A Monster Approaches

Well, the time is almost here. Andrew has finished up the sounds, my brother has polished up the graphics, and everything is running like I want it to. We're all ready, and while it is significantly past the time I was hoping to release the game, it's a case of "better late than never". Eric also pointed out to me that in just a over a week now, the new Godzilla movie is going to be released on DVD and that it might make a good time to release our game as well. So, as most new DVD releases occur on Tuesdays (and this one is no different) I'm planning on releasing the game on the Friday or Saturday prior to the movie hitting the shelves. So that's what we have planned. We'll get this game out there and then see what else we might start working on. We've talked about continuing with the Icarus themed game I made a while back. It is super simple, but it's also frustratingly addictive and I think it could be pretty cool to send it out there as well. I think it is the most likely next step.

I also need to go back and refactor bits of all my games prior to Fishy Dive. In Color Coder, Deep Sea Trapper, Androidian Summer Games, and Curse of Anubis, the leaderboards were done with a service called Scoreloop. Well, it seems that Scoreloop is having too much trouble competing with the relatively new Google Play Game Services (which I greatly prefer) and they are no longer going to be supporting their services come the new year. As a result, I need to go back and get all my older games set up with Google Play Game Services before then. It's been on my TODO list for a while, but I've yet to get myself to jump into it as its fairly tedious and involved, but it needs to be done, so that might be up next before working on any new projects.

Finishing Up the Monster Game

The monster game has really come together lately. Eric and I have been putting some final tweaks on the graphics and some of the more cosmetic aspects of the coding. Andrew has been working on the sounds so we are getting those in there. Initially I was just thinking there would only need a sound for a fireball being shot, a sound for an enemy exploding, and a sound for when the player takes damage. However, Andrew made some excellent sounds that I wasn't expecting and I just had to add those in now. So now the game also has sounds for when buildings crumble down and some stomping noises as the monster is walking. At this point we just need to some roaring sounds in place and I think we'll be ready to release it on Google Play soon, but we'll see how the last few cleanup items go.

Evolution of a Monster

Eric and I have been finishing up the monster game lately and we're almost done. Quite a bit late for our intended release date for close to the same day the latest Godzilla movie came out (almost 2 months ago), but it is really looking good and I'm really happy with the way it plays.

So, as a bit of a preview (I guess) here is a lineup of the monster in our game as it has come from my initial froggish looking creature into Eric's finished, scaly reptilian:

So, from left to right we have:
1) My initial programmer art
2) Eric's first try at a monster head and the blank body that I colored in poorly
3) Eric's second head version with the previous body
4) Eric's finished monster with scale textures, open mouth, animated stepping, and glowing back plates

It looks fantastic in the game with the crumbling buildings, attacking military units, and explosions when you shoot stuff down with your atomic fire blasts.

I just need to get some sounds going with the help of Andrew and then we are going to be publishing it to Google Play.

Military Defense

We've been trying to get the Monster game going recently and it's almost there. Eric is just finishing up some of the graphics and then we'll be good to go. Here are a couple of the military ground vehicles that we have in the game right now:

The monster is also looking really good and we have a helicopter and a jet going as well. The buildings have also seen a major overhaul. They started off as just static background scrolling images, then we upgraded so that they switched to a destroyed frame as the monster trampled them. Now, I've upgraded again so that the buildings crumble down into a dust cloud and leave behind a pile of rubble. We clearly weren't even close to hitting our initial goal of a pre-May 16th release, bu things are coming together well at this point and we are hoping to release soon.

Fishy Dive!

The Flappy Bird clone my brother Eric and I have been working on is finally released! Eric did all the art work on this game and I think it looks really good. As always, I'm very excited to be releasing something out on to Google Play. If you want to try it, you can pick it up here:

With the Flappy Bird clones I've seen (though I haven't spent much time sifting through or playing all those games) have kept to the same format. Your character is falling down, you have to tap to fly higher. I told myself that if I was going to do a Flappy Bird clone, I was at least going to try to make it a little different. Now, that is kind of hard in such a simple game. There's not much you can change up and still retain the same fun feel of game play. So, my simple change was to make the character float up to the top of the screen, and you have to tap to dive down a little. Its a very small change, obviously, but its a fun one and I think it makes the game just different enough to be worth at least checking out.

I also wanted to make the pillars you are avoiding something that actually made a little sense.  In Flappy Bird, the pillars you are trying to avoid hitting are just Super Mario style pipes. How does that make sense? The few other Flappy Clones (as I've come to call them) seem to stick with similarly out of place pillars. They are still things like stone pillars or sometimes just slightly different looking Mario pipes. Eric and I went with making our pillars be swarms of grinning jellyfish. Was this partially inspired by the jellyfish scene in Finding Nemo? Maybe, but it definitely makes sense to be avoiding them. When you end up hitting the jellyfish, a zap sound is played, a shock bubble appears around you, and your poor little fish floats to the top of the screen, upside down with an X over his eye (don't worry, he's just stunned. He'll be back).

Overall, I think the game is pretty fun for the coding time investment. It really didn't take that long. Maybe two days of on and off coding during one weekend to get the game play to a solid point, then it was just occasional aesthetic changes leading up to release. Most of all, it got me thinking of my simple "Flappy" style games to make, a few of which I have started working on and mentioned in previous blog posts.

Given the huge number of clones out there, in addition to the normal flooded market place of Google Play, my hopes aren't particularly high that this game gets a lot of visibility, but I'm happy to have worked with my brother on it, and I'm excited to be getting it out there.

Flappy Clones and the King of the Monsters

I've been continuing with my little "flappy clone" games. Our near ripoff of Flappy Bird (the fish one) is almost done. Eric just needs to finish one more image and Andrew is making us a few sounds. The Icarus game is pretty much done as well, and I'm really happy with it. I need to work in some animations, but gameplay-wise it is solid. I made one other game where you are a lizard running through the desert, dodging rocks and cacti, but I'm not a huge fan. It's for down in our queue for games to work on, so maybe I can think of an interesting tweak before we really get to it.

I've also started working on a new game, one that we will really start going on after the fish flappy bird clone, but before the Icarus game. It is a game based on Godzilla, so we want to get it out before May 16th, which is the release date of the new Godzilla movie (the trailers look awesome). Like the last two tappy style games I've made (Icarus and the lizard one), this game isn't a Flappy Bird clone, but is in the same spirit of the super simple single touch timing type gameplay. I've barely even gotten into it, and I'm already pretty excited about the potential with this one. I'm going to keep working on this one for the next week or so and push to get it out in early May. I'm hoping that the Fish game will be out sometime soon. Hopefully by this weekend so we can switch our focus entirely to the monster game. Here is a very early screenshot:

Simple Games

I've been continuing my work on Flappy Bird clone lately. It's actually done functionally and working pretty well. As fun and frustrating as the game it is based on. Eric is finishing up some graphics for it and we're going to be trying to get it up on Google Play soon.

We've also wanted to get some more original games out that are in the same type of demographic as Flappy Bird, that being the simple, fast, time-waster type games that are basically controlled with a single tap and are mostly about timing. I've started working on another little game in this area with a Greek Icarus theme.

I have an idea for yet another game after that. I like having some tiny side projects to be working on in addition to my larger, more time and effort intensive games. It's always a bit of a thrill for me to get a new game or app out on the market. Even when its something dumb and pointless like my Lucky Roulette Picker app.

Here are a couple screenshots from our Flappy Bird clone so far. Most of the art is Eric's original stuff, but the Jellyfish swarms that make up the obstacles in the game are recycled from our Deep Sea Trapper game until Eric finishes up his own Jellyfish. There are only a few art assets left and then we are good.