Wahey Blockular is now available on iphone and is in the itunes appstore, its a game me and longanimals did which was kindly sponsored by Mindjolt and which won the mochi weekly game award. This version was converted by Abstract Alien who have done a brilliantly faithful job of converting it.

From the app store:-

Blockular is an award winning puzzle game by LongAnimals and RobotJam bought to the iPhone and iPod Touch. You play on a multicoloured grid of blocks where you have to collapse blocks in all directions to manoeuvre your characters around the grid to reach their goals.

Its a kind of rubics cube/ match 3 mash up and is pretty good fun, and for 59p you really cant go wrong.

Blimey it’s been a few months since the last release I am sure I must have done something between October and Jan, just not sure what it was. Weird how quickly time flies by sometimes.

Anyway the latest release is called Gone to the dogs, a game which came about after me and Robbie the coder on the project had a night out at Hall Green Dogs in Birmingham about 12 months ago. We had already done the successful game racehorse tycoon which had done 20 million plays so it was the logical “unofficial sequel”  as I didn’t really want to draw horses again.

We decided to make quite a lot of changes to the way the game works as the racehorse game had a lot of menu screens and it was quite a chore to get though to the actual game so we added a shop and made the training section slightly more interactive. We did plan some mini games but dropped them as it was felt they would get in the way of the core game play.

I had a bit of help on the artside from Jimp, who usually works with Jules (longanimals), I didn’t really have time to do the dog animations myself so I sub contracted Jimp out for this specialist job and he did walk, run, idle and poo anims for all the racers, a cracking job really which added a lot of polish to the product.

Lastly for the sound I really struggled on racehorse to find some decent crowd sounds so I did a bit of googling on greyhound crowd noise and it turned up this site called London sound survey which as if by magic had a top quality sound recording from Wimbledon dogs, which was absolutely perfect. I got in touch with the person who ran the site Ian, who kindly let us use his sound in exchange for a credit in the game. His site really is very nice, its a collection of sounds recorded in various places all over London (as the name suggests), I’m not entire sure how they are recorded but the quality is amazingly good, with headphones if you close your eyes you really do feel like you are there. A lot of the other sounds I have listened to have kicked off ideas for another project I need to finish off.

Anyway initial launch has been great, the game made daily 3rd on newgrounds and did a million plays the first week of release, which I am very pleased with.

Anyway go and have a play of Gone to the Dogs.

This months release was SNIPER YEAR 2, the second in my serious sniping series. The first game was really quite successful (8 million plays in 3 months) it was also quite fun to make something quite gritty for a change and it also had quite a different style to my usual stuff. The second game I did think about adding in mini games and a shop to make the game slightly bigger but decided in the end to just polish what we had from the first game.

I was quite stuck for ideas for new missions, as after doing 2 panda sniper games with Rob Donkin and this game there were quite a lot of ideas already used up. The missions were also quite weak in story/plot from the first game, it was basically 12 missions I had randomly thrown together while making the “engine” for the game. So I employed Ian Mayor a script writer/ games designer who I had worked with on a number of playstation games back in the 90’s. He spent about a month on and off writting up a doc of the 12 levels, out of those 12 most of them went straight into the game, a few I had to ditch as they were slightly to complex for the engine I had built, or too close to previous missions.

It was a big help having a proper design doc on this project, most projects I just make it up as I go along but on mission based games its a huge help as you dont really have to think while you are in development mode. The whole game took me around 4 weeks to pull together from the assests stu had done for sniper 1 and a new set of anims and also a load of art assets I had bought in. I didnt really do a fat lot of drawing for this one, it was more just a producer/programmer role.

The game was released about 2 weeks ago, and has been pretty good reception, it won the second Daily on newgrounds and scored 4.07 which is a great score and was quite a lot up on sniper 1 which scored 3.91.

Play Sniper Year Two.