Robot/Lizard

After a long delay of seemingly no activity, we are now just about ready to launch some of our new projects.

More announcements to come soon!

Blimey, It’s been ages since i’ve posted here. I got a load of topics I’ve been meaning to write about, and I’ve managed to get all of none of those actually started.
What I have been doing though is making sure we finally got our latest productions launched.

Beastie Burgers

First up, we have Beastie Burgers, a time management / cooking frenzy style game we’ve been working on in our spare time for the past year and a bit (I can’t believe it’s taken that long). It’s been a lot of fun to build, and roughly marks out the style and direction of the sorts of games and apps we’ll be producing in the future. I’ll have a Hamster & cheese burger with Jalapenos and slime when you’re ready, thanks!

I’m planning to write up a bit about the development of these in the future, although quite when I’m not sure yet. Watch this space!

In my book, a good flash game is one that I play more than once. If after I’ve finished playing around with it and then later that day I start thinking, “Oooh, I want to start playing that game again”, then it’s a winner. If I happen to find myself playing this game for a good hour or two each time, then it’s a very good game.

“The Space Game” from The Casual Collective is such a game. I’ve nearly worked my way through the main missions, and as I write this I’m thinking that I’ll have another go for 30 mins or so. It’s Friday after all!

The game is descibed as “a single player strategy game that features 18 missions and modes of play. You build structures to create and store energy, you mine asteroids for their minerals, and use both to expand and defend your operation, all while under attack”.

It actually reminds me of Homeworld a bit, which I used to play for hours on the PC when I was at university. I guess you could argue that it’s actually a bit like Desktop Tower Defence, but in Space and with some mining. What would be great is if it had an attacking element to it or even better, multi-player!

I must confess I had been a bit envious of The Casual Collective, thinking that perhaps they’d been a bit too lucky with their success with Desktop Tower Defence, and especially as it allowed them to pursue Flash game development full time. With the release of this game however, I think they are proving their worth as game developers and judging by the game ratings they are getting on sites like Kongregate, I am not the only one. Hats off to you David & Paul.

Overall I’d rate this game as 4.5/5 robots and 3/5 lizards.

Play “The Space Game” here.

A nice flash game that caught my attention recently was The Codex of Alchemical Engineering by Zachtronics Industries.
The basic aim of the game it to move around elements using programmable arms in order to make new elements. I nearly gave up on it initially as the instructions weren’t immediately clear to me, but once I’d got the hang of it I really enjoyed it. The author describes it as a game for engineers, and as a programmer myself, I really enjoyed building my little contraptions to acheive the level goals. I would rate this game 4/5 robots and 1/5 lizards.

With being so busy recently, I neglected to post that Helix made a nice little shooter game.
As a break from development on our other projects, I set him the task of building a game in a day, and Tri-shooter is what he came up with.
In all honesty, it took a bit longer than a day to complete. The core game mechanic was a day, but then I decided it needed a high score system in, and then it needed testing and tweaking, so in the end it was probably about 4 days total effort.
The main criticism we have recieved is that the controls are a bit weird, which I guess is true, but they’re fine once you’re used to them. You basically use the arrow keys to tell your ‘ship’ which direction to go in, and the mouse to aim and shoot at the bad guys. The quirk being that you press the keys in the direction you want to move the ship rather than the usual, thrust/turn left/turn right setup.
Have fun!