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Showing posts from August, 2014

Youtube "Fan Finder"

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Today I decided to create an introduction video for Westsloth Games Youtube channel   (or rather, I practiced to do some kind of a marketing video). The work was done using the proven quick&dirty method, meaning that I dug out some old gameplay videos and screenshots of our previously published games, and edited the video using the Kdenlive software.  Resulting video can be found below: There is a feature called "Fan Finder" ("Fanimagneetti", in Finnish) available at Youtube. It enables you to display your video as a trueview ad for no extra cost. I added the video above to this service, so let's see how this works...I don't have any big expectations at this point.  -Jussi.

Android back button usage in Stencyl

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By default the back button of Android device sends the active application to back. However, in many mobile games back button is used e.g. to return to the menu (or any equivalent action). This is possible in Stencyl also, but you have to configure the behavior first to match your needs. Here are simple steps to do it: Go  Settings -> Mobile -> User Input Activate " Override Back Button ". This makes back button to act like escape key Go Settings -> Controls . Check escape key bindings (name: Escape, Key:Escape) Open your game scene and go to "events" tab (or edit behavior) Create keyboard event for escape key, as shown in Figure1 below ( Add Event -> Input -> Keyboard ). Set control as "escape". Add transition block and fill in your menu scene name + other required information Figure1: Keyboard event for escape key That's it! Now you can exit from your play scene to menu screen.  But wait, did you forgot

Android video capture issues

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Edit 13.7.2017: This article is bit outdated, because nowadays Android Studio provides tools for recording video from Android device.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

Dualball game concept (preview video)

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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

Turbomole statistics update

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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

Fledgling game artist...or not?

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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

Flash game statistics

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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