deeperbeige.com

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

This game selector was built for Toonami to give kids a fun way to select a random game to play. Hold the down-arrow to pull back on the plunger, and let rip!

Click the falling parachuter on the main screen to go into the parachute game. It’s a simple game of clicking on falling monkeys. The trick? The monkeys fall more and more rapidly leaving you floundering to keep up. Can you find the 1000 point bonus technique for the ultimate scores?

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.

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.