Here it is, the sequel to my most popular game so far. Click here to play it.
The first game was played by much more people than I’ve guessed (It currently has over 34 million views and still getting 50k average views everyday). Of course it’s popularity doesn’t mean that everybody loved it completely. Among the complaints, there were ones which seem to revolve around same topics: Retro graphics and unappealing difficulty (mostly because of non-rival red cars) 
So those were the starting points for this sequel.
This is the first game I used stock photos & 3d models for art (for cars and buildings/trees at the roadside), instead of doing every piece of art by myself. However, I drew all background scenery graphics, which I enjoyed doing so. Only desert background contains some manipulated building photos and I used some cloud images here and there for some backgrounds.
You can also play the game fullscreen in my site by pressing the small rectangle in the game screen. (Most portals don’t allow this functionality, so you may find that it is not working elsewhere).
For those who missed the link: Click here to play the game.
It hasn’t been more than one week and I have a new game online! This one also has been finished a long time ago but found its sponsor recently. Play it here.
Experiment 17 is basically a snake game with multiple twists: As a lab engineer, you control your snake under or over the water, collect 44 different anomalies for your testing purposes and observe how your snake is affected.
Some anomalies have cool bonuses, some have negative effects but either way there is always something to suprise you (I hope). Also, at the end of every level, you have to complete full circles by turning around “experience dots” and collect them. This was added mostly for making player comfortable with diving in and going out of water, so that you can easily go under (or over) yourself without colliding.
My dear girlfriend made the beta testing and thanks to her, I added difficulty selection, lives and other adjustments. I’m really happy that she helped me with this one, otherwise it would have been pretty hard
You can play the game by clicking here.
I waited a long time to see this online and now here it is, click here to play!
Truck games are not my favorite games and there is a lot of trivial clones around already, so I chose a theme which I would enjoy drawing… And yeah it was entertaining. 
This time I only did art & music, the game code is provided by my sponsor. It was pretty relaxing to focus on only one thing after my previous games. Music-wise, I first tried to write some cool rock/metal stuff but couldn’t write a decent thing. They also sounded like mud when combined with the truck’s noise and compressed to MP3. Hence, electronic-folky-stuff.
In case you missed the link, play it here.
It’s a bit shameless self promotion but anyway: I ported Vampire Fever to Blackberry Playbook. It’s $0.99 and includes a cheat mode which is not normally available in the flash version. Check it here!
I know there are people who liked the game but got frustrated by the difficulty of some levels. With cheat mode, you can unlock any nasty level you want and experience the full game. This also means, you can unlock all creatures and mess with the level creator as you like!
(update: I added cheat mode to the flash version on my website, play online version here. )
Why Playbook? Some of you might already know, Blackberry/RIM was giving a free Playbook as a promotion for developers who submit their app to their store before end of March. Better, you don’t need to re-write your code in a whole new language because their system allows you to wrap your flash games as apps for playbook.
I often become tired of working on my games after they’re finished so I’m pretty lazy when it comes to porting my games to mobile platforms. But since the process seemed simple, I didn’t want to miss a free tablet chance.
Of course all of this was too good to be true. The porting process was messy and painful simply because of incomplete tools. I almost gave up because of buggy simulator/sdk issues and ancient ways of doing things (It was only fun for first 5 seconds to use command line after 20 years). There is already enough rant about this topic so I will not delve into details but… Blackberry/RIM really needs to redesign this process if they want to be able to compete with other high profile and already successful tablets.
Anyway, you can buy Vampire Fever Playbook version here!
Last months were pretty hectic and i wanted to release my latest game first before posting here. It’s a “pseudo-3d” racing game, like Outrun or Lotus, if you remember those Amiga/SNES/DOS times. It’s already online, surpassed 6 million views in 23 days and still counting up. Not bad! (update: reached 7.5 million views in 1 month!)
In case you missed it, you can play the game here.
“What the hell is ‘Pseudo-3d’ anyway?”
It’s my way of saying “this is not a real 3d game, it’s actually 2d but looks/fakes 3d”. Some people may say it’s already obvious but i saw there are people who thought otherwise, so…
In old times when computers were not powerful as today (no cool 3d engines with decent graphic hardware acceleration, like today’s Flash actually), people used interesting methods to create these games to achieve a 3d feel. In this game and similar games, what you see is actually thin horizontal lines drawn on screen, as they stack up above, they scale down, thus creating a false perception of perspective. Simple to write here, harder to code, especially when all assets in game start to come together.
I believe times of Amiga/DOS has a lot of similarity with the current state of flash gaming (although these similarities arise from different reasons): You must not exceed a certain file size (and it’s really hard in flash when you’re working with mp3 music tracks instead of good-old MOD files), you don’t have decent graphics hardware acceleration thus you can’t work on a 3d engine without lousy frame rates. (Well, the last one will change soon since the new flash player will allow complete hardware acceleration, i guess we’ll see a lot of 3d racing games with modern graphics in the following months of 2011… at least i’m happy that i’m not too late with this game, i could have been caught on that frenzy)
Coming from art/design background, this was a interesting challenge for me to go from the same steps of old programmers and see how hard it can get sometimes to achieve a simple effect. I had to create a lot of graphic pieces which have meaning when they come together (In night and fog levels, i had to duplicate all objects for different fog/light levels, and saved them as separate files. I couldn’t simply apply a color transform to them since that’ll be incredibly cpu consuming). This kind of details added a lot of work, both on art and code parts. Yet, probably i could’ve done better optimization with using blitting etc. but every project has to end sometime, right?
Having finished the project, now I can get a glimpse of why there is not many flash racing games using this method. As opposed to other genres, racing is much more easy to create in real 3d, i believe. It’s much easier to get a 3d engine, put a car in it and make the user drive it in an environment including nice psyhics/collisions. You can create tracks in a visual editor in no time. Fake 3d may not be rocket science but it has it’s pitfalls and it definitely takes time to make it feel right.
By the way, don’t forget to check full-screen feature! It’s activated by the square button in the race screen at the left-bottom corner.
Hi there!
Welcome to my personal blog about game development, mostly about my on-going and finished games. I will try to share news & stuff about my games, and sometimes my thoughts on game-related topics. I hope to find enough time to update here frequently, but even if I can’t, I will be checking regularly. So please let me know what you think about my games and articles, your comments are welcome!
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If you want to learn more about me, you can check here.
In case you find this blog from a search engine, check my homepage here (or click the banner below) to see all my games all-together.
For Turkish readers, I also write here with my girlfriend, check it if you want to read our rantings about movies, books, games etc.
Enjoy!
