Rick Triqui: my first PlayCrafter game

You should remember my post Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter.

Well, I made my first game with this tool, and I want to share with you my opinions about the editor.

First of all, play Rick Triqui and rate with 5/5 :)

Then, read my comments

The idea

After playing some PlayCrafter games I found most developers modders used it like a sandbox, putting in every asset the editor offers.

So most games suffer the problem they are filled with everything kind of asset, and the final result is bad, it’s like adding all effects to a Photoshop layer. The result won’t look good.

So I designed Rick Triqui as a Rick Dangerous tribute, at that time level design was so interesting that some spikes and a couple of ladders could challenge an expert player for hours.

So this is my first advice: dont’ fill a level with every asset, in my game I only used solid blocks, destroyable block, spiked balls and plasma cannons. The less items you use, the more you must focus on level design.

Making the game

Making the game itself was like playing a game. I moved any kind of object, adjusting its position, cutting, pasting, and so on. The editor is very powerful, you’ll enjoy making your game

Downloading the game

Let me warn you: if you want to make some bucks out of your game, you must download it and upload on revenue sharing sites such as Kongregate or on a web page with ads in it. In order to do it, you need a premium account.

Using PlayCrafter without a premium account means just using it like a sandbox. Now, the first bad new… due to the large amount of silly games, in order to download a game even if you have a premium account, you’ll need at least 25 plays and 3 likes.

There isn’t a large amount of people in the portal (I counted 28 to 32 people in the chat) so it took me a couple of hours to get such visits, and I had to beg for plays in the chat (shame on me).

Then, once you can freely download your game, you’ll notice you can’t get the game in real time… you’ll have to wait for PlayCrafter to send it to your email

I got my game in a couple of hours but I think this may change according to your timezone and the time you upload the game.

Uploading the game

Finally I was ready to upload the game, and I have to say PlayCrafter guys did a great job embedding Kongregate API’s and clear instructions about their configuration in the portal.

On request, they can add a MochiAds to your game and you’ll get 10% of the revenue, and if you want to use your game for commercial purposes (to advertise a commercial product, etc.) then it’s $100 / game.

Final considerations

Try to create a decent game because like it or not all PlayCrafter’s games look very similar, and I saw some comments on PlayCrafter games saying “stolen” or “stop publishing crappy PC games” and so on.

Last but not least, even if I have a premium account there are two features I’d be willing to pay for:

* Adding external links to game assets – with about a 10% clickthrough it would be interesting

* Using my own MochiAds. With 10% of the revenue (that means 5% of Mochi’s income), it’s quite senseless wasting time uploading the game anywhere

That’s it… now give me some feedback about Rick Triqui.

** edit **

I’ve just received an update from Mathilde Pignol from PlayCrafter

If you would like to use your own MochiAd, that’s no problem. Please PayPal the $100 to cm[at]playcrafter.com and send me the MochiAd ID that you want to use. I will compile it in to your game and send you a new link.

Prototype of a Flash game like Meeblings

You should all known Meeblings and the sequel, Meeblings 2.

You have to help the Meeblings (cute creatures I’d love to burn alive) reaching the exit using some special abilities.

One of such abilities attracts Meeblings when you click and hold the mouse on a special Meebling.

In the prototype you are about to see, derived from the basic HelloWorld Box2D example, there are 10 randomly placed balls with different masses.

When you click and hold anywhere on the stage, every ball in a 4 meters radius (read this post and this post too if you don’t know how to convert meters to pixels) will be attracted towards the mouse pointer.

The more the distance, the stronger the attraction. Read more

Games for the game developers!

I was impressed by “Games for the game developers!” comment on Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter.

The idea of giving people a tool to make a so-called “videogame” without any programming knowledge isn’t new.

The first complete tool I used was the Shoot’Em-Up Construction Kit (SEUCK) on my Commodore 128

Having no idea about how to make a game, the first “games” I made with that kit was just clones of a space game included in the package, just changing bullets speed, number of lives, and other minor things.

But I loved the idea of making games.

With the SEUCK I made about 10 games I only played by myself, because you know in mid 80’s there wasn’t the so-called Web 2.0

Anyway I had a lot of fun

My first “real” game was a concentration game with time limit, combos, and so on, developed with AMOS.

I can’t even remember the name but I remember a friend of mine managed it to be included in a Aminet CD-ROM

Now the web has changed and you can create a game, upload it in a few seconds and read opinions, comments, reviews.

Moreover, you can make money out of it.

But you must not forget there are people having fun making games.

Tools like PlayCrafter are meant to make people having fun in creating their own games.

Yes, there will be a lot of bad games and most of them will be clones of the same (bad) game, but if you don’t like a game, just don’t play it.

And, more important, maybe someone will enjoy the process of making a game and will start studying a programming language to make a more original game.

And don’t forget the “Games for the game developers!” sentence can be used by Flash game developers against PlayCrafter users, but can be used in the same way by PS3 game developers against Flash game developers.

20 (TWENTY!!!) years ago people like me programming in Pascal and Basic was mocked by C++ programmers, because they said real programmers code with C++

When I learned C++ I was mocked by Assembly programmers because they said real programmers code with Assembly.

Nothing new on the horizon…

Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter

Today I am going to talk about a revolutionary way to make quality Flash games: PlayCrafter.

I must admit I am overhelmed by the enormous amount of options of this tool, but I’ll try to be as much clean as I can in my review.

Tired of making online games? Make a game online

First, PlayCrafter is an online tool. You don’t need to install any software in your computer. And this is the first great feature, because this means you don’t even need a computer to make a Flash game, you can just sit in an internet cafè and make your game in a matter of minutes.

The power of drag & drop

In PlayCrafter, you don’t need to write a single line of code. You just drag and drop elements to the stage, designing your level in a few clicks.

Any element has its own features, so a turret will automatically fire, a car will skid, a space trooper will jump and fire bouncing bombs, and so on.

The engine that handle physics is the famous Box2D so expect accurate physics simulation.

New elements are added frequently so you’ll never run out of ideas.

You can even edit your element or import your own graphics.

The Community

There is a quite big community behind PlayCrafter. You can play, rate and even edit games made by other players.

When you game receives a good feedback from the community, you can export your Flash game and publish it on game portals

The price

PlayCrafter is free to use, but you can pay a monthly fee ($4.95) to upgrade your account to “Premium” and unlock exclusive features such as raising the limit of levels to 100 and exporting the games to Flash portals.

Moreover, some assets in the game cost an a mount of Pips, the PlayCrafter’s currency. You can buy Pips with real money or you can have for free if your refer users.

The limits

At the moment, the most important limits are the fixed stage size and the lack of scrolling. In my opinion, if PlayCrafter guys do not add more and more assets this will cause a large number of games with no difference among them.

Monetization

I am going to test the monetization of this tool very soon, meanwhile play Matcheroo to see a nice game made with this tool.

Final considerations

I strongly suggest to try PlayCrafter even if you are an experienced developer… you know… at school or at work you can’t install Flash… so why don’t you make a game between a task and another?

Expect a game made with this tool very soon…

Play Mazeroll, my latest Box2D game

After SamePhysics, I made another Box2D game called Mazeroll.

You have to drag a maze to made two circles touch, collecting as much red orbs as you can, before time reaches zero.

You can find some clues about the making of this game reading The magic of compound objects with Box2D and Perfect maze generation – tile based version.

I simply put together these two concept and added some gameplay.

As you can see there are some in-game banners, and there is room for two more banners in the rotation, so starting from June 29, when the game is supposed to have been widely published, I will insert two (and only two) more ** LIFETIME ** banners for as low as $100 per banner.

Drop me an email at info[at]emanueleferonato.com if you want to be one of the lucky two people that will get these banners.

The MochiAds funnel

This is a post I always wanted to write, but I waited until I had some numbers big enough to make sense.

Before I start rambling, please notice I never put fancy MochiAds banner here and there, without any sense like I do, in example, with AdSense ads.

I simply put links to MochiAds in posts where I talk about game monetization.

So we can say people click on my link only when they read the post, not just to see what’s beyond that banner.

So, my Mochi referral stats say I sent them 4,520 visitors. 668 of them signed up and 33 reached the minimum $100 payout requirement.

What does this mean? That if you aren’t afraid of learning some Actionscript and game design (and in this blog there is a lot to learn), you can be in that 5% group that sign up and monetize Flash games.

5% is an interesting ratio, and I think it will raise as soon as all people just a few bucks away from $100 will reach the goal.

It would be interesting to know your ratio… and if you haven’t signed up yet… sign up to MochiAds!!

Eight word lists to help you creating the perfect word game

Yesterday I blogged about the World Play Flash Game Contest, and the word list provided by Dictionary.com.

Suddenly a reader said this word list is not that useful because contains words like “german nazi”, “motherfucker”, and so on.

I’ve just killed a zombie in Resident Evil 5 swearing at his mother, but both me and RE5 are rated 18+ while a flash game should be suitable for everyone.

But the biggest problem is the list does not contain only words… it contains sentences like “german nazi” that could be very difficult to guess.

Samuel Toth helped us cleaning the list and releasing it at this link, but just in case you are looking for another word list I am showing you some useful links:

1 – http://www.scrapingweb.com/databases/words-database.html
A database of over 180,000 English dictionary words available in various formats for sale at $29.95

2 – ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/dictionaries (then open Unabr.dict.gz)
A list of 213,557 english words in a text file

3 – http://www.gotnet.biz/Blog/post/English-Words-Database-from-11-Sources.aspx
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database with english words also available in csv. 320,888 words

4 – http://en-gb.pyxidium.co.uk/dictionary/OOo.php (then open en-GB-wlist.zip)
127,238 english words in a text file

5 – http://www.puzzlers.org/pub/wordlists/enable1.txt
Scrabble dictionary with 172,823 entries

6 – http://www.outpost9.com/files/WordLists.html
Various word lists for theme-based games such as family names and Dos refrence words, for absolute geeks!!

7- http://www.esclub.gr/wordoxdictionary.html
Html word list grouped by word length

8 – http://www.morewords.com/wordsbylength/
Another html word list grouped by word length and initial

Hope this will help you in the creation of the perfect dictionary. If you know more or have a link to a localized dictionary, just post it in the comments.

Win up to $7000 with “Word Play” Flash Game Contest

Dictionary.com and MochiAds are bringing you a completely new contest for summer 2009 with $15,000 in prizes.

Beside the cash, this is a very interesting contest because you must use words, and this will require a lot of game design skill to procude something different than Scrabble.

Another interesting thing is Dictionary.com is even providing a word list to help you get started! The only rules for using this list is to mark on the Title Screen of your game that it is being powered by “dictionary.com”.

You can download the list at this link, and in the zipped file you will find a .eps file with the logo and a list of 147,306 (!!) words.

I will made a couple of tutorials about the use of these words during next days, meanwhile let me talk about the prizes:

1st Place – $7,000
2nd Place – $4,000
3rd Place – $2,000
Honorable Mention (x2) – $1,000 each

Start Date: June 9th, 2009

End Date: August 14th, 2009

Contest Criteria:

* Must incorporate the MochiAds Version Control and Encryption service
* Must be distribution-enabled and use MochiAds Leaderboards
* Must run MochiAds advertisements
* Must be a word game or a game themed around words and puzzles
* Must be entered in MochiAds before midnight August 14th, 2009 PST
* Must be tagged with “dictionary.com”

Check the official page for all information.

The end of GameJacket?

I blogged about GameJacket about a year ago in the post Monetize your Flash game with GameJacket.

I never tried, but it was the biggest MochiAds competitor

Sadly, today I received this email:

« Last month, GameJacket learned that the funding round it had engaged it had failed with the proposed venture capital investor withdrawing its offer due to the uncertain current economic climate. Since this time GameJacket’s management has been actively seeking a buyer for the continuation of the business. Despite initial strong interest, all active lines of enquiry were concluded yesterday resulting in no buyer being identified.

We’re sorry to report that GameJacket ceased to trade as of yesterday and the company will make a further announcement in due course.

The employees and management of GameJacket have worked tirelessly to build and maintain the GameJacket concept and we’re disappointed in this outcome. The company would also like to take this opportunity to thank developers for their generous support and to apologise for the inconvenience this situation will cause. »

As said, I never tried it but I am a bit worried because it was a company operating in the casual games market that seems to be the new Eldorado.

I would like to hear someone having an active balance on GJ.

Understanding roguelike dungeons

The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Many early roguelikes featured ASCII graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue. (source: Wikipedia)

The interesting part of a Roguelike game is the dungeon: unlike solid perfect mazes like the one explained at Perfect maze generation – tile based version, roguelike dungeons have rooms, corridors, loops… not the kind of stuff we can obtain with a perfect maze generation script.

So I selected some interesting resources to help you understanding the process of dungeon creation, and I am obviously creating a script to create my own dungeons.

Let’s see the links:

http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/GameDesign/art07_rogue_dungeon.php
Algorithm for random dungeon generation.

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/column_at_play/
Lots of useful information about roguelike genre.

http://www.dev-spot.com/forums/index.php?topic=4.msg10
Forum thread about a roguelike dungeon creation contest with some interesting entries with source code, like this one or this one (with source code) that allows you to create a town full of enemies.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Grid_Based_Dungeon_Generator
Grid-based dungeon generator: an easy method to generate maps that contain rooms guaranteed to fit within the dungeon space.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Dungeon-Building_Algorithm
Dungeon-building algorithm.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/roguelikelib/
Portable open-source library written in C++ with a set of classes that can be used in all roguelike games. Classes are categorized to fullfill tasks of random map generation, pathfinding and counting field of view.

http://rubyquiz.com/quiz80.html
Some samples of code for a roguelike dungeon generation.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Basic_BSP_Dungeon_generation
A simple method to generate a basic dungeon using a bsp tree, a space partitioning method. In mathematics, space partitioning is the process of dividing a space (usually a Euclidean space) into two or more disjoint subsets (see also partition of a set). In other words, space partitioning divides a space into non-overlapping regions. Any point in the space can then be identified to lie in exactly one of the regions.

http://www.rpghost.com/dungeon_gen.shtml
This editor does not work but you can see how many options you can set for your dungeon generation.

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13213
A little program that builds a dungeon based on a particle aggregation algorithm.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Cellular_Automata_Method_for_Generating_Random_Cave-Like_Levels
Cellular automata method for generating random cave-like levels.

http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/11/unangband-dungeon-generation-part-one.html
Multipart tutorial about unangband dungeon generation.

http://dungeonmaker.sourceforge.net/manual/index.html
DungeonMaker manual – interesting read – and source code

That’s it… I already started coding my dungeon generation script, if you have one, let me know and I’ll publish it on the blog.

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