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Stealing Farmville's thunder one player at a time. 1 down, 80 million to go.
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David Barnes
Check out @JuicyBeast's Creation Process
Gobotron creators JuicyBeast have posted a fascinating insight into their creative process. It's well worth a read.
It follows a game's development from initial idea to a fairy late prototype, documenting the changes and compromises along the way and the reasons behind them.
How about a tower defence game where the towers reproduce organically instead of being built?
As the idea gets fleshed out, it becomes a nature loving, non violent game where the player builds a magic forest by harnessing the power from passing tree spirits.
Early prototypes reveal that the innovative features are harder to implement than expected.
After a long break in posts, a sad confession that many of the unique features are jettisoned and they've got a fairly standard tower defence game on their hands.
And then, new twists on the classic tower defence team put Juicybeast back on top with a fun game that's not what they had planned but still promises to be a lot of fun.
It's well worth reading every part. I love their original idea -- a tower defence style game based around collecting life force rather than destroying it. I hope they manage to make it work in the future. But their perseverance and pragmatism means that they've not got stuck in a rut. They're going to ship!
By the way Gobtron is out today on the iPhone so if you're lucky enough to have one of those infernal things, buy it now.
Posted
by David Barnes
Display Numerical Game Data With Funky Animated Needle Gauges (via @tutsplus)
Chances are that your social game contains a good chunk of simple, numerical data that you want to display to users. But numbers are so boring to look at. Flashtuts has a clear, step-by-step tutorial for making your numerical data look a little sexier.
Creating appealing data visualization has always been one of Flash's key features. It allows you to achieve eye candy results with real dynamic data; be it in a preloader, a game, or an office presentation.
This simple tutorial will show you how to build a needle gauge meter. You'll learn how to apply a "gloss" effect, communicate with XML, and apply a tween engine to rotations.
Check it out. What other data readout techniques can you recommend for Flash games?
Posted
by David Barnes
