New Game - Flapjack Adventure Bound

Our team launched a new game!

Flapjack: Adventure Bound

The idea was to create a dynamic where players would have to juggle their 2 characters in the air and create risky situation to keep their chains and therefore get the maximum score.

I was hoping to have a light rhythm element but it did not work out. The idea was that instead of the normal "hit it on the beat or you fail" design we could accomplish more of a "if you play well you get the most points and ADDITIONALLY you make a nice rhythm." After many attempts it just wasn't working out or executing the music aspect would negatively affect the core mechanic. Our team came up with some great designs though that I hope we can use in another game.

Our programmer implemented nice physics which really improved design by creating fun, bouncy scenarios. And, of course, all the art looks amazing.

I think Flapjack is our best new show. I am glad our team got the chance to make the launch game.

AAA game = terrible minigames?

I am not one to mindlessly rail on games. I love games. I also make games and I know how the development process goes: things go wrong, problems appear at the last moment, etc. As my good friend Steve told me, "Games are never done, they are just released."

That being said, I have to call game design foul of the recent trend of amazing AAA games neglecting the design of their minigames.

Bioshock, one of the best games I have ever played, used Pipedream as a metaphor for hacking. Why would you use this old arcade game? It's not a good metaphor for hacking and its definitely not fun. OK, I get the water theme but when a nearly 20 year old arcade game is sitting in the middle of one the most amazing, immersive games ever, I have to raise the question, did they attempted to push the design of their hacking game? Did they ever try to push past "Pipedream was a game with water in it!"?

(On a side note, I love taking pictures. I don't even like taking pictures in real life but for some reason I freak over taking pictures in games).

You know how there are crimes so terrible that even other criminals will be sickened by them? These are crimes against the very fabric of humanity. Crimes like this exist in game design. The most horrific offender? Using Simon as a design solution.

Mass Effect, an unprecedented achievement of human emotion, conversation and story telling, actually falls a step BELOW using Simon with their "decryption" mechanic. Their gambling (much like Pazaak in KOTOR) is simplified Blackjack.

Player are going to HAVE to spend time playing these minigames. Put some effort into their design. Make them compliment the game, connect with the metaphor and make the game better. Right now they are only degrading some great game experiences.

I understand that minigames offer another gameplay scenario to break up the core game. I love a well done minigame. I think Triple Triad (in Final Fantasy 8) was not only a wonderful minigame but one of the smartest card game designs going.

I have to believe there are game designers on these 200 person team who WANT to make compelling minigames and not just throw a dart at a list of MAME or parlor games. They want to take on the challenge of designing a mechanic that really communicates hacking or decrypting. Give that person a couple of months and see what they can do.

Tarnation is the weekly challenge at Kongregate!

http://www.kongregate.com/games/bradido/tarnation

So exciting to see Tarnation with achievements!

When designing Tarnation I had a goal for the scoring system: you play the game in about 15 minutes but your score can range greatly.

I feel like too many Flash game high-scores are purely reliant on how LONG you play the game, not neccesarily how well. While the scoring system in Tarnation turned out too complex and not communicated well (sorry everyone) it accomplished this goal.

From my scoring calculation I knew getting over 100,000 points was possible. Howver, I am not good enough at my own game to do this. Up until now, from looking at Kongregate and MochiLeaderboards, only about 11 people had been able to complete the game with a score over 100k. Now lots people have gotten over 100k.

Apparently having badge on your game makes people much more critical of it.

Tarnation - with MochiScores

Now Tarnation supports highscores anywhere!

Tarnation with high scores

After a couple of days of testing to make sure things are working ok I will update my "free to use" version with this one.

Everything looks good so I am releasing the version with MochiScores free for use:
This includes the SWF and a thumbnail.
http://www.bulletpattern.com/tarnation/tarnation_v5p.zip

Here is the promopack with screenshots, sprites, etc. These are only for promotion of Tarnation:
http://bulletpattern.com/tarnation/tarnation_promopack.zip

Only 2 people that I know of beaten 100,000 points.

DS Colors!

A while back a friend at work showed me Colors!, a homebrew application that let's you paint on the Nintendo DS. It's a really amazing application; it even uses the DS pressure sensitivity for brush size and opacity.

Anyway I finally did a painting I am not embarrassed to show and posted it to the gallery.
Brasshat

Browse the gallery. Some really amazing artist have Colors! and are doing some mind-blowing work on the tiny DS screen.

If you have a homebrew cart and like to draw, pick it up and submit your stuff.

Tarnation - free for use

Quite a few people have contacted me about using Tarnation on their website. If you are interested in posting Tarnation on your website here is a version that anyone is free to post.

This version of the game does not have high scores. This version had runs MochiAds and is free to use. http://www.bulletpattern.com/tarnation/tarnation_v5p.zip

Here is a promo pack of screenshots, logos, characters, etc. in PSD format here. These are for promotion of Tarnation only. ( 3.45 megs) :
http://www.bulletpattern.com/tarnation/tarnation_promopack.zip

This version of Tarnation runs MochiAds but if you are interested in removing the ads from the game and putting in a intro with your site logo and/or implimenting high scores you can do so for a one-time licensing fee.

Contact me at bradido[ a t ]gmail.com with any questions.

Tarnation wins Kongregate weekly contest!

Last week Tarnation won the weekly contest at Kongregate.com!

Thanks to everyone who played and voted.

Tarnation beta on Kongregate

My new game, Tarnation, is live:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/bradido/tarnation

Kongregate has been down today so here is an alt link:
http://www.bulletpattern.com/tarnation/ (I put Google ads on there, please don't judge me too harshly)

Please play it, submit bugs/comments and give it a high rating :)

Sometime soon I will post the entire process of creating the game.

Painting - squid

I thought I should do the ubequitous squid piece.

Programming Spirit Revived

Recently Cartoon Network invited Flash expert Grant Skinner to give us a 2-day course on Actionscript 3. It was really informative and, perhaps more importantly, it was very inspiring.

I had this idea a while back to do terrain based on perlin noise for Flash but I didn't pursue it. Inspired by the course I did a small demo.



It read the perlin noise and creates terrain. I made the low areas blue (water!) and the higher areas dirt and grass. I put gskinner ColorMatrix class in there too to fool with colors.

Digital painting

About 6 months ago I got a tablet PC at work and was very excited. I started working in Alias Sketchbook often for concepting. Just doing sketches for level layouts and quick "communication sketches" which is my description of my er, shall we say, unrefined drawings that I give to the artists to communicate my ideas.

Recently I got rid of my tablet pc because it was underpowered and none of the CS3 suite worked with the pressure sensitivity. I just got a new laptop and a Wacom. Wacom tablets are so much nicer than tablets for drawing its crazy. I had no idea of the difference.

I have always been blown away by digital paintings at site like conceptart.org and and my previous attempts at digital painting were a disaster. Recently I found this tutorial and this one. This guys art blows me away. After laboring over his tutorials and fooling around I think I have found a style that suits me pretty well.

I am going to be trying to do a couple quick paintings a week and post them so I can practice and (hopefully) track my development. These are just practice pieces.

Flower

Fish

Once I work my way through the Fs I will move onto the Ks.

I already redid some art in my game this way so you can see the updated stuff in the alpha posting.

That game sucks

Useless Words
I am getting really tired of hearing games described in such arbitrary terms such as "awesome" and "sucks." I am 33 years old and my friends tell me games suck. This kind of rhetoric has no value to me. Its for teens communicating to their friends in their vague and undeveloped language.

I actually had a friend say to me, "That game sucks so bad... I played through it 3 times and..."

So the game "sucked" yet you played the game in its entirety 3 times?

Granted, I am sensitive to the feeling of the people who made these games. I know they worked hard and more importantly game developers always WANT to make a game that will be loved by all.


Fun vs. Flaws
Of late I have been trying to think of games as fun vs. flaws. Nearly all games have SOME fun element to them and ALL games have flaws. The quesion is: do the flaws outweigh the fun?

I don't think any game can be free of flaws but it seems a game can be damned for a flaw that does not affect gameplay just as quickly as kiss-of-death flaws like unresponsive controls or a bad camera.

I nitpick games probabaly more than most but I always try to ask myself, "Does this really detract from the gaming experience?" Most often that answer is no, I am just nitpicking elements that could have been better with unlimited time and budget.

Useless Language on the Horizon
Recently I keep seeing things such as "this game is too repetitive" and "this game is too short" and serious flaws. So is Tetris flawed because its repetitive? I know this is not an apples to apples comparison but these statements are being used more and more by gaming journalist and quickly becoming damning features of a game.

The problem isn't that the game is repetitive. ALL games are repetitive! The problem is the core mechanic cannot withstand be played numerous times without becoming easily mastered and therefore boring.

Stupid Example
Jaws Unleashed scored around a 4 at every review site. I will not argue that game is seriously flawed but, my god, that game is so fun. I have played other higer scoring games that don't even come to close to the good times I have had with Jaws Unleashed. The flaws in that game are ENOURMOUS but come on, playing a shark and spitting torpedoes at offshore oil rigs, it doesn't get better than that.

Tarnation - alpha

The game I have been working on has a nice big update.

Tarnation

Any comments on the game are welcome. I am trying to make as much time as I can to work on it and get it done.

Speaking at GGDA tonight.

Tonight I will be giving my lecture of Common Flash Game Design Mistakes at the November Georgia Game Developer meeting.

My presentation has been fine tuned and I will have a computer with a more reliable battery :)

Cartoon Network MiniMatch games

Long time readers (i.e. no one) will remember Big Shot Checkers from a while back. This game was designed in mind with our upcoming multiplayer games system. Now this system is live.

MiniMatch

MiniMatch is CartoonNetwork.com's new virtual community based around playing games and getting stuff for your avatar. The more you play the more points your earn.

We made Big Shot Checkers multiplayer and created 2 other games. Again, the goals were 1) classic games 2) fast gameplay 3) CN brand integration.

Ben 10 Galactic Matchup
Like match four but when you make a match you damage your opponent. Player can make combos and even matches for the other player, resulting in self-inflicted damage. Each alien of Ben 10 is represented and when a player makes a match their matched pieces animate away in the style of the chosen alien.

Camp Lazlo Battle Beans
You remember how painfully boring those first 5 minutes of Battleship are?
"e5?"... miss
"b2?" ... miss
etc.

Well Battle Beans removes the boring bit at the start and adds a bit of skill to making your shots. Choose from 3 different teams and sink your opponents unwitting "team."

I am super happy with all 3 games. I think our team really nailed the goals of the design.

SIEGE Lecture Slides

I finished my lecture and panels last weekend for SIEGE. It was a great experience. I met a lot of really nice, talented people. I hope I get invited to speak again. I want to use my slides again which were a ton of work :)

I thought I would give Google Presentations a shot so I could work on my presentation over lunch at work and at home. Somewhere along the way it lost all my bolding and italics.

While that will make me not use for a while, I can publish my presentation which is nice.

Common Flash Game Design Mistakes

Tarnation - sort of alpha

I decided a while back that I really needed to do a game outside of my work at Cartoon Network. I wanted to do a game where I did everything like in the old days.

I did the prototype for this game in February. I finally bought a new computer for home so I could really focus on getting games done outside of work.

Here is the alpha-ish build. Only the 1st level is really tuned.

Tarnation (early build)

The idea came from the fact I cannot play RTS games. I tried to imagine what a casual RTS would be like. Also I really wanted to be able to say, "This game is based on a really sound game design principle." I thought that would guarantee the fun.

Back at GDC 2005 at the game designer workshop we did and exercise where we had to tune a giant robot to be killed by some tanks at the very last second. The idea was if you tune the robot just right you will get that "Hollywood ending" and kill the robot right before he reaches the city. If the robot dies too far out there is no tension and if he gets to the city, well, the city is destroyed.

So that was to be my idea, you must kill the baddies at the last second. You must deploy your units but if you deploy them too fast you a) run out of units (the do replenish over time) and b) the enemies die too far away and you don't get a good score.

While sketching, I got the idea that the baddies are bugs made of tar called "Tars", hence the name Tarnation. You are defending the garden's water supply from being polluted by the tars.

I thought it would be cool if the world was crayon style but the Tars are oil painted. This furthers the pollution aspect. Much of the art is place holder right now but I am updating it now that the core game system is complete.

I think it's on the way to being what I want. Everyone who plays it wants to play it again. Even my wife!

New Game - Chowder Rump-a-Thump

Chowder is a new show that will air on Cartoon Network in a couple of months. Chowder is a little kid who lives in a fantastical world and wants to be a chef.

Chowder Rump-a-Thump

Kernal of Idea
I thought it would be funny if Chowder prepared food by strapping tools to his butt and jumping on stuff. I got the idea in my head it would be interesting to have a cut tool and attempt to cut right in the center of items. The more to the center you cut the more points you get. I told Noel, our animator, about this. He drew an awesome concept sketch so then I was totally confident in the idea.


Developed Idea
With this game I wanted to take a familiar mechanic and add a bit to it. We make games for kids so I want to keep it simple and familiar but I also want to do something new. So I took the common mechanic of the butt-bounce (double-jump style) and added the layers of horizontal accuracy (cut things in half), vertical accuracy (butt-bounce from max height) and timing (hit food at certain time or release interaction at certain time).


Design Details
3 different tools you can strap to your butt: cut, pound and stir. Use the tools to cut food in half, pound it flat, pound at a certain time and stir for a certain time. All food items have 3 steps of achivement (i.e. how close to the center you cut, etc.).

2 step items in later levels (you have to use to stir tools to unscrew a shell and then pound or cut) to add some variety.

Each level is a "dish" that requires a certain number of food items. These required foods items can be different each time though they always equal the same amount of points. This way the game is always different.

The player plays a short game (15-20 minutes) and receives a star chef ranking. Play again to try to be a 5-star chef.


Result
The team did an amazing job. Art, programming and sound were so well done. Our new artist and game designer did a great. While GDD was done and very detailed, I was out with my injury during most of development. I could review stuff from home and when I got back the game was in a good place. Luckily we got extra time to polish things up. I am super ahppy with the game.


My High Score
22200

Speaking at SIEGE

I haven't been active is quite a while. I suffered a major back injury and had to have surgery. I have been out of work for 2 months but I am going back next week. Good thing, I am going stir crazy.

I will be speaking at the Southern Interactive Entertainment& Game Expo (SIEGE) in early October. I racked my brain trying to think of a good topic and I think I finally came up with something. I wanted to find something unique. My game design position is a bit odd but I feel it allows me to see things other game developers/designers don't get to experience: volume.

Since I became a game designer at Cartoon Network I have worked on over 100 Flash/Shockwave games. I have worked with numerous people/companies on games and I see the same handful of mistakes repeated.

I have helped work out solutions for these issues so now when they come up its an easy fix.

This is not a slight against the companies that make games for CN. These are really smart, talented game developers. Our internal team has made some of these same mistakes but now that i have seen them so many times I recognize them easily and have checks in place so I don't make them from the beginning.

My talk will be these handful of mistakes. What are the mistakes? Why are they made? What are the solutions? I will present examples (not from actual games to conceal the identity of the innocent) of the mistakes and outline the solutions we use.

This talk will be applicable to anyone making Flash games or 2D games.

New Game - Solar Wind

Wow another new game launch! Another The Grim Adventure of Billy and Mandy game. We joke that our team is the B&M games team but we love the property so its ok.

Solar Wind

This is a reskin of a game I made for Adult Swim a while back. Its simply the "airplane" game or whatever you call it.. with farting and and lots of it!

In retrospect, while the difficulty is ok for AS its a bit to hard for kids. We made it easier than it was but I still think its too hard. If we time I would take out the walls entirely and just rely on midscreen obstacles.

If you get over 5000 the obstacles change.

New Game - Pokemon Breakdown Blast

This has to be a record for game launches! Another new game.

Pokemon Breakdown Blast

Sometimes our team is the "OMG this game has to be done yesterday!" team. Especially when dealing with outside IP holders like Nintendo.

There are many rules when making a Pokemon game. All of them actually. It's very restrictive so we settled on an unfinished block break game that I had programmed 3 years ago :) I felt bad our programmer had to dredge though my old code and rework it. I wrote it in Actionscript 1 originally.

There are 15 levels, 5 per 3 Pokemons. Each Pokemon is a higher difficulty level. You may notice you can't lose. We wanted players to get to the end and see all the Pokemon. Let me show you them.

New Game - Magnetface

Another new game!

Magnetface

So this was an idea I had a while back. I wanted to make a platformer with magnetic powers. I had seen other games with magnetic powers but I thought they were often overly complicated. These games I played were practically physics simulations, play with attraction and repulsion, etc.

I just wanted to bounce heavy objects off my character and make him fall down.

As luck would have it, in this episode of Billy & Mandy, Billy gets a magnetic face. There is SO MUCH cut from this game. I have many other ways to use this mechanic. Maybe one day we can make a sequel.

Our new game designer Adam Wolf (adamwolf.net) helped with testing and level design. Much of level 3 is his doing.

New game - Outer Space Trace

We just finished up Outer Space Trace.

This is one of 5 games which will launched over the next 5 weeks. The CN Games Studio is doing the 1st and 5th games.

With this game I really wanted to push myself to make a mouse-based game. I have to use a special mouse and as a result my mouse dexterity is very poor. Due to this I have developed a bias to keyboard controlled games.

From the outset I was really excited about this design. I really felt it was one of my better designs, simple and easy to play, while still having enough variety and strategy for deeper play.

The programmer really helped realize this design. He & I worked together ironing out many design issues. I am so happy with the result.

My best connection is 28.

New Game - Utter Nonsense

In a previous post I mentioned I wanted kids jumping around and yelling in front of their computer. Loco Motion was the jumping around, now here is the yelling.
Utter Nonsense

You get to talk to Cheese from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends! Originally concepted for Fred Fredburger (from Billy & Mandy), the only lines of voice over were "Fred Fredburger", "Yes" and "AGH!" Utter Nonsense has 72 lines of VO!

I really wanted to make the game very easy. Again, we are dealing with a new way to play so I wanted to limit frustration as much as possible. So when you give your input its very easy to not fail but its not that easy to get a "Perfect" score. I think it worked out well.

Thanks to the CN Games Studio for doing such an awesome job.

New game - Grim's Downfall

A new game from the CN Games Studio was released Monday.
Grim's Downfall

I was trying to take a different approach to our games. Our games so often fall into neat little categories, platformer, shooter, racing, etc. I like designing within these genres. There are many unfound enjoyable mechanics to be discovered but I just was tired of seeing side-view games.

So this game is only half side-view.

Part Pilotwings, part Pocket Fighter, part RPG, Grim's Downfall is something a bit different. I don't feel it's a 100% success. In trying to do something different with the RPG fight mechanic (make it more active, make it more explorable) something was missed. I think with more time the game could be tuned to be better, but that's true for all games.

Next Monday we have another game coming!

More Games Complete

Yesterday I posted my webcam game. This made me realize I forgot to post 2, well, 1.5 games we finished earlier.

Code Lyoko
An action side-scroller featuring Yumi. I chose Yumi because she has a weapon that allowed for cool play mechanics. I was very nervous to do this because she is a girl and CN is very boys centric.

Later in the game when you face multiple enemies you can string together attacks and do some really exciting moves. Usually when I design games I seek to create "moments." These are times when something so cool happens you want to show someone. When I designed the combat I had a moment in mind, "You throw the fan through an enemy, in the time the fan is out, you can jump and melee attack an enemy in the air. When you melee in the air you do not fall. While you are in melee you catch the fan. You can then throw the fan again at another enemy before you hit the ground."

We were able to execute this moment. That made me quite pleased.

Looking back, I think the game starts off too easy and plays a bit slow. We had just wrapped up Juniper Lee which was too hard and I think I swung back in the other direction too far.

This game was a huge challenge because we used the real show assets, the actual 3D models used in the show. Since we didn't have free reign with the assets, this required exact planning. We also ended up with a very large file size.

Wheee!
I like Cheese. Everyone likes Cheese. I had this dumb idea and luckily people were behind it so we got to make this "game."

Enjoy!

Gadget Games

My previous webcam prototype has been made into a released game. There has also been a branding built around our alternate input games, "Gadget Games."

If you have a webcam, enjoy.
Loco Motion

Bubbles Flipped

Someone pointed out my bubbles were mirrored so I updated it with a fixed one.

Bubbles Flipped

Webcam color tracking

So this is a VERY rough attempt at tracking objects based on color. Again, you need a webcam.

1) Fill the middle circle with a nice bright high contrast color
2) Click the COLOR button
3) Little crosshairs track the color (er, somewhat)

Color Tracking

A brightly lit room helps. This actually worked worse and worse the later/darker it became.

With my best efforts I don't think this could be viable for a released product but it was an ejoyable experiment. What I was really hoping to do was track the color and then add some gesture recognition. Then I could cast spells a la Harry Potter or something silly.

Webcam Bubbles

Here at work my webcam stuff is well received so I am working on some more webcam games.

Again, this is built off of the code at adobe.com.
bubbles

Yes, those are Bubble Bobble bubbles.

Next I would like to remember the user's last position. Then I could do dodging, etc. I feel a bit silly trying to recreate simple things that Eyetoy can do but its still exciting to see it on a webcam.

Snow Tubing

Often I think about control mechanisms in real life that are fun. Being winter and all I was thinking about snowy games and I was thinking how much fun it is when you snow tube to just drag your hand by the side of the tube to turn.

So I threw together this demo:
Penguin Snow Tube

Of course in reality I would have art for the full rotational movement of the character. But at least he swings around the point where he touches the snow. The velocity slows depending on the amount of time your are turning to some extent. Some bumping a skidding would be nice to add as well.