Well its been a while since I did an update and Pandas Big adventure has been out for about 2 weeks, it’s a game I have been working on with my friend Rob Donkin for about 7 months on and off. After the success of the panda sniper series we wanted to take the series on a bit as it wasnt really a sniping game, a lot of the bad comments were people not liking the fact that you couldnt kill/shoot people so we decided to go for a point and click adventure game.

The whole process of design was a bit hap hazzard, it took us about 2 months to nail down a story, originally it was going to be a film studio so that we could have a variety of locations, there were 10 in all. After we put them together there were locations which seemed to fit into various time zones so we split the game in 2, the first game being set in ancient past and the second game set in present/future.

It’s probably not as big as the title suggests but it takes most people around 10-15 minutes to complete, none of the puzzles are especially taxing. After release we won the weekly kongregate prize with a  score of 3.91 and it was the daily feature on newgrounds with a score of 4.11, 2 weekly bests in a month for June !!

The second part is still floating around between me and Rob so we havent exactly finalised what the story is this time but we have a vague plot outline, hopefully it wont take 6 months to make this time.

The art on the first one was generally done with a combination of 3d backgrounds and darwing in flash, I used a 3d package to mockup the perspective on a number of the levels, the portaloo, the dark ages, the egyptian temple and the pirate ship were all mocked up using swift 3d, a really awesome package.

Anyway go and play Pandas Big Adventure.

That’s my own personal top 10 table of games produced over the last 2 years, the top ten accounts for just over 75 million game plays, which is pretty amazing. When i first started and my first game was played over a million times I was really surprised, out of the 35 games I’ve worked on there are only 3 which have failed to reach a million, that was splatter, bobblox and chooka world.

Its also interesting to see trends in which games do well, the top 5 games are all sim/ serving games, the big difference with those sort of games isnt the initial spike it’s the long term appeal they have, several games I’ve released have had huge initial spikes which drop off very rapidly but the sim games have a huge long tail often doing 10,000+ plays a day even years after release.

Firstly a few bits of news Heavy Weapons won the weekly best on Kongregate and picked up the daily award from Newgrounds with a score of 4.34, which is my first ever win on there. It has been a bit of a mystery as the game has done phenomenally well on Kong and Newgrounds but hasn’t done anywhere near as well on other sites in terms of plays. It kind of shows how different the demographics are between those 2 sites which are mainly teenage boys and the more casual games players. The teenage boys are used to xbox / playstation games and expect the flash games to have a similar quality, of which heavy compares quite well and it also has a long play time. These kids are quite prepared to put an hour into a flash game where as the average gameplayer is only after a 5 minute bit of fun.

The reviews of heavy have also been very complimentary but our favourite was “this game could kill Chuck Norris”, high praise indeed !

The other bit of strange news is I’ve had 2 games nominated in the addicting games showdown, both Synapsis and Dibs adventures have been nominated in the “Greatest escape game” and the “Best Game from planet random” respectively. I have no idea what the winners get and I’d be very suprised if I won as the competition is pretty stiff but hey its nice to be even considered. The nice people at addicting games have even done me a few buttons so if you’d like to vote click on one !