Legend of the Golden Robot

This was a game produced by robotJAM, Cathy McBurney and Rob Donkin, which was kindly sponsored by Mochi Media.

Rob James/ robotJAM (Artist/bad coder/ designer): I spent 10 years making Playstation games and then 5 years in advertising/advergames and am now an indie game developer. I work with Rob Donkin on an informal basis, we come together when one of us has a concept to make.

Cathy McBurney (Game design/Animator): I’ve been obsessed with games since the Spectrum era, mainly adventures and JPRGs. Rob J is a good friend from university where we met on the same Computer Visualisation & Animation degree course. I was an animator and FMV artist at Rage and Acclaim in the UK, working on Expendable, Wild Wild Racing, XGRA, Alias and Rocky. Game design is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and it’s wonderful to be able to hassle Rob and Rob with ideas and see them brought them to life.

Rob Donkin (Coder/Game Design): I’m a UK-based developer and have been making flash games for the last 3 years. My first ever sponsorship deal (Panda:Tactical Sniper) came with the added bonus of the sponsor getting robotJAM to redo my terrible artwork. Since then we have made a whole bunch of games together including Toxers, The Dreamerz and three more in the Panda series.

The Initial Concept

I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was a kid but only to dig up shiny things and big swords, hence the idea for Golden Robot. A realistic archaeology game would need too much specialist knowledge (and probably not be much fun) whereas reckless treasure hunting satisfies an obsessive need to collect loads of stuff. The initial design was just for a digging game, more like a single player Battleships. It had the big list of treasures, the spades, terrain types and costs to give it an element of strategy and the main goal was to find all the pieces of an ancient golden robot. Many of the treasures were based on real artifacts such as the Disc of Nebra and the Gundesrup Cauldron. Some were based on myths or popular fiction. I even managed to get a Queen reference in there!

I thought this sounded pretty cool, as I’d always fancied making an RPG type game in Flash and it had the start of the basic elements, gamers love games based on chance (like Solitaire, or Boomshine- games which don’t require any skill) so I knocked up a really basic prototype. This was basically the treasure dig areas and the main digging game in action. The initial prototype was built over a period equivalent to lunchtime, but took a few days to get the data structure sorted for generating all the treasures procedurally so I didn’t have to manually say what treasure was in what area. The game does create a different set of data each time you start a new game.

I thought it was the start of something, then I found a game by Jacksmack which had been entered into the Jayisgames Sandbox competition. It was a similar game nicely presented but somehow it really didn’t grip me game play wise (it was a nice game I just didn’t want to end up doing something that was similar). At this stage of the project it really was just a hobby project so I wasn’t really bothered if it had a stupid timescale. I made a decision at that point to make it more RPG-like, so I had an idea for making it into “Dig Fighter”, where each square would be a treasure or a monster. I fired off the idea to Cathy.

The Fighting Element

Rob J suggested there should be combat to add more scope. We worked out a scissors-paper-stone system with the spades as weapons. Your stats came directly from the spades because the emphasis was on finding treasure rather than fighting. At this stage the enemies were monstrous animals that you might dig up and the hero was going to be a character from an unmade sequel to Harry Quantum: TV Go Home.

I took a break from the digging side and knocked up a fighting prototype based on a system Cathy devised which at the time seemed to work ok. I also made a start on the main character, he was basically a cliche of all the adventure heroes I could think of, basically he’s a combination of Allan Quatermain, Indiana Jones and Chuck Norris.

At this point though Cathy decided to send me a new doc called Toxers, which was a similar game, but set in a city overrun with bugs (it was kind of like “I am Legend meets the Simpsons”). I dropped Golden Robot and rather crazily me and Rob Donkin jumped straight into production of that game. He had just finished University and we really wanted to start a new project together after having success with 5 other games we had worked on, most notably the Dreamerz. I carried on with the art a bit more and worked up the map screen from its initial basic state to a more detailed version.

This was starting to take shape but I really felt it was far too bright and colorful. I really needed to find a way of toning done the saturation, so I decided to have a go at trying to make it look like an old sepia map which is animated.

This basically involved just layering over some textures and then reducing the colours a bit from the art. Its something we carried over onto several other screens and I really felt that worked as a style.

Code Hand Over

About 3 months later Toxers was released and did pretty well, great scores on Kong and Newgrounds and had some amazing playtimes. I hadn’t actually shown Golden Robot to Rob D. yet as it really was my pet project that I was doing in my spare time. Once I did, Rob liked the start but we felt it was lacking a bit of character. I also hadn’t really touched on the artwork yet, the fighting section was looking good but the digging section was really just work in progress functional art. I left Rob with the job of converting my timeline AS2 disaster into his AS3 framework. The project really had gotten too big for me to handle alone so it was great having him come on board again.

When Rob showed me his prototype it was already looking fantastic so it didn’t take much persuasion to get me on board. The title alone was enough for me to say ‘hell yeah’! I thought that the digging for treasures worked nicely especially since there seemed to be so many unique treasures to find (I believe there were 91 special treasures and 20 generic treasures in total). Cathy and Rob had clearly already put a lot of love into the game so I was very grateful to them to invite me to join the project.

Having done Toxers already I felt confident that we could handle a project of this size so I wasted no time chopping the good bits out of Rob’s code and converting them into AS3. It was great to have a rough frame to work from and the data already there in nice neat arrays so it didn’t take long to get a more robust AS3 digging prototype up and running.

Although I liked the digging mechanic I soon got the feeling that there was something lacking. There wasn’t any strategy to digging so it didn’t take long before you were just systematically digging up every square in an area in a grid-like fashion. So it seemed logical to include a way of being able to locate treasures. We had a few ideas (metal detectors etc) before deciding on a minesweeper style where the number of neighbouring treasures of a dug square were shown in the corner. This seemed to work really well because now there was a thought process involved with digging if you wanted to maximise your profits. This was definitely something that the players seemed to respond well to (although of course not everyone reads instructions so there were plenty of people who didn’t even understand what the numbers meant…).

Rob had shown me his fighting prototype as well but I think we both felt that perhaps it could use a bit more attention. Although this was never really meant to be an RPG it was clear that, with the combat, it lent itself to a leveling up style of game play and some of the feedback on Toxers indicated that that was something the players wanted as well.

With this in mind we came up with a bunch of stats that you could build up to affect your performance in battle. From there we modified Rob’s initial combat prototype in an attempt to make it a bit more engaging. We wanted it to be simple but maintain a few elements of strategy so that it would stay interesting to players – which is not an easy task with turn-based combat! We toyed around with a few concepts before settling on the final version which included 3 different attack options, a defend option and a special item option.

Art and Animation

Having Rob do the programming was great as it really meant I could concentrate on getting the rest of the artwork sorted. The main bulk left was the creatures you would fight and the animations for them.

Rob and I brainstormed some ideas for bad guys and I spent about 3 days animating up around 28 different bad guys. They are all based on about 4 templates, so it really sped the process up as I could just change the components (legs/ arms / heads etc) on the characters and the animations then just required small bits of tweaking or 1 or 2 custom animations. Usually I like to draw stuff on paper before I work on the computer but as there were so many bad guys to draw I just dug out my Wacom tablet and drew them straight in. The first lot were the generic characters. I tried to make sets of them to save some time, so there’s 3 different goblins, 2 skeletons etc. This made the job from a few weeks into about 3 days for the lot.

And then it was boss time, we really wanted to have a few non generic characters to fight, Rob also came up with the idea that bosses would have a buddy with them which had some sort of special attack. I think he was just trying to make work for me at that stage and I really was too stupid to say no. The list of bosses were mainly from Greek mythology like the minotaur, cyclops, basilisk and the ninja goblin (I might have made that one up). The buddies I drew before the bosses, so they don’t make a lot of sense, but hey its a game, so why can’t a minotaur have a pet ferret. I did pretty much no design at all for the Evil wizard, it was only a week later I noticed he looked a bit like Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon. I often find that I draw stuff thinking its new and I’ve just seen it somewhere and my subconscious has remembered it.

Finishing Stages

One thing we learned from Toxers was that players really don’t like missing with an attack and they especially don’t like missing several times in a row. We saw a lot of comments from people complaining that the hit percentages were way off in Toxers (because they had missed 3 times in a row with a 95% hit chance which as we all know is impossible). They complained so much that I had to check that my math was sound several times before I could be certain that it wasn’t messed up in some way. So for Golden Robot we did three things to keep the players happy. Firstly we displayed the hit percentages as a bar rather than a number so that they wouldn’t know the exactly what percentage of their hits should be landing. Then we reduced the chance of missing and also added in a ‘bodge factor’ so that it was impossible to miss more than twice in a row.

So at this stage the game was looking pretty near completion. We had added in all sorts of RPG type goodies to dig up or buy in the shop and some mini-bosses that, if defeated, would hand over a fighting buddy to assist you in combat. We’d added in a range of weaponry and defensive items and a load of monsters to bash. The final part of development though on a game of this size is always the toughest (as we had already discovered on Toxers). Inputting stats for the monsters and items was really tricky and required lengthy testing sessions to try end ensure that everything was well balanced. Cathy was a huge help at this stage and played for hours on end checking for bugs and balancing issues. There doesn’t seem to be any easy approach to balancing an RPG (if there is then please let me know about it!) but after several revisions we were pretty happy with how it was playing. Choosing to use version control was a must though and we were able to make several more revisions after releasing the game in response to player’s comments.

Metrics/Stats or “Keeping them playing”

Our goal on Golden Robot was to make a a big game with a big play time. I hadn’t seen any games which have an average of over 30 mins gameplay. Even Steambirds manages only 24 mins of playtime for the average player. I really was quite worried when we came to release to see if there was even a market for Flash games which take over an hour to complete.

The stats since release really are quite stunning though. The average player spends over 40 minutes playing the game. We also tracked loads of other metrics in the game to help with testing. Here’s a few of the more crazy ones.

• Total Monsters Killed : 79 Million
• Games of Shove : 7 million
• Cheated Death: 2.7 million
• Games of Dice: 6 million
• Spades Sold in shop: 700,000
• How many players with over 5000 kills: 1
• How many girlfriends that player has: 0

Which is slightly mad, the 3 mini games combined have been played 13m times, which since they were all an after-thought is amazing as that’s more than most really good games get played.

Conclusion

The whole process from start to finish on Golden Robot really was hap-hazard but then I’ve always thought making games is a creative process, you can’t simply write a doc and copy it word for word into a game. Well you can but that’s not really much fun to do. We did have a wiki which we used to write designs and ideas into but the process from start to finish really was an organic one, where we tried out new ideas, saw if they worked and then incorporated. It was also a bit odd leaving Golden Robot to work on Toxers. They are similar games but from the feedback from Toxers we definitely pushed Golden Robot more towards being a proper RPG.

Golden Robot and our previous game, Toxers, were kind of based on each other. The original idea for Toxers goes back to about the year 2000. I started thinking of a Flash version just before the treasure hunting idea came along. The search mechanics in Toxers came from the treasure hunting and some of the game play in Golden Robot is an expansion of Toxers because people commented that it should have more RPG elements, although it was never meant to be an RPG!

© robotJAMRobDonkin for MochiLand, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments

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Come Check Out A New Exhibit By SuperDeux

With work spanning toys to television, multi-media French artist Sebastien Roux aka SuperDeux’s kaleidoscopic expression makes its way to Kokoro Studio! SuperDeux creates works with unifying elements based on the simplicity of color and shape. Acting as catalyst, SuperDeux’s subversive commercial aesthetic carries borderline political messages while bridging urban aesthetic and commercial mediums. SuperDeux has set out to infilt…rate an over saturated market with the force of childhood fascination.

Sebastien Roux began experimenting with Flash animation and graphic design in the late 90’s. His work culminated in the form of superdeux.com, though Roux’s initiative was not originally intended for commercial use. Superdeux’s early work caught the eye of Pictoplasma, an online design catalogue considered to be the preeminent point of supply for advertising executives. Having recently relocated to San Francisco, California, Roux takes his previous fascinations with Flash media to new levels as Creative Director of mochimedia.com.

Several Superdeux designs are available in the form of toys, prints and t-shirts at kidrobot and other stores worldwide

To learn more about the artist please visit his website: http://www.superdeux.com/ or email him at : info@superdeux.com

“More” opens Thursday, September 2, 2010 from 7-10 pm at Kokoro Studio. The opening coincides with the monthly First Thursday Art event in San Francisco. The exhibition is also available for viewing during regular gallery hours, Tuesday – Saturday 1pm-7pm.

For more information about Kokoro Studio please contact info@kokorostudio.us/415.400.4110

kokoro studio
682 Geary St
San Francisco, CA 94102

kokorostudio.us

kokorostudio.tumblr.com

© Colin Cupp for MochiLand, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments

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Abe with MochiCoin

It’s always really inspiring for us to see all the talent and creativity in the developer community. Keep the great games coming! And if you want to see more of ABE, head over to play Plant Pong here.

© ada for MochiLand, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

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Our resident creative genius Sebastien “Superdeux” Roux has whipped up some amazing Mochi wallpapers for your desktop and iPhone. Sebastien was the brilliant mind who was behind the creation of the Mochi Media brand and characters back in 2005, and you can find his design influence all over Mochi’s products and pages. You can find all of the wallpapers in various sizes on Flickr including iPhone here, but I’ve also linked the gallery below in 1280×800 size to get you started.

Feast your eyes and enjoy!

© ada for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

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What were we trying to achieve?

The game portal we wanted to build was slightly different from the usual. Rather than grabbing an RSS feed from somewhere like Kongregate and re-publishing everything they publish, we wanted to hand-pick our favourite games and just publish them. Quality over quantity; unless you’re talking about cupcakes.

Naturally we still wanted all the normal things that game portals do (categories, RSS feeds of games, ratings, comments etc). Both of us being programmers, we considered writing our own game portal software for, oh I don’t know, maybe 6 seconds? We ultimately decided against this because it would take too long and maintaining the code would be a bit of a nightmare (seriously, you have never seen my code).

We took a look at the portal software that was already out there. The two main players were Arcadem Pro and PHPAS. They both had some neat features alright, but overall the solutions seemed too messy. They did way more than we could ever want or need, and it really just seemed like way too much effort to apply our own design to either theme. In our search for simplicity and flexibility, it turned out we had been looking at the solution every time we visited our blog.

WordPress: The Unlikely Hero

WordPress is a blogging platform that I’m sure many of you are already familiar with. It powers millions of blogs all over the Internet, but we were able to take many of the features it offers and use them to build our portal.

So, what makes it great for a game portal?!

Our basic need was simply to publish games that we had hand-picked from various sources, and include a few details about the game and our own mini-review. We thought about it for a little while and realised that the process of publishing games for the portal was very similar to how we published out blog posts. The features that WordPress offered also made many aspects of managing the portal a lot simpler.

• 1. RSS Feeds: WordPress automatically creates RSS feeds of content published through it, so we had a ready-made feed where people could subscribe to see game releases right in their feed reader.
• 2. Pretty URLs: They’re nice to look at and it’s easy for users to remember them. Google is pretty fond of them too. All these factors make games on the portal a whole lot easier to find.
• 3. Scheduled Posts: This one’s a beauty. You could spend one night queueing up your planned releases for the next couple of months and then fly out to the Bahamas while WordPress sits at home in the rain, busily publishing out your games just like you told it to.
• 4. Comments: WordPress makes it very easy for your users have their say about each game that you post.
• 5. Categories & Tags: It’s super simple to add games to specific categories or tag them with specific keywords straight out of the box.

A little help from our friends

Of course, WordPress didn’t bow to our every command straight out of the box. We wanted our users to be able to rate the games that we published, and, being the Twitter nerds that we are, we wanted to announce the launch of each game via Twitter on our dedicated Gambrinous Games feed. Luckily, all of these issues were easily rectified by the vast WordPress developer community. We added the following plugins to help us along the way:

• Twitter Tools: A nice a simple plug-in that will automagically add new posts to Twitter.
• WP-PostRatings: Add ratings to each post in WordPress. It also has a nice feature to allow you to customise what information gets displayed around the star ratings.
• Akismet: This comes with WordPress and is a must for any blog that accepts comments. It will filter out all those nasty Viagra ads.

Already at this point, we had the bones of our game portal. There was one more feature in WordPress that came in handy, and that was Custom Fields. There was certain information that wasn’t easily conveyed through WordPress’ default functionality or through plug-ins. Certain things like setting the width and height of the flash game or setting thumbnails and screen-shots of each game we publish.

To get around this, we added a few custom fields to our blog posts for each piece of information that we needed, then added it to our WordPress theme where required. It really was remarkably painless.

The Science Bit

We brought everything together in a WordPress theme. We took the default Kubrick theme and modified it to fit our needs. The excellent WordPress Codex served as our guide throughout this process, required reading if you’re going to be making your own templates. The first thing you need to understand is the anatomy of a WordPress theme. All themes are stored in individual folders named after the theme. If you created a theme called “My Super Game Portal”, it would be found here:

/wp-content/themes/my-super-game-portal/

Another handy feature of WordPress themes is the functions.php file. Simply create a file called functions.php in your theme folder and add any custom functions to it. Everything you put in there will be available to your theme automagically. We have custom functions for pulling our top rated games and our newest games out of the database.

The final technical detail you really need to know before being able to customise your own WordPress theme is how to use those custom fields I mentioned earlier. One way we use the custom fields is to set the width and height of each game that we publish.

To use these fields in our template, we simply use the following code on the game page (single.php):

<?php
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_width', true);
    echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_height', true);
?>

That should be enough to get you started. For more information, you should check out the Theme Development article within the WordPress Codex.

Finally and in Conclusion

So, that’s how we did it. It was quick and simple, and all made possible by our new friend WordPress. What are you doing still reading? Go and use WordPress to build that game portal you’ve been talking about for the last 2 months!

© Peter McKenna for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 54 comments

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One of those is doing a professional job on the look of your game, the easiest thing to do is make nice game characters. Too many people make a simple game and just use either primitives (squares, circles, etc.) or stick men. That’s fine if your game is amazingly good like Fancy Pants but it doesn’t really make your game stand out from the crowd. The game will get overlooked by a lot of sponsors and will make a more memorable first impression if they see a nice character instead of just another stick man or ball.

A lot of people just say “but I can’t draw” but of course you can! Drawing is just practice and keeping things simple to start with. I like to use a sketch book to draw all my characters before committing to Flash. Two reasons for this: first, it’s quicker and second, if you have the sketchbook with you over time you can build up a bank of characters to use in future games. You never know when a good idea will pop up.

Here’s one way of making a game character.

First, start off with a circle for the head, and 5 lozenge shapes for the body, legs and arms. Most game characters can start off with this as the skeleton; if you’d like, you could also add more arms, have no legs or perhaps 3 legs. The beauty of game characters is they don’t have to look like anything real. For this guy I decided he should have a squid like head, so I drew on some tentacles and some facial features. Again you can do what you like, 3 eyes, 2 mouths, an extra ear. I was once on a strange project where the client asked for two beards! The third stage is just cleaning up the lines a bit. Don’t worry about details at this stage, this is just the framework to get the character into Flash. Once the sketch is complete, the image is then scanned and imported into Flash.

In the image above, I imported the sketch of squid boy and turned it into a movieclip. That way, I can put it on a layer and make its alpha 50%. This just makes it a bit easier to trace over. Initially all you want to do is draw lines between each curve point. Try and use the fewest amount of points you can get away with. The next step is to grab each of the middle of those lines to create the outline of your character. You now have a perfect outline to work with.

The next thing is coloring. I don’t know why but a lot of people think blue is #0000FF, you should avoid colors which don’t contain a good mix as they just don’t look nice. Also try and pick colors which complement each other, i.e. purples and yellow, blues and oranges, reds and greens. Avoid colors which are too bright unless you want your art to look like a kids drawing. Squid boy I decided to be mainly shades of blue with details in orange. I then filled all the outlines with flat colors.

He looks okay at this stage but still a little flat. You can sort that by using 2 tone shading, you have to decide which direction the light is coming from in the case from the left. So you have to add some more lines to the left and right of his head, body and arms. These are then filled with a darker colour on the right (shadow) and a lighter colour on the left. The lines can then be removed and he’s starting to look pretty cool.

The final thing is to add a few details, highlights in the eyes, I also don’t like black outlines on characters very much. A lot of animators use a colour which is a darker shade of the character to do the outlines, and in this case I’ve used a Navy blue. The only thing left is to separate his limbs/head so you can animate him in game.

The whole thing probably took about 20 minutes from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself a decent looking game character, which will make your game easier to sell and far more likely to do well.

© Rob James for MochiLand, 2009. | Permalink | 14 comments

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With the evolution of web-based games running at a break-neck pace, a developer’s tools become their lifeline to keeping their content competitive. More and more games are getting sponsorships for decent amounts of money and I asked myself, I wonder where that money goes? Well, while it’s really none of my business, I would like to think that some of it gets “reinvested” into our craft. Just like any professional, there are things we all need to get our game from point “A” to “done”. Much like a gardener invests in a new lawn mower, we should be investing some of our money into tools to make our games with higher quality as well as streamline our process.

We all, of course, know we need some sort of Flash compiling software to write the “code” which tends to take up most of our time no doubt. However, graphics, sound effects and music are also very important and I have read in the forums on several occasions about people complaining about the same techno looping music track, or some horribly distorted, low quality explosion sound effect.

It is important to note, that all of this information is completely unsolicited. I’m not getting paid from any of these companies. They are simply programs and resources I have found to make my development life easier. Hopefully they will make yours easier, too.

Sound Effects

So let’s imagine a for a second a world without a million games that all use the same door closing sound, or generic explosion sound…. Are you there? Do you hear it? It sounds incredible! So how do we get there?

Sound Libraries

Well, first off, we have to get our hands on some sound libraries, hopefully without breaking our bank account in the mean time. You can really spend a ton of dough on sounds. I myself have a purchased a $900 sound library that I use all the time. However, you can find sounds for as cheap as a few dollars a sound effect if you know what you are looking for. That might seem a bit steep for a small sound effect, but if you hear it a hundred times the price is well worth it.

I highly recommend buying sounds in libraries because they are cheaper and you can mix a bunch of sounds together to make new sounds. In general, sound effects are my least favorite part of game development. That being said, I always feel good when I take the time to make them right. It can really push a game to the next level.

Here are a few decent sites I found that offer per sound or sound libraries for purchase:

• Sonomic
• Producer Pack

Sound Mixing

For sound mixing, I personally use Adobe Audition which runs a staggering $350. If that is in your budget, I would highly recommend it! However, if you are looking for something quick and dirty for sound mixing, I personally love Easy Audio Editor by DanDans Digital Media. For $34.95, you couldn’t ask for any more power from a sound editing tool.

• Adobe Audition ($350)
• Easy Audition Editor ($34.95)

Music

For music I know a lot of people seem to put this in as an afterthought which is greatly disturbing. Music can transform a mediocre game to a great game all on its own (in my opinion). Even if you are not a musician there are some fantastic tools out that can be learned quickly and easily that will allow you to be the next Trent Reznor. Well not quite, but pretty close! Creating music with loops is extremely easy, usually just click and drag and can actually be quite fun.

Music Editing and Recording

I use Sony Acid 6.0 which costs whopping $299.95 for all of my techno stuff you can also check out Fruity Loops by Image Line. The very basic package offers enough to get started and runs $49. They have several versions of their software to choose from so it’s worth taking a deeper look into it to find the one that fits your needs. If you are lucky enough to play an instrument or two and want to do some multi-track recording Sonar or Cubase are pretty amazing tools as well.

Editing:

• Sony Acid 6.0 ($299.95)
• Fruity Loops ($49)

Multi-Track Recording:

• Sonar
• Cubase

Loop Libraries

With looped music, you can buy loop libraries for about $50-100 a pop. I have a collection of probably 8 discs that I use for everything, with a few of my own loops tossed in here and there so I still feel like a musician. You can buy loops in any style of music you can think of. Rock, orchestral, R & B, Hip-Hop, they are all out there. I usually go through Sony for my libraries, but there are quite a few loop creators out there.

• Sony Loop Libraries

Effects

If I see one more explosion that plays in 6 frames and has black jagged pixels around it, I swear I’m going to jump out of my second story window! Wondertouch has my back with their absolutely insanely amazing particle illusions SE package. I am not kidding when I tell you this is the coolest tool I have ever used. For $99 you get an amazingly simple program that lets you save out sequences of PNG’s, JPEG’s or whatever kind of file you want, with a few clicks of your mouse! Explosions, fire, swirly particles, you name it, it does it. Most programs promise such things and don’t deliver, this one delivers and then some. So what is the catch? There isn’t one, go get it now.

• Wondertouch particle illusions SE package ($99)

Other Tools

So now is about the time I would go into detail about hardcore art creation tools, however, since art is such a stylistic subject that depends on what look you are trying to achieve, I will leave that one alone. Obviously Flash does vector art, and beyond that, there are tons of 3D packages out there and even some great 2D programs as well. I will leave that open for you to discover.

I personally have put a lot of emphasis in my own limited success in the industry into reinvesting my hard earned money to make my final product better and optimize the process as much as I can. While it doesn’t happen overnight, you can build up your toolbox over the course of a few sponsored games. A lot of these tools have fairly low learning curves and you may find they can break up the monotony of coding and or creating art in Flash.

To be successful at anything it’s about how hard you want to work, however if you have the right tools, sometimes you can work half as hard and get something twice as good.

If anyone has any other tools they can’t live without, please feel free to post them!

© Zach Young for MochiLand, 2008. | Permalink | 7 comments

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I despair sometimes, there are some great games out there with truly dreadful menu design. OK it’s not going to make it a better experience, and the game play is the most important thing but it really doesn’t hurt to put a bit of effort into making the menu as good as the actual game.

Using Consistency

So what is a good menu system ? One that’s easy to use, where everything is consistent. Take “City Smasher” for example, a great game by syrplord and fluidAnim. The game itself is a brilliant 10 minute basher, the menu on the other looks alright but is completely inconsistent and confusing.

So whats wrong? Firstly it took me ages to work out how to play the game. The first thing you see is the title “city smasher” but otherwise the most noticeable link is “play more” – no, TRY AGAIN! I finally worked out that I had to click on one of those mode buttons, but by this stage I was really bored. I suspect that despite the brilliance of the game potential players will have given up before this discovery.

Call me old fashioned but I expect it to be clear where the buttons are, some items are click-able, some are just text. If you want a button in a game, maybe make it a button, if you use text for buttons it’s hard to work out what’s what. In City Smasher the same fonts have been used as both buttons and text, which is highly annoying, be consistent. On the web people are used to clicking on buttons, if it’s a text link its usually underlined or a different colour, or at least try and make it clear.

Button Design

So what makes a good button design. Well firstly here’s some tips:

Fonts

The one on the left is a pretty awful button but what makes it worse is for some reason the text is set to dynamic so it will turn off anti aliasing on that font. Which makes it look all horrid and jaggy. Even worse is that the dreaded “Times New Roman” has been used, it looks hideous, don’t do it.

If you aren’t going to use Times New roman choose a font which is readable, you may have some ultra cool font which looks great when large but pick something which is easy to read when its small. Bolder fonts are better for small items like buttons as they are great for readability.

Rounded Corners

I’m a fan of rounded corners, they look great, but if you do them with the flash rounded box tool and want an outline make sure you “turn lines to fills” flash has a few problems drawing rounded curves to straight and you’ll invariably end up with kinks and they look horrid.

Colour Pallete

With colours there’s a fairly simple rule with UI design, try to use as few as possible, if you can get away with one main colour it looks better, its much more stylish to be minimal in your use of colour, it will stop your art turning into a psychedelic nightmare.

Filters

Flash 8 has some great new filters for things like drop shadows/glows etc. They look great but don’t over do them. The start on the left is the usual “oh the default will do” looks a bit harsh. The one on the right is a nice subtle variation.

Of course if you don’t want to use buttons (and a lot of games don’t) try and pick a clear font, Heli boarding does this a great job of using just text, mainly because there’s no clutter. Also rather than scattering text all around the screen the menus are in a column with the most important thing at the top. Although rather oddly the button you are over fades out rather than being highlighted, another thing which quite a lot of games do.

Well that’s about all for now, remember the menus and buttons don’t make a game but they are the first thing people see and first impressions do count.

© Rob James for MochiLand, 2007. | Permalink | 8 comments

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