June 22nd, 2009
| Pos |
Name |
Plays |
| 1 |
Race Horse Tycoon |
16.8m |
| 2 |
Kebab Van |
12.7m |
| 3 |
The Blobuloids |
8.8m |
| 4 |
Grand Prix Tycoon |
8.6 m |
| 5 |
Burger Jam |
6.6m |
| 6 |
Sniper : Year One |
5.6m |
| 7 |
Aliens Must Die |
5.5m |
| 8 |
Synapsis |
4.5m |
| 9 |
The Game Called Bob |
3.9m |
| 10 |
Panda Tactical Sniper 2 |
2.6m |
|
Total Plays |
75.6m |
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.
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June 19th, 2009
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 !
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May 28th, 2009
The latest game I finished is heavy weapons the 7th game made in conjunction with Longanimals. Its basically an unofficial sequel of Aliens must die the first game we made together almost exactly a year ago. Aliens must die technically was great and looked pretty cool but it did have a lot of game play flaws. For heavy weapons the main theme/idea was always intended to be lots of cool weaponry, basically all special weapons.
Initially i struggled to come up with a style for the game, i always wanted the game to look like the concept art from the star wars films but with sprites as small as they are it just didn’t lend itself to the detail involved. I eventually more by accident ended up doing flat shaded rendering as it seemed to look a lot more 3d than properly rendered art, it somehow shows off the lighting better. With smaller ships we could also have more frames for the spinning which further increases the 3d look. For the rendering I opted for swift 3d mainly because it exports as vectors so we could easily scale the ships in game. I was really pleased with the outcome, it one of the nicest games visually I’ve worked on, helped by the superb rendering engine jules has. I also really enjoyed coming up with the mish mash of enemy craft, obviously “inspired” by other games/films.
The game has been up on kongregate a few days now and is presently the weekly best, surprisingly the players guide was also in the weekly top five. The players guide is basically what you used to get in the old crash and zap magazines from my childhood, i used to love reading those, this one was mainy inspired by one i read from xenon 2 : megablast (still one of my favourite shooters).
Heavy Weapons has also had the honour of a jayisgames review, which was cool as they only review the best games. The reviewer was quite fair but I’m not entirely sure that he “got ” the game. For once we decided we’d make a game which we wanted to play, yes its hard in places, yes you can’t easily retrace your steps, its not a “casual game” its not meant for 5 minutes of play.
Here’s a review from kongregate that sums up what we were after:-
this is the story of my today… I woke up realising my brother had already gone to his mate’s house when i went downstairs…i watched t.v for a bit but got bored i got lunch then i was so bored i was considering suicide then i found this game and i havent stopped playin considering i started at 12 and at the time of this post it is*one sec let me check*…2:30… This game deserves badges more than anything on here!!!!
Its also really interesting to read the comments where all of them have different opinions on what weapons work best for which levels. You do get a sense on kong that the overall feelings are negative reading the comments but then its rated game of the week so an awful lot of people must really like it. It’s nice when you make a game with no compromises and people do actually like it.
Thanks to mark of ace shooting games for feedback during production.
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