Charcoal Styles Blog

Project Nothingness - Part 4

2011-09-28T19:54:00.000+10:00

So, I now have less than three days to make a game for this project. It's fairly obvious that I won't have the time to make the "sneaker" project. So I think I'm going to just make a new project in Flixel and see what happens...

The slow update

2011-09-18T22:00:00.000+10:00

Work on Cascade mobile has been slow, thanks to uni assignments and work that needed to be done around the house. And the less said about Project Nothingness, the better... (though I have a one week holiday coming up soon; 1 week vs 1 month, I think my chances are good :P)
Though, there has been some time to work on it. Though there's (still) no tutorial, I have been working on some polish stuff.
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Trying not to do it wrong

2011-09-08T15:07:00.003+10:00

With the recent acquisition of an Android device and the development of Cascade Android, I've been looking into free games on the platform, both top tier and bottom of the barrel "shovel ware". I've been mainly focusing on what is the best practices for advertising, but also looking in general at how the games are presented; i.e. loading times, menus, logos.
In this time, I've come across a few things that I know I won't be doing.

Advertising on developer logo screen.

In my current build I have my logo as the first thing the user sees (for ~2 seconds). I came across a game where the developer had their logo up first (for ~5 seconds), but with an ad showing too. I'm not sure about them, but I think showing my logo would be a big part of building my "brand" and having advertising tied with that is not a message I would want to convey.

On first load going to the main menu.
- Plants vs Zombies has been out for two years. This article explains how it gets and keeps players hooked. I don't think I've seen a single mobile game that doesn't go straight to a menu.
Advertising on the main menu

This one isn't too bad, I guess. But when combined with the above, again is not a message I want to send to the user. To me it make the game feel a bit cheap, they would rather try to get a few fractions of a cent out of me than try to give a cohesive experience.

Constantly changing the position of advertising.

This is a no-brainer and is thankfully something I've only seen once on a really "cheap" game. But the fact that someone does it, means that there's most likely more out there that do it. And even if this stops one person from doing it in a future game then it's worth it.

I'm sure there's more that I've come across, these were just the worst ones that stayed with me.

Project Nothingness - Part 3

2011-09-05T08:26:00.000+10:00

Again, an update post with not much in it.
Unfortunately a sick girlfriend, uni homework, a tiny bit of work on Cascade Mobile and a little Deus Ex conspired to steal away my weekend.
But I'm 99% sold on "sneaker" and Flixel. It might be a bit of a challenge, but isn't that the point? ;)

Project Nothingness - part 2

2011-09-02T16:10:00.001+10:00

Today was filled with uni, uni homework and housework. So, there isn't really any progress apart from basically selecting the "sneaker" project as my game.
Now I just need to figure out what tech I want to use. I think it's basically between 2D in Flixel, or 3D in Unity...

Project Nothingness - Part 1

2011-09-01T15:36:00.000+10:00

Today I embark on making a game in a month. But there's a few questions I have to answer first.
The main one being: what game to make? I have a few ideas, let me list them for you:

Project Nothingness - Part 0

2011-08-31T13:23:00.000+10:00

Tomorrow sees myself and around 20 other Melbourne based game developers start a month long competition.
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The first divergence

2011-08-25T15:08:00.001+10:00

As many people know, not all ideas work out. Or at least the don't work out as planned initially when implemented.
This is a short story of one of those ideas.
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The inevitable side project

2011-08-23T17:22:00.001+10:00

As quite often happens, I was side tracked by a small project before even really starting on the "big" one.
Of which this "big" one is a side track of another even bigger project. Wow, I just can't stay on one task, can I?
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The start of a new project

2011-08-22T14:14:00.000+10:00

Over the last year, I made six flash prototypes. I polished them enough to be released onto the internet to get comments from the general public. There are a few reasons for their existence: