Fledgling Videogame Developer

I will now present a realistic summary how "Flamingo Tap Tap Run" Android game did over the first 6 months. For that I created a graph that shows moving 30 days average for new downloads. It should give a good idea how the number of downloads has evolved after the updates. Graph looks great (really steep slope after major update) as long you don't look the scale on the left hand side. But here come the details: First major version of Flamingo game was available on 3rd of September 2019. It had just one flamingo character and there was no use for collected shrimps. This version got around 50 downloads per month, that has been pretty typical for most of our released little games. Second major version with large update was released on 3rd of January 2020. This one had total of 8 playable flamingo characters which player could buy using the collected shrimps. This update increased the number of monthly downloads to 200+ and it can also be seen from the attached graph. ...

The original logo of WestSloth Games was created by me for several years ago. Basically, it was a hanging sloth that was built using voxels. I guess MagicaVoxel was the tool used to create it. In the beginning logo looked pretty ok. But over time it started to look confusing and not so good anymore. So there was a clear need to draw a new logo. But what kind of a logo is good one? Some views can be found for example from this  article concerning logo design : " A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner’s intended message.   " So yes, logo must be at least appropriate, practical and simple. Those were the words I thought I understood.  Additionally, there was also a short list of characteristics of good logo: 1. Simple 2. Memorable 3. Timeless 4. Versatile 5. Appropriate So, I tried to follow these guidelines and started drawing with Inkscape. After 30 minutes of fiddling logo looked like this: ...

During last couple of years we have created some generic Unity3D C# scripts. These scripts have been design to be re-used at least to some extent, to ease up new game project creation. Now some of them are available for public at GitHub: https://github.com/jliias/CommonUnityScripts We have selected the ones that we think are most readable and understandable and also well (?) commented. New general purpose scripts will be added when there is something we think is worth publishing. Please have a look and see if there's something useful also for you! -Jussi

After releasing Battlecards Android game, we started working on a game concept that was invented couple of years ago. At that times, I created quick&dirty prototype for testing basic game mechanics. Also, main characters were also drawn then. But for some reason we did not continue to work on it. The working title of this game has been "Fly Attack". But after some not-so-careful thinking we decived to rename it to "Fly Assault!". At least there are not too many games with same name in Google Play. :) Game itself is very simple and easy to play: There are flies coming from top of the screen and player tries to catch them before flies get in touch to muffins in the bottom of the screen. There are couple of special "weapons" available to boost killing the files: Fly poison and Frog. Please watch attached video clip from Youtube to get understanding of this game: Fly Assault! will be available at Google Play Store in July 2016. -Jussi

We decided to try an alternative promotion video for Battlecards Android game. Target was to create not-so-serious gameplay video using the properties we already had in place. So, best idea we got was to record short live gameplay of "War" (that is the model for Battlecards). Video was recorded using mobile phone, and both "actors" are amateurs. So, here is the result: Not perfect and probably not exactly what we planned, but at least we got it done. :) -Jussi

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 ...

Edit 14.3.2019: gamaan.com website will be discontinued in Autumn 2019, so links pointine there are removed from this article.  Very small percentage of our game ideas are completed and published. Most of projects are suspended (or even killed) during the early phases of game development, and only few are really published in form or another. But what happens to the ones which are not completed? In the past we have just left them to the corner of a hard disk, but now we decided to give them a second change. So we decided to create a site called gamaan.com  that is filled with unpublished game prototypes by   WestSloth Games . We wanted to give wide audience an opportunity to play and test these immature pieces of digital art and provide feedback about them. The maturity level of games varies a lot: some prototypes are in quite finished condition, but some of them can be very rough mechanics trials. We are collecting feedback on some parameters of game. If y...

Here are some general guidelines that should help to get your first gamedev projects proceed, and even completed in a reasonable time. 0. Prepare to sacrifice your time and effort Ok, you have idea for a game. But are you ready to make the effort to implement it? If you want to get your ideas ready, most likely you got to do it yourself. No one else will do it for you. 1. Start with something small and simple.  If your first game project is large and complex, you probably won't finish it. 2. Select an engine that fits to your game.  There is no need to shoot birds with cannon. Try different engines and use the one that fits for your purposes. 3. Create lots of prototypes and small games.   Select the ones that work for further development. Gather experience on suspended and unfinished projects.  4. Test the mechanics in early phase.  Find out if game mechanics is working as soon as you have working prototype. Try to define game's "fun facto...

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...

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 ...

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...