Winner’s Circle

This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is UMAG2 by DEVM-Games!

UMAG2 is great new multiplayer game by DEVM-Games!

In this real-time multiplayer game, you get to jump in the arena and take people out. There are many options, which range from 1v1 turn-based to 4vs4 sim (which tends to be a quicker match).

This game is all about customization (and shooting, of course). You can customize your badge and your tank. As you gain XP (through wins and playing time), more customization options become available.

This is a really robust game, with live chat, clans, and even a dedicated forum. More importantly, though, is that its fun- congratulations DEVM-Games!

Get To Know DEVM-Games

Tell me about yourself- how many people are on your team? Where are you based?

My name is Jan Rigerl, I’ve done the technical stuff and game design for UMAG2. The graphics and sound was done by Rik Nicol. I’m currently living in Malta, a small island in southern Europe, but I’m originally from Sweden.

In creating UMAG2, I had a lot of very helpful beta testers.

How long have you been making games? What did you do before?

I’ve worked with games in one way or another for about 10 years, and before that I was in school. :)

I’ve been self-employed for just over 3 years now.

What was your inspiration for “UMAG2″?

The inspiration for the UMAG games has been the old classic artillery games such as Scorched Earth, but also newer variants such as Worms. When I started on UMAG1 there wasn’t many other online multiplayer artillery games around.

Any major challenges or hurdles during development?

Floating point numbers. It’s been a real problem to get physics to synchronize perfectly between clients since the rounding of the numbers rarely but sometimes differ depending on Flash Player version, browser, operating system or CPU. It’s a problem that’s also present in UMAG1.

It’s one of those bugs that I’ve never been able to reproduce myself but I can see happens every now and then in the logs. I’ve tried a lot of different ways to solve this, during most of the development of UMAG2 I thought I had solved it, but once I started getting a larger amount of traffic it appeared in the logs again. Luckily the difference very rarely is large enough to affect the game.

Other than that I’ve had a lot of threading bugs on the server, I’ve written my own multiplayer server but I’m not very good at writing threaded code. :(

What types of games do you like to create the most? What types of games do you like to play the most?

I like to create games that differ from what I’ve created before, but I don’t have any favorite genre. It’s going to take a long time before I make another multiplayer game though, there’s just sooo much more work than single player games.

I like RPGs a lot, just completed Mass Effect 3, but I play almost all the major types of games.

How long is your game creation cycle? What is your process?

Differs greatly, everything from a week to 8 months.

Often the project just starts with some sort of visual look or feel that interests me, and then the game idea comes later. I try to get a playable prototype early and then go over it in iterations to improve.

Are there any game developers that you admire or consider “rock stars”?

If I start writing names of studios here I’ll just forget someone really important so I’ll pass on that question. :P

What is it about making a new game that you enjoy most?

Doing something new, finding new problems and solving them, creating a “machine” that seemingly does things by itself. And it’s a great opportunity to create a product by yourself that can be enjoyed by others.

Do you have any hot projects you’re working on right now?

I’m mainly working on projects for clients now.. But I did just start on a Stage3D project which I will be working on during weekends. I haven’t decided if it will be a racing game or maybe some sort of dune buggy shooter. It’s fun to finally be able to leverage the GPU in Flash.

A small video from it in it’s current (very early) state, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hruLkg7NXTk

Thanks and congratulations again DEVM-Games- good luck with your Stage3D project!