jdnx429

I spent a short time yesterday updating some things around the site:

*The favicon is no longer the ugly Yahoo one.
*The game pages go directly to Whirled.
*Added pages for Auction Poker & Aliens Over Hawaii.
*Updated the Coins Bar Data Page since I noticed the gadget stopped showing the updates after April 14th.

Anyways, while updating things around here I noticed that Paint Factory needs a big graphical update. I’ll be doing that after finishing up some minor stuff for Aliens Over Hawaii and listing Blackjack Square.

As for the Aliens Over Hawaii video - that’s about as complete as it’s going to get unless I somehow have a lot more free time. I storyboarded the whole thing out so maybe in the future I’ll finish it up. (Just like the Auction Poker AI posts..ha!). In this economy, however, a lot more free time might be coming sooner than I want.

So I came back after a fun evening in the town, one that involved alcohol and karaoke - never a good combination - and saw an announcement on Whirled about the winners for the Game Developer Design Challenge.  I really thought I had a shot at winning one of the prizes with Aliens Over Hawaii but I was very, very disappointed to see that it didn’t even merit an honorable mention.

“Wow” is all I can think of right now.

I had planned this weekend on finishing up a video I was creating on the making of Aliens Over Hawaii but I really need to re-evaluate the time spent on making it.  I don’t think many people are going to be interested on seeing how the game was built considering the results of the contest. I’ll probably work on finishing up Blackjack Square.

However, I uploaded to YouTube the middle two minutes of the video which is definitely my favorite part - the making of the stages. You can see it here.

Well I posted a couple of my games - Cribbage Square and Poker Square on Kongregate and Newgrounds this weekend. The results have been somewhat positive. I noticed a spike of played games this weekend. Cribbage Square was being played almost as much as Paint Factory on Sunday! I don’t think that’s ever happened. Paint Factory has always been a steady performer bringing a bit of bling every day. The one drawback have been the commenters on Kongregate - they are not as friendly as the people on Whirled and they are quick to jump the gun on “Stolen!” amongst other off-color comments.  But jerks on the internet are nothing new so it’s best to brush them off.

I also found a nasty bug that wasn’t that visible on Whirled but became much more visible on the external sites so I had to go back and fix some things. I’ll definitely have to be more careful in the future about testing some of the games for outside Whirled. It’s a good thing that I did a test for a couple of games before uploading everything at once.

I originally wanted to make Poker Square and Cribbage Square into multi-player games but now I think my time would be better spent in fixing up my single-player games. I just don’t think that Poker Square or Cribbage Square are going to get a lot of multi-player action. Paint Factory Challenge, the multi-player version of Paint Factory gets played 1/10th as much as the original Paint Factory. However as soon as I placed Poker Square and Cribbage Square on the other two sites the number of games played increased by about 400-500%. Of course, that only translates to a few hundred plays each day and I don’t expect the spikes to be sustain themselves but any trickle of blings and cents is nice.  With a few more of my games uploaded all those little trickles add up to some of spending money.

In addition, there are plenty of more fun multi-player games on Whirled, many of which I enjoy. Cribbage Square multiplayer can’t really compete against them.  My niche is definitely single-player games and I’m going to stick with them. After finishing my Aliens Over Hawaii video, I’ll finish up Blackjack Square then fix up some bugs on some of the other games - Auction Poker & Paint Factory - and upload those two to Newgrounds and Kongregate.  Even Aliens Over Hawaii will find their way to the other two sites, but I’ll have to do so lightening up on the difficulty and tweak some things since they won’t be able to save or  continue a game using the Whirled cookie. I’ll probably lighten some difficulty spikes to make it a bit more casual but even then it’s still a long game to go on one playthrough - about an hour.  Anyways, we’ll see how it goes.

Well I finally listed Aliens Over Hawaii, just in time before the Game Developer deadline. I didn’t realize how helpful the auto-fire would be until I finished several hours of testing over the weekend and finding my finger still sore on Tuesday. I  must have clicked several thousand times! Auto-fire was actually in the game early in the process but I removed it later because I thought it made the game too easy. However, after a bit of tweaking, I think I found a good balance for it and put it back in. Most of the code was still there anyways.

I’m hoping to create and release a video in the next month showing how much effort it took to create the game, similar to those videos on Whirled showing how much effort it takes to make an avatar. I took plenty of screenshots and notes so the process was well-documented. Maybe I’ll compose a track for it as well. I had collected a bunch of different songs and clips that I was going to use as inspiration for the background music of the stages and I didn’t get to use them.

I think it will be a long time before I do a game as long as AOH again. I severely underestimated the time it took to create it but now that it’s finished and released it’s time to finish up some of the other projects I have on my list. It will definitely be a nice change of pace to get back to doing a fairly simple card game such as Blackjack Square, which was about 40% finished when I began working on AOH.

In the next week or so, I’m also planning to fix up a couple of minor bugs on Poker Square and Cirbbage Square and try out the Whirled affiliate program by placing the games on Kongregate, Newgrounds and Mochi. Both of those games are easy and casual so it’s a good test to try out the system. We’ll see how that goes. After that, I’ll be working on making my card games multiplayer, fixing up Paint Factory and working on another game that’s been sitting on my shelf too long – Gravitation.