Cavalcade Games Blog » WebGames

Come ye Fusion Tanks!

Eric — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:06:02 +0000

FUSION Tanks (mutiplayer edition) – a.k.a Ftanks

Experience multi-player tank mayhem unlike any other. 5 chaotic weapons, 4 battlefields, destructible terrain, smooth controls, and the all-new Fusion system. Collect fallen tank turrets and fuse them with yours. Rain terror with up to 4 turrets!

Powered by Come2play, Fusion tanks allows you to challenge your friends even if you are on different websites or social networks like Facebook.

Battles don’t have to be just fun, put your coins at stake with come2play’s betting system which enables the TankSaw ™ – cut tanks in half and automatically fuse their turrets!

Watch out for the public beta in a few weeks.

the $11,000 Come2Play Challenge!

Eric — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:42:12 +0000

Our friends over at come2play.com has two cool offers for game developers.

GET up to $3,000 in funding for your previously released game!

If you have a single-player game with over 100,000 game plays and a rating over 3.5 on Kongregate or Newgrounds. Come2play will pay you up to $3,000 to create a multiplayer version of it! I would recommend our fellow game developers to extend their old game with a simple multiplayer concept. The key is do not overspec the multiplayer version and just go simple. It will be a good way to earn more from an old game, extend the game’s IP, and learn the basic of multiplayer design.

IN ADDITION to the funding, your game will be included in the judging contest with over $8000 in prizes!

$5,000 for first place,

$2,000 for second place

$1,000 for third place.

You can enter a NEW game or a retrofitted (with the come2play API) game. Contest runs through January 1st through March 31st, More details here: http://come2play.com/dev_inner.asp?f=1&newsid=337

We are using come2play on our next game: FTanks . Good luck and aim for the prize!

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Ftanks update – approaching beta

Eric — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:07:30 +0000

Still late but we think we can go beta this week. The terrain destruction system is undergoing some heavy optimization because it drops the framerate by 50% when it recalculates the terrain during an explosion. We are trying a ‘grid based recalculation by area’ method to restrict the part it recalculates. The come2play API is quirky and has some learning curve to make it behave optimally but nothing a deep dive can’t fix. Thats all for the technical wizardy my partner is doing. As for my part, here are a few new assets in the repository;

2010 New Year’s Resolution

Eric — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:19:49 +0000

Look at all the cobwebs and dust here! its 2010 and there has been a tectonic shift here at Cavalcade Games, the ground is still moving but one thing that’s sure is Cavalcade Games will emerge from this cocoon – better, faster, stronger. To help us commit ourselves to the plan, we are going to lay them out here for all to see. Unto the list;

CavalcadeGames.com will be redesigned and outfitted with more community and showcasing features.
Ftanks will be done and ready on or before February.
Word Mansion will be released before February ends.
A single player Ftanks will be released middle of 2010.
release at least 1 new Iphone game in Unity
release 1 iphone games in native code

Heres to a more successful 2010 for all of us in this industry!

The Flashiest Podcast on Flash Game Dev

Eric — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:52:20 +0000

Our good friend, Joseph Burchett, manage to gather so much flashismo in one podcast that it’d be hard for anyone to top this one. In the 1st slot is , Ryan Henson Creighton from Untold Entertainment – known for being in kahoots with interrupting cows. Next is Iain Lobb, an agency/firm embedded flash game developer now working freelance. Penultimate is THE Edmund McMillen, popular game developer known for creating edgy games, lastly is Mr.Love-Letter-to-Flash Daniel Cook. As you can see in the list below, a wide swath of topics was covered in the podcast.

Here is the link.

http://bit.ly/16vgv1

Topics covered:

-How Flash games differ from console games
-How to approach the design of a Flash game so it hooks people right at the beginning
-Edmund explains why he doesn’t like to implement micro-transactions into his games and why he designs games the way he does
-Everyone tries to understand why Edmund is against micro-transactions
-Dan explains why micro-transactions are scary to game designers
-Edmund goes deeper into why he doesn’t use micro-transactions
-Dan begins to explains what it means to make games as art
-Edmund restates why he doesn’t like games that encourage addiction
-The podcast loses control!
-Art in games and how to make your game stand out
-Discussion on why the Flash game market isn’t actually crowded
-Quality of Flash games
-Why Flash is a good learning tool for designing games
-What steps that everyone takes to get there design juices flowing
-Dan discusses shorter and long form Flash games
-Brief discussion about how clients usually don’t know what they want in a game.
-Social interaction in Flash games
-14 year old’s and Flash game development
-Why more Flash game developers are not using social hooks and multi-player in their games
-Why developers jump ship and don’t stay with flash for future “real” game development
-Dan’s prophecy (on Flash games)
-What to do when the mainstream companies start making games for Flash (14 year olds run to the bedroom, slam the door and cry)
-Using Flash to prototype your game, then porting your game to a different platform
-How to get noticed as an indie game developer
-Realism in games
-Art direction
-Vector art
-Another digression, but it’s a good one… Edmund asks his wife about game design
-Making a game that doesn’t look like a Flash game
-Find out where Dan gets his artistic inspiration from… You will never guess it
-Americanized Anime
-Different art styles
-Innovation and what not to do in a game
-Camera zooming effect and polish
-What it’s like working for the more main stream companies
-Education and game development
-Tools to use when learning game development for the first time
-IPhone games
-Edmund hints at a new device that will compete with the IPhone
-Return to the discussion of multi-player games
-Procedurally generated content
-Letting users generate the game content for you
-Closing it out with advice for up and coming game developers

Links To Things Mentioned:

Stackopolis
Zwok
Meta4orce
Bunnie
Andre Spierings
Coil
Grey-Matter
Spewer
Time Fcuk
Interrupting Cow trivia
Bloat
Aether
Gish
Machinarium
Electro server
Cunt (Not work safe!)
Dragon Age: Journeys
Kahoots
Meatboy
Flash love letter
Zombie Cow Studio’s
Guppy
Tyler Glaiel
Closure
Game Maker
RPG Maker 2000
Shark Runners
Spelunky
Disgaea
Love

Virtual Game Development pt. 1 – People

Eric — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:52:52 +0000

Here at Cavalcade Games we create games in a virtual office setup. Both me and Shikii, live in the same city but create games virtually. With games being a highly collaborative and creative product, this setup has molded our output in more ways than one. In the next year, we will be moving into a physical office. This makes for a good time to conduct a roundup of what we learned during our time with virtual game development. Part 1 – will be about the people component of a virtual game developments setup, part 2 will be about the tools and part 3 will be about everything else.

As a background, virtual office is defined as replicating a working environment – online. This mostly involves substituting concepts and tools found in a physical environment with web or desktop applications. The substitutions starts from the very act of talking to emulating office fixtures such as whiteboards and the conference room.

Virtual Game Development is defined as creating games in a virtual office setup. Virtually creating games is a special case in the sense that, first, the discipline is a creative endeavor in nature; second, it requires participants to be constantly in-step (requiring varied types of communication) and third, game development is known as a huge hard slog to the playable part, much more so when done with less human interaction. So with these characteristics, Virtual game development is much more under duress than the typical virtual office setup. Hopefully, with these tips, other game developers planning to go virtual can get off to a good start. First up! – the people.

PEOPLE

This is the most important component of the setup. Some people are just not incompatible with the whole setup. The goal is how to identify who can hack it so that game development will be optimal and smooth even if you are miles away from each other. Here are 5 factors, that I believe are the most important in determining those rare people.

1. Experience

When determining if a member of the game development team can thrive in a virtual game dev setup, the most significant determinant is work experience. I believe a minimum of 1-year telecommuting/freelance experience is a requirement. These two are very different layers of discipline, one that overlays on top of any type of profession. Telecommuting/Freelancing develops the following important skills;

Reading Comprehension – i.e. reading instructions, quick research, learn new stuff rapidly, etc.
Self-starting – to work without any external pressures (supervisors, managers, etc)
Ability to read between the words.

2. Communication Skills

Doesn’t have to be great but a decent communication skills cuts down on time spent on re-explaining things and blind spots. Communication skills means the ability to explain things concisely and also in a respectful manner. For example, instead of typing ‘Huh?, a good communicator would type, “Do you mean xxx?. The first one is a bit rude and the latter, is not just polite but goes a bit further and offers a path out of the confusion by implying that you need a reworded reply. Also a good communicator knows that communication online is prone to misinterpretation and won’t react right away when sensitive matters are being discussed.

3. Researching skills

The ability to quickly Google terms and unfamiliar concepts is a great timesaving skill in virtual game development. Consider a case when the typer types a foreign term like orthogonal (view), the bad way would be asking the typer ‘Whats orthogonal view?”, he then explains it in his own words. This has a time and mental cost to the explainer. This sometimes results to more question therefore wasting more time on both sides. A handy website for this particular situation is found at http://lmgtfy.com/

4. Output oriented

Working virtually, everyone tends to get out of sync. That is why there needs to be a syncing point. Output files are the most effective ones so that managers will know that work is being done at the same time check if its being done properly. The more frequent the output is the more in step the team will be throughout the development period. Members need to put out work-in-progess builds/files often so errors and misinterpretations can be checked early/often and wastage will be minimized.

5. Gamer

Games are inherited systems in nature. Almost any feature that a game needs had already been, more or less, implemented in a past game. It is quickest when you just say “do that growth effect like in Super Mario” than typing it out or drawing it. Having members with good knowledge of games is a definite plus. Fortunately, there is Youtube and other video channels to show elements of past games to uneducated members.

—–

These are the top 5 traits you should look for to determine if a partner/member will fit in a virtual game development setup. Missing any of these will result to delays, frustration and compromises to the game being done. Look out for part 2 for the tools we have used…

Do you agree or disagree? Have anything to add to the topic? Comment below so we can have a discussion…

Unity3d Game Portals

Eric — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:27:50 +0000

In Flash game development, the primary way developers earn is to have flash game portals sponsor their game. Sponsoring primarily means turning a game into a traffic building content as well as a brand-building product. This is done by inserting sponsor’s logos all around the game’s scenes. This has been the main driving force in the flash game content business for some time.

Unity3d on the web is slowly but surely gaining traction amongst game developers. So its only a matter of time before the sponsorship model will be adopted in the space as well. A few pieces of the puzzle need to be in place for that to happen. One vital piece that is missing are game portals. 3 notable ones are gaining momentum and may become the Kongregate, Newgrounds or Miniclip of 3d games in the near future. Let us take a look at each of them.

Muse games is first with a pure Unity3d slate of games. As you’d expect its a slim selection with only 4 games but the site’s got a strong stake on microtransactions with a store for some of its game. A card deck and some clothes, furnitures are available for purchase.

Still in top secret beta phase, dimeRocker seems to be poised for some action with zombie and pirate games in tow. They are a constant presence in activities where the Unity devs are so hopefully this close association will result to something awesome when they go live. Perhaps some plugins for high scores and trial / full version locks.

Finally, there is Wooglie.com who is actively courting Unity developers to upload their games to their site. Some sort of CPM-sharing is offered there. Its got a good approach of mixing flash games and the unity3d games. Flash games drive the traffice while the unity games gives it differentiation. It seems it only looks like flash game portals and do not have any flash games at all. Still its a good strategy to capitalize on the familiar user experience. Wooglie has the best selection of unity3d games amongst the sites featured here.

———

These game portals are trying very different approaches to building their audience and its very interesting to see how it plays out. But one things for sure, any success from these website will grow the whole 3d web games market and when the rising tides comes, all boats are lifted.

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Ftanks and Pushbutton Engine

Eric — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:43:28 +0000

Our next big release is codenamed Ftanks. Its a ‘refinement’ of the classic Worms formula featuring tanks (or Scorched Earth for the older readers) . It is funded by come2play to showcase their very groovy API. It is also being built with the Pushbutton Engine. PBE is a game engine for the Flash platform which by itself is great enough. But what made us jump into using it is the fact that its open-source, comes with a marketplace to buy/sell components and is made by Torque alumni. We knew it was gonna be much tougher than building our custom engine but we figured it will be good for us in the long run.

True enough, PBE has proven to be tougher than we thought and we encountered some thorny problems related to fitting what we needed into the engine. But we persisted and are steadily going forward with the game. Huge props goes to PBE’s Ben Garney for the patience to walk us through solutions. Also worth mentioning are the cool coders from the small but growing community namely Phil Peron, Martijn Segers, and others.

Pushbutton engine is in (REAL) beta so a few rough spots exists. Its NOT as3-beginner friendly in its current state but hopefully they can push the bar further down when 1.0 comes around. My partner, Shiki, is liking it and even posted several tutorials to help early adopters. As for Ftanks, the tanks are moving and animated, rockets are firing (but not exploding) and stuff is coming along shortly. Look for a public beta in late October- early November. Here is a tasty screenshot for reading this post.

Webby Gaming Links – September 09 Edition

Eric — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:37:06 +0000

I didn’t realize that i skipped August for the both roundup series (web games and iphone) until just now. Bad blogger == me.August had some good news so ill mix them in here.

Danc published part 2 of his Love Letter to flash. >> here . If someone love letters this comprehensive they would surely feel amazed, confused, tired then amazed.
Joseph Burchett of Gamedevradio.net interviewed Ben Garney, lead guy on Pushbutton engine. >> here.
GDC is ongoing and some very interesting information was lectured and shared.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25264 ($175,000 in 3-4 months!)
http://adachen.com/2009/09/16/gdc-austin-mmo-and-virtual-world-monetization/ (MMOs and ARPU FTW!)
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25284 (Blurst works 20-hours / week! no way that’s gonna work here.)

Mochi Media did a couple of v. interesting interviews featuring Ninja Kiwi and Nitrome. (flash outliers or replicable success, who nose?)

Concept Art for Project FvsW

Eric — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:19:48 +0000

Fun stuff are still being brewed here within the confines of our virtual office. With Word Mansion delayed yet again and our next project still ways off (1.5 months at least), i thought a nice tease would be in order. So, here is a concept art for one our early 2010 project, codename FvsW. Enjoy!