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.
Another experiment in advertising. This handy single-serving URL is so easy to remember that we’re hoping lots of people return to it whenever they need an online stopwatch. It’s easy to use, contains just the features you need and looks fab. Spread it far and wide, please!
In fact, feel free to embed the stopwatch on your own website – the embed code is right there in the stopwatch widget.
A game for young kids – match the sounds to the correct characters from the new Timmy Time show. There’s even switch controls for the disabled in this one, so no excuses not to play!
A spiritual sucessor to Hanna in a Choppa, Wallace and Gromit: Invention Suspension sees you helping Gromit to pilot a remote-control chopper to collect parts for their new invention.
Everything about this game is improved over Hanna in a Choppa. The helicopter is better controlled, more stable and stronger. There is even a choice of three differently performing choppers. The graphics are beautiful, the sounds are spot on and the level design continues the trend of making things new and different per level, not harder. There are more achievements to get, and there’s even a highscore table that you can submit your total time to. If you can get within a minute of my 6min 26seconds total, you’re doing really very well. If you liked Hanna in a Choppa, prepare to love this!
The Fit4Anything website supplies mental health assessments for urban youngsters at risk of taking the wrong path.
The owners can update the site via a built in CMS and can see the results of the tests taken via secure online reports.
I inherited this website for the small book seller MG Books. It was in a bit of a state, but with a tiny budget made it presentable and editable via a CMS that the owner can use. The site had a geeklog CMS before that only half-worked, and was too complex for the owner to work with reliably.
The In-Gear website was designed and created for a local motorcycle riding school to help them sell courses.
This is the riding school that taught me to ride a motorbike too, and I can thoroughly recommend them for all your rider training needs, from CBT to big-bike courses.
Visit the in-gear.co.uk website
The site’s owner keeps the site fresh and up to date via the flexible CMS, and there are a number of integrated features on the site:
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.
Use your mouse to help Wallace & Gromit bake break in this time-management game. Aardman’s usual high-quality and attention to detail shines through in the graphics and sound in this game.
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:
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