Sniper Year 2

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.