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Well, next week I move to Honolulu. I haven’t had time to really do anything in Whirled.  However, due to move, I have to give up my piano keyboard. I can’t take it with me:

I don’t know when I’ll be getting  another one so I really don’t think I’ll be able to do any music for Aliens Over Hawaii.

Below are three songs that would’ve served as the base for some of the stages. This is what I had when I stopped working on them many weeks ago. These are very, very, very early rough drafts- they’re basically just easy piano pieces. There’s a several bar theme that can be heard in all three songs that serves as the “Hero’s Theme”.

Song #1

Song #2

Song #3

I wanted the songs to have a driving feel to them but the mood would change from lighthearted to a more serious and darker tone depending on the stage. In the early stages, the hero is having a bit of fun killing the aliens. In the middle stages the hero realizes that it’s going to be a bit of work to get to the mothership and in the final stages the Hero’s Theme would nearly be drowned out due to the difficulty and desperation of trying to get to the mothership.

Oh well, maybe I’ll get back to it sometime later. However, that might be after I finish memorizing the ocean in Puzzle Pirates. It’s been too long since I played it.

Well I just finished my last trip for work for quite a while.  It also looks like I may not be moving anytime soon, so it definitely seems like I’ll have a bit more free time! I still have a few things unfinished with Aliens Over Hawaii so I’ll get back to the sound effects and music for it. I’m also going to include a Very Hard difficulty mode and a few new trophies. Now that YouTube now allows us to make captions for videos, the “Making Of” video will be a lot easier. Once that is done, I can put it out of my mind and focus on revamping the graphics for Paint Factory. After that, it’s all about making new games.

I haven’t been on Whirled much either so I have to catch up on all the new releases and games. I still don’t know exactly what Whirleds are all about but I’ll test them out and maybe make something.

And for no reason, here’s a picture of a one-legged seagull I took yesterday on the central California coast:

Alright, Auction Poker has been updated with new trophies and some graphical changes. Note to game designers: if you put point values in the trophies themselves, it makes it harder to change their requirements!

I wanted to reduce the requirements for meeting the poker chip trophies but it would’ve been really odd to earn a trophy that says 500K on it with only 250,000 points.

Also, I completed my four-part section on making the AI for Auction Poker. The first two posts are a bit of a rehash from the previous time I tried to do it but there’s a little more information.  It was originally a bit longer since I edited out big chunks that I thought were going to be confusing or boring.

With this update I am free from working with card games for a few months! Next, I’ll be working on some updates to Aliens Over Hawaii - mainly adding sound effects, music and an extra difficulty mode. I also want to dig down and figure out why the payout for the game seems to be quite lower than other games.  I suspect there’s a bug based on an examination of the Game Metrics.

In addition, I’ll be re-doing the “Making Of” video that I never finished. This clip was the introduction to that half-finished video. The second part of that video would’ve been this clip which showed roughly how the stages were made and where they were located on the island of Oahu.

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t finish that video. I don’t think it would’ve been as interesting as the new video I’ll be making. Instead of showing how the game is built, I’ll be showing the process of making the game. I’ll show the initial sketches, stages that didn’t make it into the game and other bloopers:

Well, that’s it for now. Time to make some music and sound effects.

So I finally listed Blackjack Square tonight. Took a bit longer than I originally intended but I think the final tweaks were worth it.

Anyways, here are the icons for the three games - Poker Square, Cribbage Square and Blackjack Square.

There is one suit missing and I’ve actually reserved that for the final Square game. It’s based on a game that’s not that popular anymore but I do like the mechanics of its gameplay and will probably be awfully easy to code. I’ll probably finish that one after updating Aliens Over Hawaii and Paint Factory, most likely near the end of the year.

Currently, the next big push will be to create about 30 new trophies for Auction Poker in addition to finish writing how the AI was developed. Hopefully I can finish all this in about a month or so but we’ll see.

So I’ve taken a bit longer to release Blackjack Square but there’s a good reason. Even after lots of testing,  to check the trophies, it struck me that the outcome of the game relied too much on luck. While luck does play a part in the other two Square games, it seems to play a  much bigger part in Blackjack Square.  I did some tinkering here and there with the Switches but we’ll see what feedback there is when I release the game.

I’ve probably been a bit slow in finishing up the testing of the game because I’m already looking forward and dabbling with some other things on my list. Auction Poker is going to get a bunch of new trophies as well and I have written new drafts explaining how the AI works. (I’ll finish it this time, really!)

In addition, I wrote some themes on the piano for Aliens Over Hawaii so hopefully I can get some sound and music into the game, as well as fixing one rather annoying bug that seems to be affecting the scores.  A little bit of sound can really add to the game:  Depth Charge wouldn’t be the same with those pretty cool sound effects.

And after that, in a few months, Paint Factory is going to get a big upgrade with a couple of new modes and themes.

I also have a ton of ideas for new games so we’ll see when I can get them out. At this pace, somewhere around 2012.

A month has passed since I released “Aliens Over Hawaii” and I found the reception of the game to a bit frustrating.  When I initially listed the game on Whirled, many of the comments were complaints about the game being too hard. I realize I’m the one who made the game and have played it at least a hundred times so I may have a different perspective on the game than everyone else. However, I never thought the game was “impossibly hard”.  Sure, there are stage segments where I died a dozen times but those were Stages 7 and 8 - on Hard Mode.  I honestly found it baffling that there would be people finding the game to be hard on Stage 1, even on Easy.

So soon after the Whirled release, I loosened up the game a bit and added the auto-fire (which in retrospect should’ve been there in the first place).  A short while after that I uploaded the game to Newgrounds and Kongregate. More complaints that the game was too hard followed and so I loosened the game a bit more.  I eased up on some trophy requirements, I made the bosses a bit easier, I increased the shield regeneration rate and then I loosened everything again just a bit more.

However, there’s a certain point where I got tired of listening to people complain that the game was too hard. I also became increasingly uncomfortable loosening the game past a certain point. I had tested and re-tested the game many, many times so I was confident that the original game was ‘hard enough’ - not impossibly hard, but certainly challenging. That’s when I decided to reset the game back closer to it’s originally difficulty level and create the ItemPacks. If people still thought the game was too tough, well then here are some things you can buy to make it easier.

One mistake I did make, though, was making some of the trophies too hard to get. When I was first planning out how the trophies were to be given out, I had a goal in mind that all trophies would be earned in 50 full playthroughs of the game. That’s why the final Lifetime Points trophy was set at 150 million points (3 million points per game * 50 games). The enemy trophies were spread out amongst those 50 playthroughs. I spread them out so that at least one would be earned every few playthroughs. However, I realize now that 50 full playthroughs is too much. I reduced the trophy requirements so that all trophies would be able to earned in at most 20 playthroughs which translates to roughly more than 20 hours of play time.

Anyways, with the release of the Item Packs  I will just let the game rest for the time being - no updates or significant changes for a while, maybe some minor bug fixes. From here on,  I’ll be working on fixing up some things on the games that are currently live and then it’s off to make some new ones.

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 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.

About two weeks left and I’m cutting it quite close.  All the bosses are finished, except for the final boss which I’ve had to redo a bit.  The final fight was a bit too short with only two phases so I’ll be adding a third.  The artwork for all the trophies, except for a few, is also done. The big push after this is all the Whirled stuff - cookies, scoring, etc.  Anyways, there will be about 65-70 trophies in the game.  Here’s a few of them:

That’s all for now.