Doodle Bomber

Doodle Bomber is a little game I made with graphics by my 10 yr old son, Andrew. It’s based on the old game Blitz that I used to play on the Apple II, where your plane flies across the landscape dropping bombs and levelling buildings.

[BlackBerry 10 Phone/PlayBook]   [Android download]   [iOS download]

I’m very pleased with the visual style (kudos to Andrew!) and especially like the little stickmen. As usual I have focused on sound effects and once again the endless bounty that is freesound.org turned up some rather brilliant yells and screams which the little guys emit as you blow them 40 feet in the air ;-)
I did a little pitch shifting on them, which turns it from “slightly disconcerting bloodcurdling yell” to “comedy effect yell”.

The stickmen run towards the nearest building, and build it from the ground up to 4 floors. At this point a gun appears on the top and starts shooting at you. Tanks also appear if you’re taking too long on a level.

Here’s a quick look at the Doodle Bomber game’s use of 2D sprites in a 3D world; it’s a nice way to get parallax effects. In actual gameplay, the camera scrolls along beside the airplane, and as the various pieces of scenery disappear off the left of the screen they are transported forwards to the right, to give the impression on an endless (looping) game world:

Crockery Ninja

OK, it’s not very original. But it’s a bit of fun.

I wanted to do a small collaborative project with an artist friend of mine (Liam Krewer) and I also felt that the sound effects in Let’s Break Stuff! were just too good to not be used one more time.

[Android download here]   [iOS download here]

So yeah, it’s a ninja swiping game, along the lines of a few thousand other games you might have seen before. There’s a nice combo/power-up system to give it a bit of a twist. And of course the sound effects destroy the opposition with their awesomeness! The theme tune by Art Munson of Shockwave Sound is really nice also :-)

Musclecar Online Update

My ‘versus ghost’ social racing game, Musclecar Online, is now live in a few places: the Mac appstore, Android Google Play, and BlackBerry PlayBook App World.

You can also get it for Windows/Mac/Linux on the game’s website.
Hell, we even have a Facebook page ;-)

For the moment the big test is maybe the Android appstore, where downloads have been solid if not astounding. After a few days it’s now just breaking into the top 100 ‘new free racing games’ list – so maybe this will bring some increased traction. While the ‘new’ list on Google Play is a great concept, it’s always inundated with massively varied quality items, ranging from poorly designed wallpaper image apps (masquerading as games just long enough to spam you with adverts), to 200 clones of whatever lightweight crap is popular this month, right thru to high budget 3D racers. So getting some visibility even there isn’t always easy. The top ranking apps in the ‘new free’ lists are getting tens of thousands of downloads in a week or two, while getting to the top of the ‘paid’ list requires maybe 10 sales. Tells you something huh…

The Musclecar Online player-base is growing steadily; we’re currently getting a couple of hundred new downloads a day and by day-end we’re seeing upwards of 100 users posting laps in the more popular cars. The next couple of weeks will be interesting, and maybe we’ll see whether there’s any viral potential in the social features I worked so hard on!

The game is launching on Desura soon, and if you get a chance to upvote it on Steam Greenlight that would be most cool ;-)

Desura Digital Distribution  

Here’s a couple of screenshots from the new 3D camera viewpoint, added in version 1.3:

and here’s the most recent teaser movie made for the Android store:

Musclecar Online – making good progress

I have been making good progress with my “social versus-ghost racer” Musclecar Online. A bunch of friends and Darkwind players have been testing it and having a bit of fun in the process.

The game is functionally almost complete at this stage, and we have been listed on indedb.com as well as being approved for distribution by Desura.com. I have pretty much decided it will be free-to-play on every possible platform, with monetization* via in-game purchases and (where appropriate) adverts.

*monetization: somehow that word only looks right with an American spelling. Lol.