Hey there.  So I figured I’d make a post this weekend summing up what’s going on with what and what’s happened when. (What?)

Defective

It’ll be released eventually, I’ve started the process of getting it more attention and I’m thinking it will be sold sometime this month.  On Monday or Tuesday I’m going to be sending out emails to potential sponsors about Trophiends, so I’ll slip a little note about Defective in there too.  If you’re a sponsor and have a sponsor account on FlashGameLicense, go check it out here.

Trophiends

In case you haven’t heard, Trophiends went up for sale on FlashGameLicense this week.  I’m really happy to see it got an editor’s rating of 8, which from my understanding is really great (7 or 7.5 is the norm).  What does this mean?  Well, nothing really.  I’m sure it helps peak sponsor’s interest a little, but that’s probably about it.

Anyway, not only did it go up for sale, it already has it’s first bid.  I’m confident this game will go fast and will be my most successful yet.

Check out this lame trailer I put together for it in Windows Live Movie Maker.

Miscellaneous Things…

1. My old game, Christmas Defense, raked in $68 in ad revenue over the Christmas season, not bad for a year-old game.  You’d be surprised that that game appears to make roughly $15 – $20 a month year-round from the CPMStar ads alone.  Pretty good for a Christmas game, huh?
2. I know I said back in this post that I wanted to give ForTheLoss.org a redesign over my winter break from college.  Well, since I go back on Wednesday, I doubt this is going to happen.  There are two reasons why I want this redesign to happen – to present all of my completed games easier, for one, and secondly to just freshen up the logo (if you can call it that).  I used a new design for the “ForTheLoss Games” splash screen in Trophiends and I was hoping to update the site to go along with this new design.  The main reason I’m not going through with the redesign?  Well, I feel like that’s just me giving myself an excuse to procrastinate and not work on my game projects, which are far more important.

New Project

So what’s my new project since Trophiends is finished?

Well, no big details yet, but I can tell you it’s a platformer, it’s going to have a story, I’d like for it to implement the Starling API, and it’s certainly going to be my most ambitious project to date.  More information at a later date.

While transitioning from Trophiends to this new project, I’ve spent the majority of my time writing up a design document – jotting down any possible idea as soon as it enters my mind, cleaning up / optimizing my base classes I use for all of my games, and most importantly – drawing concept art.

As you can see from the picture on the right, I already have the design of the two protagonists and the main antagonist completed.  Now, of course these drawings are way over-detailed to be used in the game, but I wanted to try something new this time and draw up the characters in detail before designing their in-game sprites.

It took a while, but I think I eventually got the hand of sketching out rough drafts, line-tooling them up / coloring them in Flash, and finally adding the details / shadows in Photoshop.  In the end, I’m very happy with the outcome.

Alright, that’s enough from me.  Time to go enjoy some BF3 and get back to work.

Hey guys.  Just a quick post to tell you I just uploaded the trailer for Trophiends tonight.  Check it out and tell me what you think.  (The video is kind of grainy, I need to find a new way to record SWFs, but that’ll be a job for my next game.)

So that’s it, Trophiends should be up for sponsorship within a day or two, whenever it gets the green light from the review crew at FlashGameLicense.com.  More news on that, Defective, and my upcoming game in a future post!

So it’s 2012. I’m going to skip the obligatory apocalyptic joke and jump into the meat of this post.

Game Updates

Trophiends has gotten some promising reviews / stats from the few “First Impression” players over at FlashGameLicense.com, so I’m really happy about that.  I’ve learned of a few areas of the game that can be improved, so I plan on doing some work on that tonight and possibly 100% completing the game.  (All that’s left to do besides those minor tweaks is to build 5 bonus levels, of which I already have a few ideas.)

If I don’t finish up tonight however, it’s not a big deal, I’ll finish it up tomorrow.  I’ll still be on schedule because I don’t plan on uploading the game for sponsorship until Wednesday morning Sunday morning.  I’ll also begin promoting Defective and focusing on getting that sold on Wednesday Sunday / Monday as well, so expect two games of mine to be released nearly simultaneously, probably in February.

The Holidays…

So Christmas came and went.  It was a fun weekend with the family, and the gifts weren’t too shabby either.  If any of you follow me on Twitter, you’ll probably be aware that I’ve been planning on building a computer for Christmas.  I spent the Christmas shopping season scouting on deals on all of the parts, and after receiving the monitor as a Christmas gift from my parents, I put the thing together on December 26th.

I ran into a few minor issues along the way, all of which only slowed me down. The first being that I plugged the monitor DVI cable into the wrong slot onto the PC when I first booted it up to see if it worked.  As a result, the computer turned on and looked to be working, but the monitor showed “No Signal.”  That was quickly resolved, however.

I then learned that I would need to buy a new copy of Windows 7, as I apparently can’t resuse the one I bought with a student discount back in 2009.

After installing Windows, I then realized I completely forgot about a wireless card.  Another two days of waiting while it shipped and the build was finally completed.  (Well, not completely.  I want to overclock the CPU but because a rear fan isn’t working I have to wait on that to arrive on Monday.)

Here are a few pictures of my battlestation.

And for those interested, here is the part list.

So yeah, as you can tell, I’m pretty excited.  I tried out Battlefield 3 and it runs super smooth at 1920 x 1080 at all High settings.  Even Ultra runs completely smooth (and looks amazing) except when there are a lot of explosions or something similar.

So that’s that.  I plan on getting to work on my next game project sometime this week.  I’ve been planning it for weeks now and can’t wait to see it take shape.  More news on that in the future, of course.

Alright, happy 2012!

Alright let’s do this, LEEEEROOOOOOOOOOY…

So let me just get the apology out of the way for the absence of updates, I was finishing up the college semester and generally spending any free time I had not doing online / game work.  That’s all behind me now and I’m now focusing on getting Trophiends out the door.

Some Screenshots

“Trophiends” Progress

This list is going to seem abnormally large because there’s a backlog of the updates I keep written down since I haven’t posted recently.  That’s okay though, right?  Right.

• Added TNT crates.
• TNT crates and Trophies act appropriately on Moving Platforms / Treadmills.
• Drop Floors light up when stepped on.
• Perimeter Spikes optimized for performance and glitches fixed.
• Level Editor detects corrupt strings before loading a level, tells the user.
• Q and ESC hotkeys to quit.
• Level Editor “Test Level” button functionality implemented.
• Added Playtomic API for level sharing.
• Hotkeys to skip the end-of-level transition.
• Powerups show what they do after activated.
• Shared Object implemented to save player progress client-side.
• Created all 30 levels.
• Added all sounds.
• Added music.
• “Secret Reward” for completing the game added.
• Player-Made Levels menu added, game will load data from Playtomic servers.
• Preloader added.
• Splash screens added.
• Many various tweaks / changes / fixes.
• Fixed bug where Level Editor incorrectly determines a string is corrupt.
• Fixed bug with Floor Buttons / the things they control.
• Fixed bug where level loses focus on restart.
• Fixed bug where walking off a Horizontal Moving Platform would get the player stuck.
• Fixed bug where the player can die from barely touching a Spike when on a Moving Platform.
• Fixed bug where player doesn’t die if initially spawned on Spikes or if invincibility wears off while standing on Spikes.
• Fixed the bug where framerate would drop to ~20 and slow down the game temporarily when levels were started / restarted. Massively increased performance like a boss.

“Trophiends” To-Do List

• Finish up the “Rate this Level” menu when playing a custom player-made level.
• Get player-death heatmaps working (waiting on word of a potential bug regarding Playtomic).
• Add stat-tracking code (both Playtomic and GameTracker).
• Upload to FlashGameLicense for First Impression reviews (Monday).
• Add 5 or so bonus levels (probably will be done after initial feedback from First Impression players).
• Playtest and bug fix.
• Upload for sponsorship (around Januaray 4th, after the holidays).

Oh my goodness gracious, that was a lot of typing.

So that’s that, Trophiends will be ready for sponsorship by Christmas, but I won’t be uploading it until January because of Christmas / New Years, etc…

What About Defective?

Defective is still up for sponsorship.  I haven’t received a bid I feel comfortable with, and I haven’t invested much time on getting the word out about it.  Again, I’m waiting until after the holidays when sponsors are settled back in from their vacations.  Expect more news on this soon.

Future Plans

Like I mentioned at the top of this post, the college semester is behind me and I have a good month to work on my own stuff without interruption.  What am I planning for this month?

1. Finish Trophiends, get it up for sponsorship.
2. Get Defective sponsored and released.
3. Build my gaming PC and waste countless hours drooling over it / playing BF3.
4. Redesign ForTheLoss.org, new theme and everything.
5. Begin work on my next game.  Already sketching plans out for it.

Alright, I’m hungry and require nourishment.  I’ve spent far too much time on this post.

I’ll leave you with a picture of my festivus-inspired work area.

Merry almost-Christmas!

But I’m back now, well, sort of.  I still have about two-to-three weeks of college left before the month-long winter break kicks in, and I have a feeling those two-to-three weeks aren’t going to go by quietly.

In the meantime, I’m trying to fit in as much work as possible into finishing Trophiends and getting it ready for sponsorship by January 1st.  As of right now, the game is actually, well, a game.  There are only five levels, but because of the built-in level editor, making levels is a breeze.  Making interesting and fun levels is the challenging part.

I spent most of yesterday finishing the “Level Cleared” menu as well as fixing a bunch of random bugs I encountered while testing out the new levels.  Today I plan on adding more levels, and unless I find bugs that take up my time to fix, I don’t see why I won’t be able to create all 30 of the game levels.  After that, I might work on creating the 9 bonus levels (insanely-difficult ones).

The level editor is 100% functional and working.  It even sends the level data to Playtomic when the user shares the level so others can play it.  After I’m done creating the actual built-in game levels, the last major thing to do outside of sound effects / music is to create a simple interface for users to browse through the custom user-made levels and play them.

So yeah, everything is moving along.  I’ve barely been online for the past week or two because of an onslaught of college work.  Even though there’s a lull in the action now, I expect things to pick up again for the end of the semester.  However, since there’s not much more to do with Trophiends, I’m confident I’ll have it at least 90 – 95% complete by Christmas.

Alright, that’s all from me.  Speaking of Christmas, I put the banner for Christmas Defense back up in the header.  I can’t believe it’s already the Christmas season again.