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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:

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.

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.

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’ve started working on Blackjack Square and I still think this will be a pretty easy game to code. The game will definitely be uploaded sometime in early to mid-November.

However, the other big thing I want to work on is making my current games multi-player. My very first experience with multi-player games was Paint Factory Challenge and that turned out to be a total bust. It’s barely played at all - only about 1200 games so far. It was also an unbelievable pain in the butt to code and test since I use Flash CS3 to develop my games. Basically I had to log on to Whirled every time to test the multi-player aspects of the game.

When I originally thought up of Auction Poker, I intended it to be multi-player but I really did not want to go through the hassle of creating another multi-player game and have it end up unplayed. There are a few good multi-player games on Whirled that end up minimally played. Games such as Zyraxxus, Spades and Gomoku. I’m speculating here that part of the reason for that is that these games require another person to play. Games that have single player modes, in general, seem to get a lot more play.

However, I’ve learned a lot since I coded Paint Factory Challenge several months ago and I’m writing up a few classes and tools that will help make multi-player games a lot easier for me. I also think that many of my games can benefit from playing with other people - it’d be awesome to have 6 people playing Poker Square at a time in a challenge mode.

So basically, once Blackjack Square is done. I’ll be going around my other games and making them multi-player. The trickiest game to make multi-player will be Auction Poker and I’ll be leaving that one for last. I still haven’t quite figured out what to do with a player that’s elimnated in the first round. Will they just sit there, waiting for the next round? Or will I need to re-work the elimination of multi-player to make it optional? I suppose I’ll figure it out.

I noticed that as of yesterday, game creators on Whirled are receiving Bling! Below is a shot of my first Game Bling.

One game in particular is bringing in much more bling than the others - 16 points. I don’t know for certain which one it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s Paint Factory since it is my most popular game.

Poker Square is also quite popular, much more than Cribbage square so I’m guessing that’s where the 5 points of bling came from.  Auction Poker and Cribbage Square bring up the rest. I also have Paint Factory Challenge listed but it’s not really played so I don’t really expect any real bling from it.

I’m currently working on fixing up some stuff on Auction Poker and I’ve already started writing the next two entries on the Auction Poker AI, but I just need to do cleanup before publishing.

I’ve been updating things here and there. I’ve created two new pages. One for Paint Factory. (Yes, you can play it outside of Whirled!) The other page is for one of my Whirled Rooms where I test stuff out.

Even though I haven’t finished Auction Poker or started Poker Square, I’ve already started writing notes for a Blackjack-type game. I have notes for other games too but I’ll probably get the cards games done first, they’d certainly be easier to code than a space-based gravity game or a plant breeding game.

I’ve been watching the score distribution for Paint Factory very closely ever since a booched score (11 million points!) caused everyone to earn very little coins. Looking at early score distributions, it was clear that people liked playing the normal modes more even though the harder modes pay more Coins.

However, since I revamped Paint Factory the play frequency on the different difficulty levels has been really noticeable. Take a look at the scores distribution graph. I modified it to make it a bit clearer.

The color bars represent rough scores for each of the difficulties.

In reality, there is a bit of an overlap between difficulties and failing scores are spread throughout the graph, but this is a good estimation. As you can see, the Normal difficulty is the most popular by far!

Usually the difference is not this distinct but this was taken about a week after the scores were reset. As more scores are recorded and the higher end players get back to playing the difficult levels, there will more scores recorded for the higher difficulties. Stay tuned.