Another one of my best games. This is another classic styled arcade game, which is original while also being based on traditional arcade gameplay mechanics. The ship movement and firing is the same as my “Replicator” game – in fact, this is kind of a sequel to “Replicator”. The player clears the screen of the bugs then destroys the queen bugs that control the hive. In later levels, enemies swoop onto the screen in scripted attack waves, they adding a variety to the game play. This type of gameplay is compelling and addictive.

This is another return to the purity of the classic arcade experience–a new game based on retro gameplay mechanics. As with the all my games, they are designed to fit into the golden age of videogames. They never existed in the old arcade days, but they would easily have found a home there.

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With the photoreal graphics around in the console world starting to slip their way into the casual gaming realm, I find it quite necessary to produce a game based on more abstract graphics. When the camera was invented, painters such as Picasso changed their style to a more abstract mode. This was in reaction to the realness of photography. The same should happen in the game world. As games become more real looking, we should see indy developers seeking to develop abstract games that bear little resemblance to reality.

In Elecktra, the player is stuck in a fixed location. Fleets of block shapes edge their way towards the player, and the goal is to destroy them before they hit. The only way to do this is by launching “electra hooks” at the enemies. These can be launched in only four directions, thus imposing limitations on what the player can do.

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More than just another banner game, Def-Logic presents “Skyhigh”. This game has been designed exclusively for well known casual game review site www.jayisgames.com. In Skyhigh, the player is taken through an adrenaline rush ride through the clouds. Rapid level advancement make this a thrillride that every visitor to jayisgames will enjoy. Use Arrowkeys to pilot your ship and Z key to fire. Destroy the ice creatures before they freeze the Casual Gameplay logo. Rescue the jayisgames review team. Navigate a suborbital maze. Survive and get to the end.

I was asked to design a banner game for the Jayisgames review site. Most banner games are simple “shoot at the target” type games, but I wanted to do something more extensive. The result is Skyhigh. Its a mini-game, but it contains all the elements of a complete arcade game. The only difference is the rapid pace at which the player progresses through the levels.

One of the challenges in designing this game was the limited playfield size. Normally I work within 640×500 (sometimes 800×600), but for this game I was required to work with a 750×150 size game. I made use of the length of the game play area by making this a side scrolling game. The limited height came in useful for some levels where enemies attack from above. It created a good challenge for the player, who would have to hover as far down to the bottom of the screen as possible to avoid getting hit.

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I came up with the idea for this game while playing classic Gyruss. I wanted to do another fast action shooter (since not many are being released at the moment) and I wanted to ensure that it stayed true to the arcade genre. Playing Gyruss, Galaga, and my own Replicator gave me the idea for Swarm. Its based on my theory that addictive gameplay comes about through the action of “cleaning up” the screen. In this game the player gets two ways to “clean up” the screen. First of all, the player needs to destroy the swarm, which look very cluttered on the screen. There is satisfaction in cleaning them up. The player also gets to return the central matrix back to its original color (the swarm change it).

When I originally planned this game, the player’s ship was going to move around the outside of the screen, just like Gyruss. It looked quite good, but I had trouble getting the game difficulty pitched right. It was either too hard or too easy. There seemed no middle ground. I solved the problem by giving the player more movement freedom. The player can move anywhere on the screen. The only thing is that the player is always targetting the center of the screen, so the shots always head towards the matrix. I think its a good effect and provides a level of originality in the game.

This is a fast paced game, and the enemies move in fast scripted waves (very fast in later levels). To add emphasis to the speed I found a couple of nice fastpace tunes on the internet. I don’t know who sequenced them unfortunately. They fit the game very well.

I put together an effective flashing transition between the levels. During test playing I found that sometimes the flashing would match the timing of the snare buildups in the backing music. The effect was fantastic and having seen it I became determined to somehow use it. The problem was that it was impossible to guarantee that the flashing would start exactly when a drum roll was occuring. My first solution was to insert a sound effect of a snare build. It sounded and looked quite good, but I decided that I needed a more abstract sound effect for the transition. Luckily I found one in a classic arcade sound effect folder. It is an effect that is percussive, and by getting the script to switch it off and on when the flash starts, stops, and starts again, the effect is impressive. When it finishes I use a nice little electronic ‘veeb’ sound to complete the stage transition.

Read the jayisgames review on Swarm here: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2005/07/swarm.php
2009 update – This game has been ported to iPhone by Cerebral Fix

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I was asked to write a game with similar gameplay to the 1986 arcade game “Gauntlet”. Dark Age is the result of that request. In order to give it a point of difference, I made this a fixed screen game (Gauntlet was a scrolling game). One of the challenges in designing this game was the birds-eye perspective for sprites. Often top-down view games have sprites on a sort of 3/4 angle view (pseudo 3D). But I wanted a true birds-eye view. The challenge here was designing sprites that looked like real creatures. I didn’t realize how limited a top-down view is for putting detail in characters. You really only see their heads and shoulders. I’m very pleased with the graphics I came up with, however. They look pretty cool. I’m particularly happy with the exploding zombie (from level 2). It looks great.

Another challenge in the design revolves around maintaining speed with so many moving screen elements. Part of the character of this game is the fact that the screen (after a while) is packed with enemies. It makes for a fun game, but (as always) speed is an issue. I think it performs quite well on Internet Explorer. I have tested it on a 1.5Ghz machine and it runs fine. Firefox is slow, but I am confident that the next release of Firefox will be a lot faster.

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This is another fast-paced neo-arcade shooter. As with many of my games, this is based on the traditional arcade formula. I developed the idea while writing Popaloon. I noticed that there is a lot of satisfaction in popping huge groups of balloons, which made me decide to incorporate that concept into an arcade style shooter. Now, it would be a little uninteresting to fly around in a ship destroying bubbles, so I decided to make them eggs, which would hatch into a range of different enemies. It seemed natural to go a step further and have the enemies laying new eggs at increasing speed. And so “Replicator” was born.

One of my favorite features of “Replicator” is the particle effect when eggs and bugs explode. In order to maintain speed, I couldn’t use my normal particle effect–simply deploying an array of particle sprites in different directions. This is because “Replicator” has a lot of onscreen elements to maintain. And I wanted the particle effect to be a lot richer than normal. The simplest solution was to make the particle effect into a sprite. By doing this I could make the effect quite rich, with many particles, but the computer would only need to update one sprite. An obvious solution, really.

Read the jayisgames review on Replicator here: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2005/01/replicator.php

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I was asked to do a point and click game. Such games are very popular with a wide audience. Until now I’ve avoided doing one, since I figured they’d been done to death. There are so many around that I didn’t think there was room for another. I changed my mind when I started thinking about a new way to present this type of game. I thought I would like to use balloons instead of blocks, and have the balloons being launched by a character, rather than simply appearing. From that thought “Popaloon” was born.

The gameplay only took a day to write. I then worked on the presentation. The balloons and the wolf are recycled from “Antarctica”, while the concept for the scenery came from “Bust’n Redzta”. Although the entire game was done in about 3 days, I then spent a week refining the game and trying to get the difficulty pitched correctly.

I also had a pain in the neck bug in the game, which didn’t occur until around stage 11. It took 3 days to iron it out. The problem was that sometimes when the stage started, there would be gaps between balloons at the top. And for some reason these gaps were solid–nothing could pass through. I checked the arrays, and coded a lot of hacks to try to fix it, but nothing worked. In the end I discovered the problem. It was so obvious, and was just a stupid mistake on my part. Basically, when resetting the balloons, I had forgotten to reset their last finishing positions to 0 (I use finishing positions while balloons are moving to tell the script when to check for a collision). What happened was that some of the reset balloons had retained previous finish positions that were too high, so they moved to those positions without altering their position in the array (because they were not meant to be moving at that time). Its kind of hard to articulate the error. Needless to say, I found it after pulling out most of my hair through frustration.

I haven’t done one of these games since “Circle Bobble”. I think its quite addictive, really. In testing it I can fully understand why this type of game is so popular. Its hard to put down.

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The main reason I wrote this game was to satisfy demand. My Commando21c game has been doing very well on a tournament site, so I thought it was time for another game in that genre. While the gameplay is essentially the same as Commando21c, Counter Terror features enhanced graphics. The backgrounds in particular are much nicer to look at. Counter Terror has been written from scratch (it is not based on the Commando21c code) and gives the player more freedom to fire in multiple directions.

Why Terrorism? Well, Commando21c was loosely based on this theme but I wanted to do something more obviously based on eliminating terrorism. Then Raw Thrills (headed by Eugene Jarvis) released their FPS coin-op, Target:Terror, and its success showed that this is an issue people want to see in games (I’ve read a report that people stand in line waiting to play Target:Terror–great for revitalizing arcades). There are not many webgames based on fighting terrorism, so I thought I’d fill that niche.

Why the armored suit? The idea came about while thinking about the old Robocop films and playing the Robocop game. I thought it would be a good idea for a commando to be outfitted with the sort of armor that Robocop wore. Its the best way to survive carbombs, bullets, and missles. Of course, they guy in Counter Terror is not a cyborg. He’s a human dressed in armor.

Counter Terror gets quite difficult, so I’ll be interested to see if anyone completes it and signs the hall of fame. Have fun with it.

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This game contains some of the nicest background graphics I have produced to date. The game is set in an Ancient Egyptian tomb. I’ve been reading some books an Ancient Egypt and got graphics inspiration from some of the photographs contained in those books. The whole game is inspired by stories of archeologists exploring ancient tombs. This is a platformer, but it has a special feature. The player can ascend to higher platforms by shooting a rope up. It hooks into the platform above and pulls the player up. The idea came (in part) after playing an emulated Rock ‘n’ Rope from the 80’s. The rope in that game works a bit differently to this one, however. Some nice visuals have been worked into this game. The enemies appear in sarcofogi (didn’t spell that right, did I !), in an effect that sees sand build up until it explodes, revealing the enemy. It has only 13 levels. I would like to have put more in, but the download would get too big. Have fun with it.

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