Fledgling Videogame Developer

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 sketching a game for FGL's "week long game jam" , and noticed quite soon that I have a game idea that would need smoke animation. I did not have previous experience how to create one, so it was time for few trials. One of them proved to be useful for me, and here is description how it was done with Construct2 . First of all, I tried different styles of "particles" or objects for a smoke. My target was to create something like volcano-style smoke, meaning that it will appear in certain point and starts ascending slowly to the sky. Simultaneously, this puff of smoke expands and gets thinner (=opacity decreases), and at some point it disappears totally. Just like in the still picture below: I tested couple of options for creating a smoke object, and ended up something like described in the picture below: Somehow, round shapes looked the best, but I tried cloud-like objects also. The background was light blue, so dark colors were better in this...

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...