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Help Shaun, Shirley and Timmy find their way home in this super-cute BAFTA-nominated physics puzzle platformer.

Play the London episode on the web, free

Play the Underground episode on the web, free

Visit the official site to buy the game for your PC or iPhone/iPad

After the success of the original Home Sheep Home, Aardman asked me to work on a sequel with the ultra-talented artist/animator, Robin Davey (who did all the art/animation for the first game too). The original game was a pure Flash web game, hastily built just to raise brand awareness for the Shaun the Sheep show. The new game was to be a multi-platform paid download game, as well as a free-to-play web game. We had our work cut out for us!

So, what could both work as a free web game, and as a paid download? Why would anyone pay to play something they can play for free? Well, we came up with a few reasons:

• Super high resolution graphics, running super-smooth in full screen
• Lots more content – more episodes, bonus levels, more to collect
• Developer’s commentary
• Exclusive fun/silly cheat modes
• Runs on your iPhone/iPad

Robin and I scratched our heads, scribbled lots of notes, drank lots of tea and ate lots of biscuits until we had a rough plan of the game. Then came months of hard work building it all. Top-designer Gavin Strange worked on the lovely interface screens. Tech genius Richard Davey orchestrated a textbook perfect technology-intercept with AIR3 for the desktop version, and lots of other people at Aardman were involved (check the in-game credits for the full list).

Alongside our own development we also worked closely with the amazing Mobile Pie to help them create the iOS version of the game. Mobile Pie’s star developer Matt Arahna and the rest of the team did a truly spectacular job of bringing the experience to the iPhone and iPad. They slaved for months ensuring the mobile version played just like the desktop and web versions, including every frame of the rich animation, beautiful layered backgrounds, physics, controls and more.

It’s been a long journey, and one of the most complicated projects I’ve ever been involved with! The multi-platform end product was well worth all the hard work though, and although the game has only been out for a couple of days as I write, it has already had hundreds of thousands of plays. Initial feedback from players seems very positive too! That’s the bit that really matters in the end – bringing a beautiful and fun experience to people who love games.

To go with the brilliant kids wildlife TV show “Live ‘n Deadly”, the BBC wanted a major online game. They got Aardman to build it, and I was brought in as part of the team. I worked mainly on the design of levels 2 and 3 (Borneo and California), but also on the core platform engine a little, alongside Mark Burvill and a few others.

It was an ambitious project, with a pretty tight deadline. There’s the odd rough edge, but overall it came out pretty well! There were even tie-ins with the show, with the presenters giving out goodies for the game live on air.

Play Deadly Planet.

To advertise the kids laser-tag toys Light Strike, I built a simple target-range game. It was created over the course of a couple of days, with supplied graphics from Chris Minett.

Even though this was a super-quick build, there was still time to work a little depth into the game. The gun has a 3-round auto, and using it will help you score higher. Don’t hit your own team colour too, and aim for the centre of each target for maximum points! There’s even a faux-3D effect on the gun lasers.

Play Light Strike

Bend reality itself in this strange and innovative platformer that asks “What if monkeys could bend reality with their minds?”. Find out for yourself by playing Infinite Monkeys Bending Reality.

Postmortem.

I started work on this game shortly after Flash 8 was released, something like 4 years ago! It was written in AS1, and started out as a test of the new DisplacementMapFilter that had just been introduced. I built a dead simple early test where you could bend the level and jump around on it, and it worked better than expected. Sometime around then, I quit my full time job and became freelance, and Infinite Monkeys got pushed aside for more critical jobs.

Over the next couple of years, I’d occasionally find myself with a bit of time to work on the Monkeys. So I’d go back to it, add a few levels, do some graphical work, add a new feature or whatever. Then something more important would come up again, and Monkeys would get forgotten again.

This super-long gestation period seems to have led to a pretty big game with lots of features and plenty to like about it. Unfortunately it’s also led to confused and somewhat buggy code, multiple art styles and rather random storylines! There are missing features too. A few people have complained that it doesn’t save your progress. This is true, but it turned out to be a very hard feature to implement due to the disjointed way the whole game was built.

The public reception to Infinite Monkeys on the whole is rather better than I’d expected. You always get some people hating on games they don’t like for whatever reason, and you tend to get hate for anything that doesn’t work perfectly in a game too. I’d always expected it to be a Marmite game, splitting opinion neatly into “It’s bonkers and I love it” and “It’s hard and buggy and I hate it”. That happened, but it seems to have gone much more towards the first than the last; a pleasant surprise!

Most people seem to enjoy the intro. They like my silly voice and the weirdness of it. A few people seem to read deeper meanings than were intended here, like references to The Hitchiker’s Guide, pro/anti-evolution themes and all sorts. The only vague meaning beyond amusement, was that the game really has been bashed out by a sort of monkey at a typewriter: Me!

This game features four separate endings. Two are pretty easy to find – you run to the end and there’s a junction where you have to make a choice. The other two are much harder to discover. You have to do a tricky move to get past an obstacle that doesn’t look passable, then nip down the drain beneath (where there’s another junction). A surprising number of people have done this, and in fact one of these endings is the second highest achieved, according to the stats.

Graphically the game is a bit of a mix. I did most of the levels etc myself, just by trimming bitmapped textures with Flash’s built in tools. The game was originally intended to run over hand-drawn levels, but it turned out far too hard to get the hand drawn bits to match up with gameplay constraints. Plus there was an awful lot of levels in the end (over 50) and it would have taken forever to make them all. Some of them are animated too, like giant machines you have to crawl through.

The very best bit of graphical work in the entire game was the protagonist monkey itself, illustrated and animated by the super talanted Nick Hilditch. The monkey character is well received by the public, and helps give the game sufficient charm to make people play in the first place. Awesome!

Lessons:

1. It doesn’t pay to leave something on the back-burner too long. The world moves on, and you forget how the code works!

2. Have a bit of fun with hiding objects, easter eggs and the like around the game. People enjoy them, it seems.

3. Multiple endings are popular!

4. Buggy code will produce angry players! Doesn’t matter if you’re doing something difficult, they don’t care.

5. Intros can be worth it. Keep ’em short and punchy though.

6. Make something a little weird and mystereous, and some people will add their own meaning.

7. Everyone loves monkeys!