Winner’s Circle
This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is Indi Cannon Players Pack by BePlayed!
In this cannon launcher, your job is to collect all of the coins on each level. You launch “Indi” out of your cannon, around obstacles, and even through walls to accomplish your task. The more Indi’s you launch, the lower your score gets.
So, the concept of launcher and ragdoll games isn’t anything new; however, Indi Cannon is a standout due to it’s well thought-out theme and the extra elements of polish that the developers included. As you advance, naturally, the levels increase in degree of difficulty. You also get introduced to new Indi’s that you can launch out of your cannon, including a stone Indi that breaks down walls and crushes man-eating plants.
The degree of difficulty isn’t particularly high, but this game is still really fun. It could be clear reference to Indiana Jones. It could be the game mechanics. It could be the polish. Maybe it’s all of those things. Congratulations Belayed!
Get To Know BePlayed
Q: Tell me about yourself – how many people are on your team? Where are you based?
We are a small team of game developers based in Russia. There are 7 people in the team: several coders, an artist, a game designer and two guys doing a bit of everything.
Q: How long have you been making games? What did you do before?
Each member has different background, not necessarily connected to the games. Some of us were independent developers before joining the team, some worked for big international companies before getting bored of enterprise software. Yet all of us share passion for good games, regardless big or small. It’s been about a year or two since we started our joint effort to make Flash games. There were only 3 of us back then though.
Q: What was your inspiration for “Indi Cannon Players Pack”?
Creating Indi Cannon was fun. While there are many Flash games with cannons and ragdolls (so it is difficult to point out which one inspired us more), we thought it would be nice to add some sort of personality. And as the game designer is a fan of the Indiana Jones movies, it was an obvious choice whom should represent the game’s hero :). Jungle with bats, spiders, strange totems and traps was the most appropriate environment for our main character.
Q: Did you encounter any major challenges or hurdles during development?
The most challenging in creating a game, no matter which one, is to make it fun. People play these games when they are relaxing, resting after work, or just surfing the net. So it takes quite a few days to test the game prototype, to check all the levels after they are done, to polish gameplay and make sure players won’t get bored. Indi Cannon was not an exception.
Q: What types of games do you like to create the most? What types of games do you like to play the most?
As we develop our games, we use popular genres such as puzzles, point&click games, launchers and try to add some unique features that will make a game to stand out among others. For us such features are humor, unusual setting and a combination of game mechanics that might have not been implemented before. Playing other games helps us to understand what gamers love and what should be avoided. Usually we play most of the popular games. However, puzzles, launchers and defense games attract our attention more often than other genres :).
Q: How long is your game creation cycle? What is your process?
Speaking of Indi Cannon development cycle, I think it took about a month from start to finish. We had a game engine that we used to create puzzle games, so coding did not take too long, just a week or so. As with other our games, development process started with a concept describing what the game will be about. Then the game designer worked out the details of gameplay and graphical assets, the artist completed all the necessary assets and combined them in a single *.fla file. After a coder integrated assets into the game, a level designer (one of two guys who are jacks of all trades :)) made game levels and a tutorial. When release time was close, the game underwent thorough testing among the team to make sure there were no bugs or gameplay issues. After the release we studied reaction of players closely as this helps us to understand what went right and what went wrong.
Q: Are there any game developers that you admire or consider “rock stars”?
Some games always inspire us to make things better and strive for better quality. Berzerk Studio, Juicy Beast, Flipline Studios are some of the developers who make great games in our opinion (yours may vary!). We closely follow their releases and try to study as much as possible from their games.
Q: What is it about making a new game that you enjoy most?
When we start new game it is always exciting to think about what will make it fun, how it will appeal to the gamers. Designing game mechanics, thinking about what player will like, how to make tutorial absolutely intuitive- this is what we enjoy the most. However, we do not forget about the technology side, and try to make games bug-free as much as possible.
Q: Do you have any hot projects you’re working on right now?
There are a couple of projects under development, one of them is the sequel to our point&click game Find the Cow. The first title was warmly met by players and we are going to develop a game that will appeal those who played Find the Cow and will please new gamers as well.
Thanks BePlayed, good luck with your next game!
