deeperbeige.com

Use your mouse to wind back the mallet, then unleash it on a Scissor Sister when they light up and make a sound. The harder you can hit, the more you’ll score in this whack-a-mole style game.

Watch for the real-time ripple effect wherever you hit. It’s a bigger effect if you wind the mallet back further, and I haven’t seen this effect done elsewhere on the web yet. It’s produced by animating a displacement colour map filter over the clip that holds the Sisters.

Use the cursor keys to race Santa in this sleigh driving game.  Hit space to use any pickup bonusses you might find, and look out for cheeky shortcuts!

This game makes heavy use of my AS2 physics engine again to simulate the sleigh movements behind the reindeer. You can bash and crash and swing about in quite a fun way!

The tracks left in the snow are worth a mention too. The track is one giant bitmap stored in memory and scrolled around to show the player’s position. The game stores the sleigh’s skids’ start and end points for the current frame and the previous frame, then creates a polygon for each skid around the four stored points. This is then drawn to the main bitmap with blend mode ‘add’. Then it is drawn again, half as bright, with blend mode ‘subtract’ and offset down/right a little. The result is what you see – a permanant skidmark with a bright highlight on the top/left side, and a dark shadow on the bottom/right edge. Because it’s combined into the track as a bitmap effect, it is permanant, and costs nothing in terms of CPU time for a longer skidmark. The only cost is a small amount of work per frame to actually update the bitmap. Because the sleighs slide about in all sorts of directions and rotations, the track width varies and slides about beautifully in response. It’s an effect I haven’t seen done quite as nicely in any other web games.

I built a PHP gallery for the Blade Runner origami competition. It was a fairly decent online gallery that allows people to upload images, see them as thumbnails, rate pictures and report inappropriate entries.

The competition wasn’t entered by a lot of people (the instructions for the origami were complicated and hard to follow), but the site is still quite a nice piece of work.

Use the cursor keys to dodge the incoming laser blasts from the aliens on your Dareway scooter.

The Dareway itself is a cheap copy of the Segway scooter for children, only with none of the cleverness of the original. This microsite was to promote the toy, and the game was rushed together from the Silver Surfer games. It plays OK for a few minutes, but is never going to set the world alight with new concepts! Watch for the tell tale green glow of the laser lines approaching to anticipate where you’re being fired at from, and reposition yourself to avoid getting hit. Take too much damage and you’re out.

Use your mouse to control the dark Silver Surfer whilst being chased by the light Surfer, and shot at by rockets. This is a very quick reskin of the earlier game with few extra elements. Frankly, the earlier game plays better, so I won’t be offended if you skip this one!

A simple physics game as part of a microsite. Collect up the tiles and scatter them into the ring. There’s not a lot of game here, but the physics engine from Rant enhances the tactile feel of collecting and releasing the tiles.

Use the mouse in this simple matching game to find the hidden pairs. You’re against the clock, so work fast!

Unusually for a pairs game, you can click as rapidly as you like. You don’t need to wait for the last two pairs to turn over before starting the next couple! Get to it and make it snappy.

Cause the biggest pile-up you can in this quick-hit driving game. Use the cursor keys to race up the road and smash into the junction at the end. The more you hit, the better your score!

Postmortem:

Whilst messing about with an idea I had in my spare time, I ended up creating a basic AS2 physics engine for simulating masses and springs. It turned out to be just what was needed for the Rant game. Each car is two round masses joined together by a spring, with a car graphic pasted over the top. The resulting losenge shape isn’t really much like a car I know, but it is perfectly sufficient for the game as it stands.

Initially, I tried making the cars out of a box made from four masses and six springs holding them in position. This ran considerably slower as the collision detection had that much more work to do, and there were that many more springs to simulate. The results weren’t as good either, with boxes occasionally turning inside out and often wobbling like jelly. The two-mass system worked considerably better and was considerably cheaper on the CPU. All round win!

A typical game of Rant only lasts a few seconds. You race up the road, tap a few cars, get a score then it’s all over. It turned out in playtesting that the trick to making this addictive was to make it really easy to play again. So, spacebar to reset at any point (even before the game is over) was critical. Likewise, there’s no lengthy transition effect before you’re back in control. In fact, there’s not even a brief half-second transition – I found that it annoyed people to wait even for that when you can replay so rapidly.

Another way to reduce user friction was to store their high-score in their Flash Shared Object. I found that people got into a routine of restarting rapidly, and sometimes did so when they had a highscore by accident. Rather than lose the chance to submit it, I allow them to submit it at any point in the future after a game too. The highscore table automatically allows just one entry per person, so there’s no chance of one person filling the table when they’ve achieved a top score.

Ultimately, Rant is a game of luck. If you’re lucky, you can hit all three of the randomly placed speed boosts, catch a few cars just right on the junction itself and hit lots of parked cars for that magical score. The game keys into that ‘one more go’ trap that we’re all succeptible to, and a little bit into the semi-gambling gene that makes us play dice games like Yahtzee, even when there’s nothing other than a highscore at stake.

Lessons

• Very short games can increase replayability and addiction, since people don’t have to invest much time in each go
• … as long as there’s very little friction before playing again
• When simulating physical objects, go for the simplest underlying representation that will suffice
• You don’t always need a lot of gameplay to generate addiction

I inherited the Emarcy music label website when it’s owners decided not to continue working with the original site creators. We did lots of enhancements and additions to the site over the years, and I still help maintain the site for Hyperlaunch on a freelance basis from time to time.

Have a look through the media section. You might just find something you like! The site’s owners are comitted to keeping the site up to date via the PHP CMS, and are often adding new free music and videos for public consumption.

Use the cursor keys to race your trolley around the supermarket in this Travis oriented racing game.

Postmortem:

This game was written as a development of the Unaccompanied Minors racing game, and used much the same engine underneath. The major change here is that the trolley doesn’t have to behave like a car, and as such needed to be much more slippy-slidey. The simple way to achieve that is with a basic vectored thrust and momentum movement model – something I’ve written many times over for space rocket style games in the past. It’s easy to get it feeling great for rockets (and trolleys), although it really doesn’t feel right for anything but the slipperiest of cars (think ice-racing rally cars, for example).

There are other enhancements over the Unaccompanied Minors game here too. The tracks have a clearly marked out path you can follow, so you needn’t get lost at every corner. Track design in general is much better too: There are shortcuts for the observent to find, pickups to collect for bonus points and the game runs better too due to better prepared graphics (the artist for this one followed my direction perfectly in terms of what would affect performance).

The mood of the game is a little depressing for my taste. The yellow floors and dimly lit store rooms remind me of the bad strip lighting in stores like Lidl and Aldi. That’s on purpose of course – it’s like that to fit in with the Travis song/video, but it still drags the mood down a bit for a racing game.

The biggest mistake in this game however is the collision response. It’ s much improved over Unaccompanied Minors, and you can do a lot more when you have a momentum vector hanging around that you can modify. The edge approximation still sucks however, and it’s not hard to find yourself accidentily rotated into a wall. There are all sorts of horrible special-case hacks in the code for recovering from such incidents, but luckily they don’t have to be used much, unless the player attempts some of the tighter shortcuts where it’s easier to get stuck.

Lessons:

• Half-decent collision response still isn’t good enough!
• Decent performance makes everything feel better
• Everybody likes sliding around