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.

Yay ! We finally finished Cyclomaniacs this week, been in production for 6 solid week since the end on June. A slightly strange one as it was originally meant to be a bike/puzzle game follow up to water werks. After the initial prototype Jules (Longanimals) knocked up it was clear that it was just great fun doing wheelies and somersaults so the game changed tack and we decided to make it more like a stunt race. It was also going to be motorbikes initially but I decided I wanted pedalling, just to create a bit of work for myself so we went for bikes rather than motorbikes.

It was probably the most fun game to work on as I didn’t do much artwork on the computer, I drew everything in pencil then scanned it in and just put it through vector magic, which created a really nice hand drawn look and also in my own cartoon style rather than being quite generic. We also decided at an early stage to just go with every crazy idea that we came up with. The end level is a skateboarding haddock chasing a clown, I have no idea why it just seemed like a goo thing to do at the time.

It was sponsored and launched on Kong a few days ago and they do seem to really have got into it, I know several players who have spent hours at a time which is really nice to see, I was pretty confident it was good as I found myself glued to it which making it, but you never really know until the game is released.

Anyway go and have a play of Cyclomaniacs.