The site you’re currently looking at underwent a fairly major update from an old fashioned HTML site (created many years ago) to a whizzy new WordPress powered affair. All done in-house of course, and I’ll be posting any newly completed work here. Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date, or browse through whatever sections you wish.
This CMS driven website was designed and built for the owner of a beauty-therapy company. There wasn’t much content last time I checked, but the site design is worth a quick look nonetheless.
Update: The site has since been taken down.
Can you help Hanna pilot her chopper through 21 unique and puzzling levels? Use keyboard or mouse controls and fly your way to success.
Postmortem:
For this game, I didn’t have any external clients. I didn’t have any final goal for it. I didn’t really have much of an initial goal for it. It evolved from almost nothing into something pretty special, almost by itself.
Hanna in a Choppa started life as Hanna on a Hoppa, which was going to be a physics game based on the latest version of my now fairly advanced AS2 physics engine. I’d just given it nice stable flat surfaces to bounce masses off, and they worked an absolute treat. I thought it would be hilariously funny if you played a sort of springy ragdoll called Hanna sat atop a space hopper, bouncing around off all sorts of surfaces and generally causing mayhem. I built the prototype in a short space of time, and discovered that it sucked. Bad. It turns out that space hoppers and physics games go together considerably less well than you might imagine. After fiddling with it for a while, I shelved the idea.
Later, whilst mulling over the name, I thought it’d be amusing to extend the punnage of the Hoppa into all sorts of other things. Hanna in a Choppa seemed like a good one, and I almost immediately had an idea of how to code up the helicopter in the physics engine. I threw a prototype together, and lo and behold it worked a treat.
Initially, the helicopter controls were inspired by an old Amiga game, Zeewolf. That had such an amazing feel to it, I wanted to do something similar, but in 2D. My controls worked and were mightily tactile, but suffered from the mouse wandering off-screen a bit. This is a virtually unsolvable issue in Flash, as you can’t constrain the mouse, but I could at least detect it and auto-pause the game, so it didn’t cause you to crash.
So on I went. I picked a simple in-your-face 2-tone graphical style mainly because I’m not great at drawing, but partly because it would perform superbly. And partly because it would hide overlapping object errors in the physics! From the cartoonish over the top style came the cartoonish over the top captions and level designs. The project grew and grew until about half the levels were done, and it had enough interface screens to show around to some friends for a bit of playtesting.
Disaster.
Nobody could get the hang of the controls. The beautiful tactile controls that I adored so much, and that I could fly with such finesse. All I wanted was to give that experience of harmony to the world, but nobody got it. Nobody understood. Everyone who tried, ended up stuck upside down in any nook or cranny.
I tweaked those controls. I added sensitivity settings, subtle self-righting, clever damping, non-linear response curves, all sorts. They all damaged the experience for me, and none helped for other people. I caved in and added key controls that drove the same force vectors that the mouse was attached to.
This was better. People could at least fly for a while now. For a while. Without any finesse, and bumping off walls a lot. On the plus side, now people were playing for long enough to appreciate the level design a little more. The fact that you could pick items up with a winch, push them around etc. The way each level presented a different challenge and task, not just a harder set of obsticles to fly through.
But it still wasn’t good enough. People got frustrated and still gave up quickly.
I caved a second time and added the key controls that you can play in-game today. You push right. The chopper flies right. You push up. It goes up. And so on. Finally it was accessable and everyone could play it. I didn’t like the idea of losing the mouse controls though, so kept them in and put the easier keys on an option.
An option that nobody played long enough to find.
So I added a new screen at the start of the game. New players were asked to make one choice – easy key controls, or hard mouse controls. A lot of people selected easy at this point and went on to have a lovely time. A significant number picked hard however, and within 30 seconds of gameplay hated the game. The curious thing here is that they never went into options at this point and changed back to easy. They just quit and went elsewhere.
So eventually, after a little bit of alone-time sobbing, I made the key controls the default. Most players would never go into the options menu and would never even try the trickier mouse option. It was the right choice. For certain. I haven’t read a single comment on the web from someone saying they enjoyed the mouse controls. A few people have commented on how tough it is on the mouse though, but they’ve already played the game enough on keys to not hate it.
Anyway, the game was now more or less complete. A few more levels remained to be built, and a couple of interface screens needed a bit of polish. Next came the love.
I’d been deliberately building love into Hanna in a Choppa as I went along. Little humorous comments and references in the levels seemed to go a long way with the playtesters, so I made sure they were all as amusing as possible. I ensured there was plenty of diversity in the levels, rather than increasing difficulty. That worked a treat too. People would keep playing to see what madness they had to perform next, rather than to improve at the game.
Adding the love was all about increasing the number of those little features that make people smile. So, for the hardcore gamers I added achievements. They announce themselves visibly when you get them, and you’re more or less bound to get a few by accident along the way as some of them are pretty easy (on purpose). Then, when you’ve completed all the levels and are hungry for more, you remember the achievements and hunt around for the screen that shows you what else is available to collect. I made some of them dead easy. Some flippant and silly, and some rock solid hard (like perfecting all levels – flying without touching the walls at all). This meant that people could play to whatever level they fancied. The elite gamers could get everything. Mid-range players could get a fair chunk but miss a few, and amateurs could drop out after beating all the levels. It’s a sort of self-adjusting difficulty curve in a way.
Then there was things like the developer message screen. I find feedback and stats unbelievably useful to get to know how a typical gamer thinks and reacts to things. If I ask for feedback, I know I’ll get a lot of rubbish, but there will be a few gems in there that’ll really teach me something. In Hanna, I made it an achievement to send me a message. Well, gosh, I got a lot of messages! And still get a lot of messages. That’s fine though, and there have indeed been some gems.
The “never press” button was well received too. I thought when I made it that about half the players would like it, thinking it cute, and the other half would think it entirely pointless and rant about it. Not so. Everyone who commented loved it, or apologised for making it cry. It seems people really do like sillyness for sillyness’s sake.
The rich feedback let me summarise the main criticisms against the game. I’ll respond here…
Lessons:
The Selenia site was created for University West of England to give teachers and pupils a fun science learning resource. There are lots of beautifully drawn comics available (created by a third party), along with supporting minigames and other stuff.
The site has a simple CMS so that the organisers at UWE can update the content, comics and games. It also has a facility that exports the entire site to static files and zips them up, so they can be used offline in a classroom from a USB flash drive or CD-ROM.
The Hazard Perception Challenge website provides learner drivers an online resource for practicing for their theory and hazard perception tests.
As far as I know, there’s no better way to practice for your hazard perception test online. No other service even comes close to the quality of interractive Wedding Videography we have on this website! If you’ve got your national theory test coming up, you need this site!
Not only can you practice your hazard perception skills in exactly the same way as the real test, but you can also test your theory knowledge with the official DSA question database. There are also car and motorbike driving videos narrated by a top qualified driving-instructor. This really is the best resource out there for learners.
A silly little game to test how fast you can click a button 50 times. It’s not quite as easy as it looks though…
I wrote this game as an experiment in advertising. It is deliberately a simple game, but with a few silly tricks that give it some lasting appeal so it’d distribute well. Then, I put a version on my site with google ads, a version out on the web with mochi ads built in and a version on Kongregate with their ad-share system in place.
So how has each version done? Well, I wouldn’t call them resounding successes:
Google ads: $1.96 from 40 impressions
Mochi ads: $15.92 from 113046 impressions
Kong ads: $2.31 from 2452 impressions
All of the above are over a period of a fair few months. So, number one problem: Not enough impressions! Number two problem: Mochiads pays bugger all! A hundred thousand impressions isn’t a lot, granted, but then neither is $16. Scale that up by a factor of 10 for a million-plays game (which is about right for a fair game with fair distribution), and you get $160. Which is pathetic.
Google ads looks rather better, but remember that the ads don’t travel with the game, but stay on your own website. That means you only get paid if people are actually on your site itself, not if the game is played on a portal elsewhere, which is the norm.
Get rich quick via advertising? Doesn’t seem likely from these figures.
The classic block-collapsing game we all know and love. Click on the biggest groups possible to score the highest.
I made this game not to be original or groundbreaking in any way other than one – to have an incredibly hard to hack highscore table! To date, I don’t believe anyone has ever successfully cheated at it. Give it a go if you like, but be responsible – let me know if you manage to hack it successfully. I’d love to know how if it has any flaws.
Here’s roughly how it works: The server sends you a random game seed to be played. As you play, Flash records the moves you make. Then, when your game is over it sends your score along with the moves you made to the server. The server replays your game in PHP and checks it comes out with the same score. It also checks mundane things like the game is actually the one it sent you, and it hasn’t been played before etc. If the scores match, you’re on the highscore table. If not, you’re a cheat!
I can’t think of any exploits, although occasionally it does generate a rediculously easy to score starting layout due to a flaw in the random number generator that I’ve never bothered to fix!
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