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.

This months first release is Water Werks, its a game I have been working on with Longanimals for a while. Been out a few weeks but its probably about time to blog about it.

It started off as a quick demo which Jules (longanimals) knocked up one lunchtime just spraying objects with water using Box2d for the physics and it seemed pretty fun. Most of the physics games around basically involve the same gameplay, ie. get the objedt to some part of the screen via pushing, bunging parts down or firing stuff from a cannon.

We went down a slightly different route as the scoring/level end criteria borrows a lot from the classic lemmings, you have to get a certain number of blobs home so it doesn’t matter is a few die off. For the art side of things it was quite an easy game to work on as there arent that many assets, it was basically a few phyiscs objects, the blobs and some backgrounds. I wanted to go for a much more illustrative feel to this than previous games so I used a lot of custom line styles and quite a lot of just mouse drawing with the brush tool. Quite pleased with the final result as it looks pretty polished. The backgrounds were a lot of fun to do as you could basically do anything, one level is the toenail level based on looking at my very own toe while drawing.

In the first 3 weeks its been my most successful launch of a game, we didnt have to seed the game at all and it was on 500 other sites in the first week, it looks like this month it could break the 3 million barrier which is pretty amazing going.

Anyway go have a play of water werks.

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.