deeperbeige.com

Solve the puzzles by dropping command tiles for the robot to follow in this unique puzzle game. Compete worldwide for the fastest times over each set of levels and see your name on the highscore table!

Click “Robo Game” at the bottom to get into the game. If you want to play the advanced levels, the access code is 3003.

Postmortem:

I was allowed a lot of freedom in creating this game, and came up with the concept from scratch. The idea of using a primative form of programming to promote a toy that would appeal to technically minded kids worked well. There’s a little added depth in the game in the fact that you can work towards a most efficient solution, as well as just completing each puzzle.

Whilst it looks like a pure logic game, astute players will spot that the timer starts as soon as you drop your first command. This means actually there’s a certain amount of skill required to get fast times, as your first tile-drop should be on the robot itself to get it walking as soon as possible. This also means there’s a best-possible solution for each level. I really like these subtlties and they interplay with each other to create a deeper and more unique experience.

The initial levels are designed to teach the user how to drive the robot around, but are not meant to be entirely trivial still. Each concept is introduced separately which is a good thing, and a puzzle that isn’t necessarily instantly obvious is given at the same time. The idea was to avoid the boredom of learning that often comes with games like this before the real challenges.

The graphics for this game were done by a collegue, and are generally excellent. There are a couple of exceptions however: holes don’t look quite enough like holes, and crates don’t quite look moveable enough. The crates issue is partly down to the fact that you have to be able to see what’s under them at various points in the game, but the holes could have been better. Specifically, they should afford the possibility of dropping not just the main character but also crates into them, since disposing of crates is essential for some of the puzzles.

Two big mistakes damaged this game’s success severely. The first is that we were told to lock the third (and best) set of puzzles behind a secret code. The code was distributed on notes on the shelves in Toys-R-Us stores. It turns out nobody (and I really mean nobody) finds these and takes them home to try out. I calculated from the stats that the locked content was played by just 7 real players in the life of the campaign! It’s a real shame, as people who played the initial levels and were hungry for more could see that more existed, but couldn’t get at it to play, so would have been frustrated.

The second big mistake was that the game was never seeded widely. Therefore very few people got to actually play the game because nobody knew it existed! For one of my favorite personal game builds, it’s quite a sad tale really. The site was visited by around 3000 visitors in the life of the campaign, which is pathetic by any standards! I plan to make a spin-off game using the same concept one day, and to promote it using the modern Flash distribution websites.

I also made a smaller design mistake in the final locked level. You have to find a way to re-use one of the tiles. Turns out a minor gameplay bug introduced by the graphic designer means you can pick up a tile whilst it’s dissappearing, just after it has been executed by the robot. You can then re-use it elsewhere! Dispite hinting at that in the level’s text, it was still unfair to expect the player to find that. As a result, very few of the very few people that found the final level code, have completed the final level!

Lessons:

• If you have highscores in your game, make sure that it’s always going to be possible to improve by a tiny bit. In this game, there’s a perfect performance for each level that’s pretty easy to do once you know how. The first set of highscore entries are all identical, which isn’t great for promoting competition.
• Don’t hide away content behind difficult to achieve codes unless you want it to go unplayed by most.
• Agressively pimp your games to as many places as possible to seed them for traffic. A game that nobody plays is just a waste of development time!
• Don’t build dirty-tricks into level design. They can exist as a cunning way for the astute player to improve their score, but should never be required to complete a level.

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.

To promote The Rapture’s album ‘Pieces of the People We Love’, I created this microsite where fans could upload their image and a small profile to the band’s site. Their image became a part of a picture of the band. This really worked well with the album name, as people who uploaded a photo literally became pieces of the people loved by the band.

The site was a decent  success and thousands of fans engaged and uploaded a picture. As the picture filled up more and more, the site automatically rearranges the images on a slightly smaller scale, so it always looks like there’s only a few more images to go before the image is complete. Ok, so it’s a dirty trick, but it really encourages people to get involved!

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.

A simple database site for the Shark energy drink. You can register as a DJ and people needing DJ’s can find you!

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

This microsite was produced to promote the film ‘A Scanner Darkly’. As more people upload their images to the system, an overall image begins to form from the mosaic of smaller photos.

The site is quite technically challenging, having to upload and process images into appropriate positions on the master image. Then to send all that data back to the client machine is a tricky task too, achieved by combining images into one giant image on the server, then getting Flash to sort everything out on the client’s machine.

This webtoy was built to promote the Ant Bully film. You get to draw on the ground with a stick, then send your picture to a friend, where it is recreated via the medium of crawling ants!

Sounds like a simple concept, but there’s an unexpected niceness in the way the ants form all of your lines simultaneously. Check out the link below (which links to a message I’ve made just for you) to see what I mean…

I created this band site for the singer Sia. Her unusual artistic style was brought into the site by making everything look like a 3 year old child drew it!

Behind the scenes is a CMS so Sia and her band can update the website by themselves, and they do! Part of the reason her fanbase is so loyal (besides her occasionally brilliant music – don’t miss hearing “Breathe Me” on the site) is her willingness to interract with the fans themselves. The website is always kept up to date with samples of her latest music, videos and blog entries.

NOTE: The website I built has since been replaced by another company.

Visit: http://www.siamusic.net

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.