deeperbeige.com

I know I know. You hate the Crazy Frog. Yep, so do I, but work is work. Besides, I did my level best to inject as little evil as possible into this banner game! In fact, it actually ended up a fairly decent little game for what was just a day or so’s work.

First to address your fears:

• There is NO Crazy Frog music in this game
• There are NO popups in this game
• There are NO horrid sound effects in this game

Right, with that out of the way, click the link and play the game! Click the mouse somewhere above the frog and he’ll leap upwards. Hit spikes or get crushed, and you’ll be killed (which isn’t the point of the game, but you might enjoy watching him die anyway). Climb as high as you can before you get squashed.

Postmortem:

It’s a simple game, but quite good fun in its own way. The level is pre-defined and whilst is a little unfair with hidden spikes that shoot out from a couple of places, is mostly a decent challenge. You can play in a very short space of time too, which means you don’t have to invest much effort to have another go.

We did a pretty good job of keeping evil out of this banner, which I personally think is essential for trustworthy advertising. If the banner annoys people, they’re hardly going to want to buy the product, right? The only minor bit of evil is at the top of the level, there’s a platform that’s just too far away to reach, so you always fail. This was done to save file-size in terms of having an end of level and a win sequence. It’s a banner after all.

I was pretty pleased with the motion of the frog itself. It seems that most people figure out how to get him to leap mostly where they want him to go within a few clicks, which is good. I’ve built other games along these lines where people just don’t get it no matter what. There’s a lesson here – a jump preview line would go a long way for user training, even if it’s only there for the first few jumps then vanishes.

Use your mouse to shoot the baddies and avoid the maidens in this minigame promoting the Call of Juarez computer game.

This whole project was built start to end in a day from supplied graphics. It is intended as a throwaway banner game (without any evil popups etc), but actually turned out fairly decent for such a short build.

Use the cursor keys and your mouse in this all-action shoot ’em up. Kill anything that moves, including zombies, parachutists and more. Don’t forget to reload by ducking behind the defensive wall.

This was my first big game with Hyperlaunch, promoting Iron Maiden’s new album ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. A build time of a couple of weeks allowed us to push the boat out more than we had done before, and add effects and flair for the sake of polish, rather than just getting the minimum done. The result is a game that plays well, and looks and sounds great. It was played by over 3 million people worldwide, which was a huge success for the campaign.

Postmortem:

The game features destructable baddies that you can hit in all sorts of places for different effects and scores. For example, shooting a parachute a number of times makes it collapse, but you can get more points for hitting the tiny zombie figure on the chute itself. He can even be seen dropping his rifle and slumping on his ropes, and you can still take out the chute for even more points. This worked really well, and people who liked the game and wanted a deeper experience would learn how to maximise their points from each baddie.

There are 3D bullets too! I spent a fair bit of time getting them just right, including having them drop off in their trajectory in the far distance. The interraction between 3D bullets and the essentially 2D game engine worked surprisingly well too, with bullets being hit-tested as they passed through a particular Z-depth. I expected that to feel wrong and look unfair, but you just don’t notice what a faux-effect it is when playing! In fact, this is a game entirely made by it’s gutteral feel. Essentially all there is to do is click on targets that pop up, and reload occasionally. Having the atmosphere just right really makes it work.

The bullets even ricochet off objects. On the third level, this is really noticable with the tank turret. Bouncing bullets can still hit baddies, and it can be a surprisingly effective way to take things like parachutes out. Again, these tiny subtle features all add to the overall experience and help produce depth that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

On reflection now, the sound stage is a little overpowered by the music. I spent quite a bit of time getting things like the ratatatat of the machine gun just right, and it gets drowned out by the Iron Maiden song. Not that I don’t like the song of course, it’s excellent!

This game really reflects how essential a good graphic artist is to a project. The artist involved was superb, not just in his artistry but also in understanding the requirements I gave him in terms of how I was going to build the game. I’ve worked with lots of artists who can produce a pretty picture of a game, but only the top few can produce it in such a way that it’s then easy to convert it into working software. It’s not just about organising assets to be easy to work with (although that does help), it’s also about things like effeciency of design so that good-looking effects can be built up from a minimum of runtime elements, which helps keep performance brisk.

The only bit of artistry that didn’t quite work as we’d have liked was Eddie’s gun-arm. As it bends around the screen, it flips to some pretty unnatural and disturbing looking angles!

Lessons learned:

• Add subtlty in gameplay wherever possible
• Work with the best graphic artist available for maximum win!
• A big name client helps considerably

I created this wordsearch to help the band The Futureheads promote their latest tour. Find the tour locations in the wordsearch to get the details.

As an advertising campaign, it’s a bit of a broken concept since you have to work to get the info you want, and you can’t be sure you’ve found all the locations. As a simple wordsearch game it works pretty well, however.

I built this spooky fridge-magnet game to promote the Emily Rose DVD release. You had to try and spell a phrase from the magnets before the clock strikes 3am and all hell breaks loose.

The game isn’t online anymore, but it featured neat feeling letters that rotated and floated around nicely when you picked them up. It didn’t force you to create the phrase in any specific point either, but allowed you to build the words up more or less anywhere.

Use the mouse to catch the wine spurting from your date’s tracheotemy in this gross wobbly-hand game.

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolow was my first project at Hyperlaunch. It was a bit of a shock to be producing a game on my first day of work, but I dived in and built this game in my first few days (not including the microsite).

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!

Play PickaBrick

My first ever real Flash game (and it shows). Navigate around the gloomy caverns using your headlamps and radar, this game is all about restricted vision. There’s mines to dodge, fuel to pick up, fully destructable scenery and more in this technically strong but underdeveloped game.

Play Radar Rik in Escape From The Caverns of the Poor Lighting