Some artwork I digitally painted for my Donut game

So I’ve been hard at work on this Sokay stuff but nothing much is ready to show yet. For the past month I’ve been cracking away at a new version of Sokay.net . It’s a bit of a subtle update, but I’m giving each game a profile page. I’m aiming to launch it with the release of Christopher J. Rock’s game, Rush Hour. He finished it a while ago and tried to find a sponsor but ended up starting work on a new game. He’s decided to release Rush Hour as a Sokay game, I’m proud to present it. You can read about it in Chris’ post about it.

I’ve been heavy in the art and interface of the Donut game, on and off for the past few months. I’ve finished most of the menu interface. I’m glad that’s together. Next I’m going to finish up the introduction game. The Donut game is essentially 3 mini-games tied together through a scenario. So far I have 2 of the 3 engines in prototype forms, practically alpha. A lot of the final artwork is in, but the gameplay’s missing a lot of features. I develop games heavily with the artwork in mind, so I tend to do more of the artwork upfront, which is the reverse of what many developers would recommend. I think they’re probably just more programmer oriented, rather than visually.

Here’s a sketch I drew for the game. Most of the art starts off like this.

So we continue, one step at a time. I look forward to showing ya’ll another game. It’s what I live for.

Peace.

Just finished my first game since going solo and it went pretty well. It’s a pretty simple top-down shooter. I wanted to test myself with a 1 week schedule, but ended up taking 2 weeks.

I’ve put it on Flash Game License. This is the first time I try out their service, but I’ve only heard good things. I’ll put a link up after the game’s live.

The soundtrack was done by my brother, Jonathan Rock. After the game’s out, I’ll put the music here for download.

Continue Reading…

Today marks one week since my last day with a full time job. I felt a pressure all of a sudden that I had to quit and go game dev. No more wasting time.

I’d say one week as an indie game developer, but that title doesn’t feel quite right before completing at least one game independently. Shouldn’t be much longer.

Before I left my previous employer, I was spending nights working on Bad Bones, losing sleep, time with my girlfriend, and feeling increasingly frustrated by how difficult it was to fit my passions into my life.

Bad Bones is a concept I like a lot. One that bears many of my feelings and thoughts on games, but it also represents a great deal of compromise. The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn is to effectively compromise my ideas. It’s hard because I’ve spent years teaching myself not to compromise. Too many artists are too willing to compromise and their work gets so diluted by the suggestions of others that eventually it’s tasteless. They take the scratchy, misshapen materials of their identity and sand down all the rough edges with what’s popular, what’s easy, what pays, or what some committee of peers finds palatable. All the sharp, rusty edges are gone and you get a nice, round blob. Nothing to poke anybody. God forbid you make something with meaning because somebody might be offended by it, or think its too artsy, too preachy. Every amorphous blob just tickles fancies and rolls away, disappears. Continue Reading…

A long while ago I stopped posting when I decided I wasn’t getting enough cold hard coding done. After a lot of cold hard coding, I’m back to talk about Bad Bones. Bad Bones is a flash based real-time strategy game that is my first attempt at the RTS genre the way I see it. It still needs work, but it’s doing well.

Bryson is still working on unit art, but here are a couple sketches I sent over to give him an idea of what I was going for with the game.

They’re called Boman and they like to eat and have babies. Stay tuned for more art and the Boman backstory.

I’ll be demoing my early version of Bad Bones at the Independent Game Conference West in sunny Los Angeles (Marina Del Rey) this Thursday and Friday (November 5th and 6th, 2009). If you’re around, gimme a holler and wish me luck on finding a bag of cash to fund my game.

Now I wish to direct your attention to some impressive figures! I expect that I can deliver good performance on map sizes at least as big as 1600×1200, and perhaps as large as 3200×2400. Dimensions like that are generally thought to be impossible in flash, but I tell you it can be done. My proof is that I have seen it! Though it was at about 15fps…Still, it can happen.

I can get in 1000 units if I’m okay with 15fps on a 1600×1200 map currently. After some house-cleaning I expect to run a solid 30 fps with 500 units on a 1600×1200 map and of course I’ll aim for higher.

Bad Bones represents years of pondering over the RTS genre. I might say that the first time I became a hardcore fan of a game was when I got into Warcraft. It was right around the time that Warcraft 2 was coming out that I found out about the series from a kid named Raphael in my 6th grade class. His description gave me a blind faith in its excellence, and at this crucial time in my gaming experience, I was not disappointed. My family had just recently purchased our first computer and Warcraft and Warcraft 2 were an immensely gratifying experiment in PC gaming for my brother and I.

However the suspension of disbelief perpetuated by the fantastic booklet art and its pages of story, the in-game text, cut-scenes, and characters could not last forever. Warcraft 2 was my first online multiplayer experience and I became immediately aware that the name of the game was micromanagement and rushing. The best players weren’t strategists or tacticians, they were factory foreman that knew how to pump out a basic unit fast and deliver it to the enemy encampment. Continue Reading…

Play it at www.sammysamurai.com

In late November of 2008 I found a forum post on Flashkit that linked to a contest from Mochiads. I wasn’t too excited about the prizes, the runner-up prizes were almost a joke, but I saw this as an opportunity to rush and actually finish something. Winning would be a plus. I hadn’t released a Sokay game in 2008 so I felt it was my last chance.

So I wanted to plan something that I would be able to finish within a month. That meant it had to be a lot simpler than my usual grandiose visions. I passed up on the opportunity to work with the Donut game I’ve been working on because there was a lot of animation that needed to done that I didn’t want to think about.

I had recently been inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Tales from Earthsea. I didn’t think the movie was very good but it has some awesome background design and a few shots had some excellent parallax scrolling going on. The parallax shots were very quick but captured my attention. Thanks to digital compositing they were able to blend many layers without making it obvious where one layer ended and another began. Continue Reading…

So Chris surprised the hell out of me yesterday when he mentioned that there was an independent games festival going on right down the street from me in Culver City — Indiecade ’09. His friend told him about it and he told me. I was feeling kind of down that I wasn’t out raving in the streets of San Francisco this weekend, but I suppose things happen for a reason. I missed Saturday but I checked it out today.

I Wish I Were the Moon by Daniel Benmergui

I didn’t get the opportunity to see everything but the favorite thing that I played was Moon Stories by Daniel Benmergui of Argentina. This is a series a 3 games, which are more like interactive stories. I could spend a paragraph trying to explain it or you can just play the damn thing. I liked that I could just jump in an play around and that the game didn’t expect anything from me. I had fun messing around just to see what would happen. This is really how game stories need to be told more often. Continue Reading…

Bubble Struggle – a prime example of Flash Game Ballin’

I found an inspiring forum post by kreso, the Croatian creator of the Bubble Struggle Flash games. He made a thread asking if anybody wanted to buy his sites that generated $10k a month. Many posters weren’t taking him seriously but he stuck to his claims , adding that about half was generated Mochiads and the other by CPX advertisements.

In the end, he found a deal and left an informative post about the story of his game. How , when he was a kid, he sometimes stole his parents money to play the original at an arcade. How he wanted to make a Flash game more compelling than the lame Flash games running rampant. How he sold the game to Miniclip for only $750 way back when, after initially offering $250. Good stuff.

Check it out here:

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=189080#post189080

An excerpt…

First hours spent on creating Bubble Struggle 1 were actually practicing programming. I created a box that was moving left and right on keypress. Amazing! Then I added bubbles. Wow! Then the harpoon (shot) etc… After I realized that I have all the basic elements of a game I noticed something about internet and got an idea!

What I noticed was this: all of flash games on internet are either a) short in duration (you can finish the whole game within 5-10 minutes) or b) so boring that you don’t want to play it more than 5-10 minutes.

My idea was – what if I would create a game that is a) long in duration b)had a new, different chalenge on every level.

I knew that this ment more programming for me, but as I was just learning and enjoying progamming this was actually a plus. A sidenote: code in my game is disastrous. I just kept adding code for each new level because it was so different than all the others. But I succedded!

If you somehow haven’t played this game before, it’s basically a clone of Buster Bros. It’s a great game and I’ve been wanting to 1-up him by making a game like it myself.

This is one of those “one in a million” success stories that you read about in articles like Gamasutra’s Where’s the Cash for Flash? but it’s definitely encouraging everytime I hear someone having success doing what they genuinely enjoy. Kind of an unfortunate contrast to news that Xbox Live Community Games has yet to yield much success for its developers.

Oh well, let’s make some more games!

New Sokay.net, check it out!

I just finished the new Sokay.net layout for 2009. It’s all Flash now. I’m using swfAddress for deeplinking into the Flash content. Very nifty. I’m also using my favorite Flash utility tweener for the transitions. I’ve been working on this on and off for the past month. I wanted it to coincide with a widespread release for our latest game, Sammy Samurai.

I’ve also made the previous versions of Sokay.net available.

Sokay.net circa 2004

Sokay.net circa 2007

I think it’s funny how close the 2004 one is to the current one.

Now that that is done with, time to work on more games!

Friendly Integration: click here to play

I’m releasing the source code for a Papervision3D game I was putting together. This project was meant to be an interactive visual for a party my friend threw last weekend, Friendly Integration. This game was meant to be projected onto a wall and controlled with a DDR pad for each player. There were also plans to have additional panels that could be stepped on that changed the “theme” of the game.

Continue Reading…

Just check it out, it’s the Coolest Flash toy today :-p.