It’s been a while since I posted anything but I’ve not been sat idle. Since May 2009 I’ve been working on Deal Or No Deal – the official multiplayer game for social networks. Up to 18 people can play at once. There are 26 boxes each containing some money value. Each round some of the boxes are taken away. You then get a call from the banker offering you a sum of money (which is less than the average value of the remaining boxes). The aim is to win as much money as possible by clicking ‘deal’ or ‘no deal’. The game is pure chance. Sometimes the best strategy is to do nothing. For me, the in-game chat is what makes this game fun. Will it be a big hit on Facebook? Not sure but it has one big problem at the moment which is often you have to wait to start playing. That might deter people from playing, but it is a common problem with real-time multiplayer games.

There’s talk of a competition to make a Flash game in under 4Kb (link). So I thought I’d have a go. This is what I managed to create in about 4 hours. It’s an R-Type style shoot ‘em up. Use the cursor keys to move the ship and hold down space to fire. I found myself renaming variables to single characters in order to save on file size. It might be even smaller if I use a compression program to shrink it. Game play lacks at bit but there’s only so much you can achieve in 4Kb although I like the movement and explosions.

Play with my pet eel. I coded this eel using Box 2D. It strangely addictive to watch. You can click on the stage to make the ball move towards the mouse.

This is a work-in-progress; a game I’m currently making which I’d describe a squares version of Trism, the popular iPhone game. The idea of the game is to remove groups of tiles that are the same colour. Once the tiles vanish you can drag the grid in one of 4 directions to rearrange it and bring new tiles in. It’s never ending. The game play isn’t quite there yet. I’ve never even played Trism so I’m making it up as I go along.

Melon Sequencer

If you play Nova Chain then you’ll notice the Melon Effect (see post below) before each level. Before I created that version I coded a sequencer for it so you can manually draw them yourself. This version allows you to pick the shape, colour and other parameters then draw on the screen and record it.

After building this I realised that the human drawn result isn’t as eloquent as a mathematically drawn pattern so abandoned it for some nice algorithms instead. However, it does remain a fun little tool.

I had a few days to kill so in my spare time I thought I’d have a go at making my own game inspired by a nice little game called Boomshine. My version is much more polished and now has added physics as well as some nice drawing routines thrown in to enhance the experiences. The original was largely a game of luck so I’ve attempted to improve on it by making it into a puzzle game. There are currently 42 levels to play. I might add more if I get the motivation.

I’ve added a cool effect for the in between levels screen. I call it the Melon Effect since I first saw it done by Melon Dezign in their SOS demo for the Amiga back in 1991. It looks like an oil smudge and I use Lissajous and Rose Curves to define its motion path. The game also features a great soundtrack by my old pal Michael Forrest.

This is the Sony Walkman web site launched Christmas 2007. A scalable actionscript 3 web site (try resizing the browser), where users can upload videos of themselves playing along to the song from the advert. Users can pick up to four video tracks and play them in synch to make a new rendition of the music.

This is a prototpye from the Sony Bravia website. I actually prefer this version to the final version. There’s more going on that at first meets the eye. What’s clever about it is the way it zooms in to the choosen items. You click and drag to open the items. Releasing the mouse auto opens/closes the chosen item. There’s no preloader on this so please bear with it while it loads.

Signs Of Life is now live for the next 5 years and can be watched at: www.bbc.co.uk/signsoflife. The following list is the sections I personally coded.

• Astral Paths
• The First Sigil
• Daisy’s Chart
• Raindrops
• Second Sigil
• Matching Photos
• Daisy’s Chart 2
• Daisy’s Trip
• Joe Reflects
• Max’s Words
• Wake Up Daisy
• In The Heavens

This is a game I build for Hertz. The object is to pick up items that appear on the road. The game is not my design (I would have added gameplay!) but the code is. It uses semi-fake 3D technique called Z-mapping combined with some custom road rendering routines. It chugs a bit because they insisted on adding textures to the surfaces.