flaws have not been found (yet). Also the level design is quite ok at least from our own perspective. It seems that sounds share opinions, but the current solution is about as good I was able to arrange within this schedule. For background music I was using "Fun in a Bottle" downloaded from Kevin McLeod's " Royalty Free Music " pages. All sound effects were created using the laptop microphone and Audacity software, so there might be some strange ...

As defined in the "roadmap", we decided to make updated versions from our two flash games. Because the plan was made and the work seemed to be quite straightforward, I started evaluating and updating "Turbomole Trial Run"  flash game.  Game was originally created with Stencyl and published using the Mochimedia distribution network. I had no intention to do everything again from the scratch, so I dug out the latest development version from my backup disk and started to explore how game was implemented about half an year ago. I have to admit that my old "code" (i.e. Stencyl blocks) is not too easy to understand, mostly because of the bad "coding" style and missing commment blocks. But anyways I got an idea what I've done before, and started planning the modifications.  First task was to remove Mochimedia API blocks out from the game, and replace them with corresponding Newgrounds stuff (leaderboard mainly). I also started new game pro...

First part of my summer vacations is over, and tomorrow it is time go back to work. Luckily, I have still one week vacation left in the beginning of August. :) My game development activities have also been quite minimal for last couple of weeks. However, there is a small exception: I've been discussing with my brother how our gamedev activities should be continued for the rest of the year. And as a part of this process we have tried to sketch a roadmap for upcoming game releases. I work full-time in large telecommunications company and all my game development is done in leisure time, so there is a clear need for some kind of a rough plan to keep things progressing smoothly. First of all, we have a plan to release three html5 games in the next six months: Two smaller ones and one large one. Smaller games are planned to have relatively simple graphics and gameplay, so we are able to finish them ourselves quite smoothly. There are already technology demos up and running for both ...

I decided to write some kind of a post-mortem analysis for " Soccer Breakthrough " flash game we released around 21st of June to Newgrounds (and Kongregate). Overall rating for the game has been 3+ stars at Newgrounds and 2+ stars at Kongregate. But there has been huge variation in ratings from different players: Some players have liked game a lot because of it's simplified gameplay and medal system. They even have encouraged us to continue same way with future games. But then there have been several comments concerning the lack of realism, the fact that game gets boring quick, most of the sounds are irritating (in fact, they are), and so on. I have even received direct requirements to change literally everything in the game. Yippee. Soccer Breakthrough was originally intended to be a HTML5 game with very simple gameplay and simplified graphics. However, we had very tight schedule because of my holiday trip, and we decided to make this release with Stencyl because ...

Alhough I've been creating game prototypes with Construct 2 for last couple of months, I decided to do yet one more flash game with Stencyl. I am not too sure what was the original reasoning behind that decision, but anyways the game was published today. "Soccer Breakthrough!" is currently available on  Newgrounds . Game has leaderboard and also medals (or achievements, whatever). Now I just sit and watch how our little game will please gamers. I am also planning to create HTML5 and mobile versions of this game, but before that I will carefully analyze how flash version will do on portals.  My vacation period started yesterday, and for next three weeks I don't have to think about System-On-Chip design at all. So I might have some more time for game development. But now I am having at least one week without any work or game related activities, and try to recover from the stressful last days at work... -Jussi

Yes, I am still alive and kicking, although no blog postings or games released for a while. Sometimes it is a good idea to have a little break and take a closer look what you have done recently. After releasing  Explopool , I have mostly been planning and creating different game prototypes. I've also explored various game development environments and engines to get an idea what kind of tools are available. There are plenty of choices, but I have not yet decided which one to try next for releasing a game. Haxeflixel might be a good candidate, but first I have to get better understanding on it. Stencyl 3.0 came available couple of months ago, and I've been gradually migrating to it. Android support has been the main driver for that, because I really want to go mobile at some point and Stencyl is the most familiar development environment for me currently. Since I am running my game development activities over Linux, it's not always so straightforward to switch to a new t...

Since Mochi Media is winding down the services  in the end of March, I started to look for alternatives for publishing and spreading my own flash games. Previously, I have posted couple of games to Kongregate just to test the flow, but there has been only handful of players for each of them (with zero marketing). However, I also posted Explopool  to kong for a week ago, and this time there has been enough players to get the ratings visible (2.7 / 5.0 stars at the moment). Clear progress, I would say. :) I have heard stories about Newgrounds and how demanding the audience is there. So it has been bit frightening choice for the fledgling game developer who is unsure about his own skills. Nevertheless, I decided to make a Newgrounds version of Explopool (with scoreboard and ads), and test how game publishing flow works there. Basically, integrating Newgrounds API to game made with Stencyl was very easy: Just create game project at Newgrounds and copy the API ID and encry...

It is somehow rewarding (and also relaxing) to get something finished. I am happy to tell, that after all that debugging, polishing and problem solving we got " Explopool " flash game ready and released. Game mechanics is not too complex, but still there were challenges to be overcome before we were able to say that this (possibly) works. The basic idea of the game is simple: place and set a bomb to pool table, wait it to explode, and see how balls are pushed by the shock wave. If ball goes to the pocket, you will receive some points and handful of coins. When coin meter (on the right hand side) is full, you will get one more bomb. There is also possibility to get 2x or 3x points, if you get enough balls to the pockets with one explosion. There are few special features available to make game more interesting and challenging: black hole: sucks all balls in certain range to the hole color match: if this is activated, balls of same color will disappear if they col...

"No matter what you publish, as long as you publish something" . I have tried this strategy for a while when learning game development and released several flash games (or equivalent) without much self-criticism.  There are many hobby game developers who start a project, work passionately on it for some time, and finally dump it to the trashcan or leave to the drawer to wait for better times. And this is repeated over and over again, for every game project. Basically, there is nothing wrong with this approach: sometimes project has to be terminated for some reason. And there is always something to learn from each project, even if it was left unfinished and never shown to anyone else.  For most game developers the funniest and most interesting parts are concept creation and actual development of the game. Who would not like creating game assets and mechanics, or sketching characters and new worlds? Bug-hunting, game polishing and balancing are also tolerable tasks for most...

During the past weekend my target was to finalize " Explopool " flash game. Basically, the game mechanics was working pretty well and the content was also in good shape from my point of view. However, I found some flaws in the first tests and decided that overall gameplay was not on the satisfactory level. Therefore decided to postpone the release date and started to do some major modifications to improve gameplay and overall look&feel.  Testing your game is extremely important, especially if you are going to make a public release of it. Although your brand new game seems to be finalized on the surface, it is very probable that there is still some polishing to do and in most cases also some bugs to be fixed. Finding those may require very intensive and creative testing.  Common target for game design and testing is to make a game that will be a positive experience for the end user. If game designer (=you) is the only tester, then it is very probable that the testing e...