Fledgling Videogame Developer

"Shapecalypse: Cosmic Impact" is a fast-paced space battle game with unique twist. Attention and quick reflexes are required to be successful in this galactic war. Features: - Google Play leaderboard - Local highscore will be saved too - Geometrical aliens have 4 different attack styles (will be mixed) - Compelling background music - Easy to learn but hard to master Facitious story: Mankind decided to set up a colony on distant asteroid zone. Unfortunately, that part of the space was already inhabited by geometric alien race. So serious consequences will be expected! (what a surprise) Your task: Your mission is to defend the surface of distant astral body as long as possible. Geometric aliens will send geometrically shaped meteorites to crush the base, and you are the only one between them and rest of the colony. How? Geometrical alien shapes are coming from the sky in different formations. The only way to stop each wave is to catch one of the shapes with ...

Hello Friends! Now it is time to present you the latest Android game from WestSloth Games . Game is called "Battlecards", and it is a digital version of ancient card game "War". There are several variations of this game, and our version is probably one of the simplest ones. Gameplay is as simple as it can get: The deck is shuffled and divided evenly among the players. On each round both players reveal the top card of their deck, and the player with the higher card takes both of the cards played and moves them to the bottom of his stack. Aces are high, and suits are ignored. If the two cards played are of equal value, then there is a "battle". Both players place the next card of their pile to the table. If topmost cards are still equal, battle continues with another set of cards. Battle will continue as long as either player has higher topmost card than the other one (or player runs out of cards on his/her deck). Winner gets all the cards that were on ...

Friend of mine sent me a question how to create a local leaderboard for Top10 scores/times/results/whatever in Construct 2. I want to introduce one simple way to implement leaderboard locally (no server required). Solution can be seen in this screenshot: Brief description of the method used: Save new score to variable for further use (in this case  inputScore ) Check if new score is greater than the lowest value in current array => If it is greater, replace lowest value with new score ( inputScore ) Sort array contents to descending order using this simple algorithm: => Take two consecutive elements from the array, starting from bottom, and compare them => If two consecutive elements are not in correct order, swap them Basically, this is very simple to do if you understand how to access arrays in C2. Have fun! -Jussi.

Since there has not been too many downloads for " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths " for Android, I started to investigate if there is something to improve app visibility at Play Store. To begin with something, I decided to get familiar with App Store Optimization (ASO). That is a process to improve app visibility at app store in a similar way than SEO for webpages. This was just to see if that helps at all in this case. In reality it might be that no one wants to play this game, but at least I have to try. :) After taking a short ASO training from Udemy course selection, I used a keyword tool (whose name I will not mention here) to find out primary keyword for my app. This keyword is now used as my app title at Google Play. Also, I tried to tune app description using the secondary keywords to maximize visibility. I am not too sure how I succeeded, but I guess the result can be seen during next weeks (or months). Who knows. My plan is to report the result of this ASO trial...

Edit 20.5.2020: Del Gibbon's Mad Math was suspended from Google Play Store about one year because of outdated API. However, just about a month ago we uploaded new version created with Unity3D to Play Store. So original Construct2/Crosswalk version does now exist anymore.  Greetings after a long time! This blog has been quiet for a long time and there has been only few updates during this year. I have been extremely busy in my day job, so I have not been able to use enough time for my game development activities. Anyways, during my summer vacation I started two totally new mobile game projects. The first one was released to Google Play couple of days ago, and it is called " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths ". This game is aimed to test and develop player's mental calculation skills. Concept is very simple: the answer is shown on top of the screen, and player has to select two or more numbers that totals are same than the answer shown on screen. There is a time lim...

Our first Android game "Swing Rocket Dash" was developed using Construct 2 and the Android native build was done with Crosswalk. As promised in the previous article, I listed some experiences using Crosswalk to build Android application from Construct 2 HTML5 export. There is a great  tutorial for using Crosswalk flow  at Scirra's webpage. However, there are few things I'd like to add: On Build Settings (under Cordova 3.x settings) you have to define App ID field. That is used as package name at Google Play, and it is using reverse domain name notation, e.g.  com.myhost.myappname.  This name is unique for each app, and for "Swing Rocket Dash" we were using com.gamaan.swingrockets (gamaan.com is our own domain).  It is important to increment App Version Code field every time you create new version. Google Play wont't accept you new APK if it has same version number than any previously loaded package of your game You should also check the Plugins...

I am happy to tell that our first mobile game called "Swing Rocket Dash" was published at Google Play for ten days ago. Since we had no previous experience on creating Android applications, there was all kinds of a problems to be solved along the way. But anyways we got it somehow working. Game was developed using Construct 2, exported as HTML5, and finally built to Android native app using Crosswalk (Intel XDK). I will later provide separate article on this to clarify technical details and issues we met during the process.  Game was also published as HTML5 at Newgrounds . Basically, is was quite easy to make the release: HTML5 export was zipped so that index.html was on top level hierarchy, and zip package was uploaded to Newgrounds. I tried to add Newgrounds HTML5 API to this game, but for some reason it did not work as expected. So there are no medals in the game at the moment. Sorry! :) BTW, Docteur Pi did a video review of HTML5 version and it can be foun...

It's quite long time from my latest blog article, so I try to catch up what has happened lately.  First of all, we got "Dualball" flash game released to both Newgrounds and Kongregate . For some unkonwn reason, this game was extremely hard to get ready and published. And to be honest, there were some planned features we dropped out from the released version. We just had no motivation to implement those. Also, at summertime we planned to have Android version too, but that is not on our plans at the moment. There has been some queries from flash version players for us to create mobile version, but at this point I don't promise anything. Another change has been the slow migration from Stencyl to Construct 2. The reason for this has simply been the HTML5 capability of the latter one. Exported game can be played on almost any platform you can imagine, and the HTML5 output can be converted to some kind of "native" application e.g. for Android, iOS, WP, etc....

Apparently, I had a need to create a scene where the X position of consecutive objects was determined with sine function. Simultaneously, objects were moving from top to bottom, keeping their X position all the time until they exit the screen. Please see  sine wave demo (html5)  to get an idea what I was trying to do.  ( not available anymore ) The ready-made "Sine" function of Construct 2 was not suitable in this case, because I did not want to make the series of objects to look like a worm. :) Task is not too complicated and math it pretty easy, but anyways I decided to create an example showing my solution. If you are not willing to download .capx from my own server, the screenshot below shows the most critical points to implement this behavior: Basically, you will need following events and variables to make things working: xPosDelta determines the "steps" in which the objects are created. You can try to change the value o...

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...

While getting familiar with the Construct 2, I started to wonder would it be possible somehow detect what kind of a device is used as an input device for HTML5 game. In principle, HTML5 will run on almost all platforms, so it would be very useful to see whether the player is using mouse or touch screen as a input device. I created a simple Breakout game clone to find out how the control method could be detected easily. Breakout clone Game is very simple one, and it has no extra features included. I also tried to add some comments to ease up understanding what has been done and why. I am not too sure if everything is done "correct" way, but anyways this example is working somehow with my own devices (Android tablet, Lumia phone, Linux and windows computers). Game events 2-4 are the most interesting ones from this article point of view. Please see the .capx or the picture below to see how detection was done in this case. Detect whether mouse or touc...

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...

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...

As mentioned in previous blog article, my target was to attend FGL's "week long game jam" with one idea. However, after four days of work I realized that I am not able to make the game as playable as I wanted to. So I decided to freeze development work, and quickly drafted a new concept that was possible to get to up and running in less than one day.  In practice it was ~7 hours before deadline when I started creating the game. But the development work went quite smoothly without any problems, and in the end I got the game ready in 5 hours. So there were still some margin left. :) It works best with some touch-screen device supporting HTML5, but you can try it also with computer+mouse combination. You can find game also from FGL, if you have account there.  Next step would be to polish the graphics and make some improvements to the gameplay. Edit 7.6.2014: No special success in jam, but got some valuable feedback how game could be improved. The most important t...

I started evaluating new game development tools for a few weeks ago. My target was to find out which kind of tools are available for creating games for e.g. HTML5, Android, facebook etc. During the search I happened to find out that there was a Construct 2 jam ongoing at Newgrounds, and realized I did not know anything about the tool. So I installed it to my windows desktop and started to find out how it works.  Tool itself is quite easy to use, and so far I have created couple of demo HTML5 games that can be run on almost any platform. Tests have been run without problems on linux and windows PCs (using browsers), Nokia Lumia (Windows 8 phone), and couple of Android phones. Earlier I was skeptical about the performance of HTML5 games, but to my surprise at least these specific demos were running smoothly on all tested devices. Even if I have not much experience on developing game for multiple platforms, I have at least one guideline to share: Keep in mind what input devi...