Well been a while since an update, Sniper year one was released last month and on first months figures has had the most plays in a single month of any of my games. Its topped out at 3.2 million plays in a month which was pretty amazing as that’s an average of about 100k a day. It went down pretty well on most portals picking up a daily award on newgrounds. It was quite surprising as its not really a game with a huge amount of replay value and its not really that “casual”. The basic idea came about as I’d was commissioned to do an animation for a BBC project about 3 years ago which featured silhouette artwork animation using swift 3d. I was never that great at character animation so I employed my good friend and University room mate Stu Hogton to do the character animation while I did the background animation and artwork.

I’d always had the thought of making a game in that style but at that stage I wasn’t proficient at programming in flash. I had a bit of a break in my schedule around Xmas and started a bit of a mock-up of a sniper game. All the sniper games out apart from one or two are all stickman based and generally look bloody awful. The idea on this as it was the first in the series was to create a sniper engine, the game its self wasn’t intended to be too original I needed to create a framework for making missions which was quick to put together and it did succeed on this front. A lot of the critique was about the fact that its “nothing really new”, it was never intended to be original, as a rule of thumb people complain about generic games but it doesn’t stop them playing them.

Stu again helped out with all the character animation and did a cracking job, the final game really looks a cut above any of the other sniper games out there. Now that we have a solid framework in place its time to start developing on the originality, also get a slightly more involved story down for sniper year 2. But that wont be for a few months I suspect….

Oh and I have no idea who that girl is on the title page, she is not my wife !