Yay, new game! What, another match three? Come on, that’s going to get boring. But wait, there is something different in there.
Alright, here is my new game. Years ago, I had this on a phone and really liked it but never found anything like it in flash. So, I made it. Again with FlashDevelop and without any single graphical asset. Seems I developed an interest in computer generated graphics. With all the given filters in flash it’s pretty simple though to make something shiny.

Ok, some facts and pictures. The first fact: I forgot why I choose blue as the main theme.

The menu screen with kegMenu™, German & muted

Programming the game took approximately 2 days. Doing the framework was the harder part. Or shall I say overdoing. That’s what I tend to. All communication between classes is now done with custom events. And wow, these are powerful. I used a state machine for the first time and that makes sense when creating a game without lag.

The game itself comes, like TriPop, with a timed mode, where one has several seconds to score as many points as possible, and my favourite skilled mode, where only moves cost energy and no clock stresses the player. The new thing here is the hexagonal positioning of the balls and that you need to turn triplets either clockwise or counterclockwise to form lines (basic match three game description goes here…) of three or more balls of the same color. With chains longer than three balls or more than one chain on the initial turn you can regain energy. So, choose wisely and play forever. Balancing was big part here, since the timed mode in TriPop allowed the player to swap gems at no cost and thus create really long chains and score high, higher, woot. This time, turning the triplet comes with energy cost (evil grin here).

I first wanted to include a simple pattern mode (different colored balls displaying different patterns) for a better differentiation between the different balls that could be usable for e.g. colorblind people. It turned out, that I made the patterns, which were simple dots at first, a little bit more entertaining.

The game with pattern mode turned off (above) and on

The game comes in 10 languages. English and German were done by me, the rest was done by a part of the great Mochi Community, namely:

• Ernesto Quezada, Spanish
• LustiGames, Hungarian
• Maras, Czech
• kcnh, Dutch
• kou, Greek
• Pavel, Russian
• J.K.S., Finnish
• José Ferreira, Portuguese

So, in the attempt to let people help you on a specific task, the most important thing I learned is: BE SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT. I did send out the strings I needed to be translated and installed a test version of the game. What I should have done in addition would have been some descriptions for my dearest translation team to really know that I mean, because aside from SPO there may be other differences in languages… Well, that was one learning. It went pretty good though for a first try. Use short sentences and don’t focus on reusability of single words. The second important was, you may need a fallback font for special characters. Or, upfront, choose a font that supports those. There is a file size optimization possibility I did use for the first languages. It is ‘only embed the needed fonts’. But you can run into trouble there. So be careful. Write a little program, feed it all your strings, let it sort out the uniques and embed those. Otherwise you may miss one or two.

So, aside from all that I included some progression. With every game played, the points are summed and with every level gained the player gets more energy for the next game. Let’s see if I can make it to level 99 (it’s unlimited by the way).

The game over screen showing the players progress

The player’s level is also accessible from the kegMenu™ and there is another leaderboard for the level reached. So, if you are interested you can track my addiction to this game.

Since it’s above 30 degrees Celsius now I’m running out of all the cool stuff I wanted to write. Oh, nearly forgot, here is a link to the game.

Yoho, the game (you just lost it). I love memebase.

The selfish creation. I like match three games, so I made one. What I don’t like in games is time pressure whatever more ‘excitement’ it may bring. So I made me a little relaxing game. When I thought about making it public I added a timed mode, because there are people who like that. The most interesting fact from the developer side of view: I did the whole game in FlashDevelop and there is not a single graphical asset included. It’s all code generated.

Strategic alignment:

• Create a casual game as expandable and thus exploitable template
• Learn to work with FlashDevelop

The mechanism of a match three is trickier than thought. I decided against a flood fill check algorithm and instead used a double loop (rows, then columns). That way the first check is cheaper because only the swapped region (1 row and 2 cloumns or 2 rows and 1 column) is checked. I managed to implement detection of all kinds of combos. By checking rows first and columns later there are combinations that aren’t easily marked as having the same elements. But a little backwards loop over all found matches afterwards did that.

The game features:

• A title screen with the expanded kegMenu^® and some fluffy clouds floating around. The game uses automatic language detection via System.Capabilities for english and german.


The TriPop menu screen

• A settings screen with full sound control (main, music and effects) as well a language choice.


The TriPop settings screen

• A screen showing the basic instructions


The TriPop help screen

• A screen that informs the player that a link he clicked is not working. This is mostly due to the parameters allowNetworking or allowScriptAccess set by the site owner. When it is detected via try...catch the link is copied to the clipboard and the user is informed that he can just paste it into the address bar. I didn’t want to block the game at this moment. One could include the domain where the links are blocked for a dynamic blacklist or something but blocking the game would be rather annoying for the player.


The TriPop link block alert

• And a little ‘console screen’ though no input is possible. I included it just for me to see if the game is working correctly. It is accessible via keyboard input ‘IDDQD’. In-game this leads to a faster game end, a feature that I needed to test the leaderboards.


The TriPop developer console

• And of course the game. As this is the developer log I just wanted to show off the gimmicks first. As already mentioned, all graphics are code generated. The size of the final swf including the MochiAds preloader is 307KB with:
  • 238KB for the background loop (‘Winter’s Dream’, also on NewGrounds Audio)
  • 10KB for the sound effects
  • 39KB for the game itself


A TriPop game screenshot

And here is the game link.

Have fun playing it and leave a comment if you like to. Though it is still no ‘industrial standard’, I feel that this is my most professional work and I had a lot of fun developing it with only free tools. FlashDevelop is very comfortable for writing code, not only regarding the space on the screen for conding on a laptop monitor.

Yoho!

On the other side I guess I should be either faster in completing my god game prototype or relax and see how it works out for Pete. Or, totally ignore it and continue to make my game purely for the excitement to make it.

In the end run I am sure that it will be a complete mix of these three options.

Yoho!

This is now a less frustrating sequel. Less frustrating because I did not implement instant losing in the easy mode. Well, some players already commented on the game being too hard or too easy. Seems like mission completed! I did reuse a lot of code and stuff from the first game, thus development should have been fast. It wasn’t.

It took quite some time to sit down again and make the level design. Right, engine and graphics were ready. All it needed were some numbers. It took a while, I played it a lot of times and I think the different modes are quite good balanced. Some of the achievements are probably really really really hard to get.

Hmm, I am still not sure about sponsoring. I have tried it for the last game and it got a number, but on the other hand… I had to reject the exclusive offer anyway because of the mochimedia contest requiring distribution.

Pig-a-boo, yoho!

EDIT: That’s from the kongregate website:

Flu!!2 in the Kongregate contest list

EDIT n#2: You can also play and rate it on kongregate and newgrounds.

The fastest game I’ve ever made (including the time of despair about lack of talent) for mochimedia’s January contest. Uhh, graphics are a horrible thing. It would be easier it every object had a clearly defined function. Anyway, that game definitly holds some opportunities and a sequel should definitely follow. Maybe I should get an artist on board of the team.

The contest theme was ‘fairy tale nights’. First thing I started was a Beat ‘em up in MortalKombat style. It is a fun engine (1Player, 2Player and CPUvsCPU), though I did not finish any graphics. But as I wanted to participate I needed something else. So, this Paperboy ‘clone’ was the result. This engine is capable of making it a real clone (that is already implemented but that would have gone to far) with customers, non-customers and thus kind of a story mode.

Though the game is pretty short, I like it.

Be t’ big bad pirate wolf, yoho!

EDIT: You can also play and rate it on kongregate and newgrounds. It was in the kongregate contest list for some minutes:

PaperWolf in the Kongregate contest list

This is a byproduct of a game I am actually working on. The announcement of MochiMedias latest contest ’60 seconds to fame’ led to the development of this simple match-four-type-of-game.
Right from the start this was designed to be short (60 seconds), so a game with fast progress was needed. I have tried several improvements on this one.

Besides MochiAds, MochiScores and several APIs (kongregate, mindjolt, newgrounds), I have tried to improve buttons, my new soon-to-be-corporate-image menu (upper left side) and movement that I have not seen before in this kind of game. I spend some minutes to create a song that lasts throughout the 60 seconds and ends in a climax. The guitar solo is quite catching in my eyes/ears. If one of my four guitars would have had six intact strings on it I would have rather recorded it myself. Other than that, the synthetic sound isn’t all bad. Oldschool video gaming noise.

I consider this my best game so far. Though it is short it is pretty polished, comfortable (most options are saved in the local sharedObject) and somewhat challenging.
Ok, you read that far and I am going to share a highscoring secret (though it is obvious, no cheat). You need three and a half red combos to get blue orbs. Once these are on just collect blue combos because the score is multiplied each time. Yellow combos will create more orbs allowing more combos but making exact targeting more challenging. Green combos will increase the orb speed thus making the game even harder. Orbs are generated randomly, so to achieve a great score (gold medal is 400000) you’ll need some luck also. Well, good luck. See you on the leaderboard.

In terms of monetization, it nearly instantly (after 5 hours) received a three figure bid on FlashGameLicense. Unfortunately it was for a primary sponsorship. The contest requests ‘distribution enabled’ that would have broken the seven day exclusivity on the sponsors page. Other than that it feels great to see my work getting appreciated.

It’s also on Kongregate and NewGrounds but as usual they are pretty much ignoring/bashing me there. What, me worry?

Join t’ battle, yoho!

Made from the tutorial, this is my newest game. I included several ideas that people on Kongregate and Newgrounds suggested such as the obstacles.

So, third game. Features:

• chain reaction
• score and highscore with MochiMedia Leaderboard
• MochiMedia Leaderboard Medal Achievements
• score and highscore with Kongregate API statistics
• achievements with newgrounds API
• highscore with mindjolt API
• sound effects AND mute button
• music AND mute button
• custom cursor
• custom context menu
• 3 modes
• 19 levels each, random design
• 4 kinds of piggies
• 4 different obstacles

So, possibilities are still endless. One could do that as a zombie game, where the bullets are body parts and the zombies (like piggies here) change direction and maybe hunt the cursor. Include upgrades like better weapons, a Matrix-Time-Zoom effect and so on. Endless… Grab that tutorial and do your best.

If you have got a Newgrounds account and like to rate this game there: Newgrounds. Or get your account here.
If you have got a Kongregate account and like to rate this game there: Kongregate.

Be ye a gamer. Yo ho!

EDIT: I don’t know if anyone noticed it, but have a look at the shadows of piggies and vacc-bullets…

Basically it’s the first game, but this time it has a goal. Still on the experiment road. I am a bit excited. I wonder what the best weekday is to push it into the world. I think I’ll go through the mochibot stats to find something.

• some clickety-click
• score and highscore
• sound effects
• custom cursor
• custom context menu

Another version includes the Kongregate API.

Be ye a gamer. Yo ho!

Basically it’s the thing I wrote for the shared objects tutorial. Just added some other graphics. It is my approach to begin the experiment. That ‘game’ won’t get any good score, on the other hand: it’s just a test.

So, first game.
Features:

• some clickety-click
• score and highscore

Still got to insert some music and a custom cursor… Testing the power of mochis version control. I did already make a change to it and well, it’s updated.

Be ye a gamer. Yo ho!

edit 2009-06-20: cursor added
edit 2009-06-21: leaderboard added, positive experience with mochi’s verson control so far