Piron Games Insider

Nothing related to that Orbital Decay, but funny stuff nonetheless

Anyway, more of this guy rockets here and here.

As Born of Fire TD pretty much hit the maintenance end of the line and only one license (see the previous post) remains to be customized, it’s time to move on and explore other creative horizons

A puzzle game has been completed – it’s actually ready since April – and it’s that kind of game that will twist your brain so hard that will make it melt down So I won’t be surprised if lots will hate it. Spil licensed it, which means that it too waits for localizations in 13 languages, which further means that the public release date is unknown. Probably in September.

Meanwhile, a bullet-hell/arena-shooter title is in the making, the result of my collaboration with a talented artist, which, incidentally, is my cousin. Not that cousin, though. Anyway, expect cartoon-ish graphics, flying pigs, a little less conversation, a little more action. Audio/video assets are done 90%, code&design are trying to catch-up, expect a beta in September.

Also, two other titles are in pre-production and are trying to make themselves a place in the busy schedule. One is a “match-3″ type puzzle, but with a lemon twist, the other is a strategy with ZX Spectrum retro feel, which will, somewhat resemble Orbital Decay. Both are small projects and will probably take 2-6 weeks to complete. Unless a catastrophic event is scheduled, they might be out during the Autumn months.

I have abandoned momentarily any project that might take more than 6-8 weeks to complete, so Orbital Decay 2 is postponed indefinitely. There is a concept for the graphics and game-play, but I don’t have anything clever to say as the story, and since the story was the backbone of the first game, it would be a pity to waste effort for a game that doesn’t “speak”. I’d pretty much like to do it sometimes, but I’m aware that it exceeds my resources right now.

As for the Born of Fire TD 2, there’s not going to be any. Maybe a Born of Fire RPG, I’d pretty much like to expand on that universe, but that’s so far in the future that I’ll probably release Pure Power before it

Publishing your games on Nonoba is fun!

…click…click…type…type…click…click…submit…*wait*

Table ‘.\nonoba\search’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired

If this isn’t fun, then I don’t know what else is

If you think you’ve spotted one too many Manowar references in Born of Fire, here’s why:

So remember: when doing house chores, it’s imperative to wear Manowar insignia! Humming “boooorn with a heaaaart of steeeeeel” is optional, but recommended. It really helps

It’s a fact: bugs love me.

Flash-back, a couple of years ago. As part of the Gameloft porting drone army, I’ve got the task of getting AND1 Streetball work on a couple of Sprint phones. On the first look, the phones were decent, with plenty of package and memory and it seemed like an easy task. But nooo….

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In the pure Diablo 2 tradition, here are the Born of Fire TD hero stats as tables.

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Here’s a little Flash tower-defense game called Nicemetal by Babara.

It’s not something that screams for mainstream: the name is weird (and we don’t care as long as it follows the “all your base” pattern ), 8-bit graphics (and even of the very dull and dusty kind), 8-bit music, the menus and cutscenes are in Japanese and the menu flow is kind of weird and highly against any good UI experience, including the fact that it doesn’t save the mission progress and you have to finish the game in one session.

But, as I said, it’s okay because the gameplay is brilliant in its simplicity. You don’t build anything, you don’t upgrade anything, all the turrets are already built. You don’t have to worry about waves and enemies: there is only one enemy. All you have to do is send 5 pixels small stickmen to man the turrets or wherever on the field to fire pixelated bullets, again and again, because they’re kind of amnesiac and return to the pool after a short while. All in all, the gameplay faintly reminds me of Z by Bitmap Brothers.

The game it would have been a masterpiece if the squashed stickmen would have died in a pool of blood, like you can do in another game by these guys

Truly wonderful. The animation technique, what else!?

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That, since I now run a portal, new games will be uploaded once or twice a week. I’m mostly a fan of strategy/tower-defense games, but a puzzle, a bullet hell shooter or something else of the unusual type might slip in every now and then.

It’s cool to establish a Facebook presence. Since you’re reading this blog and you don’t seem to be a search engine, you are the coolest guy around. Coolest guy around does cool things, like becoming a fan on Facebook

I also keep a Twitter account to announce the latest news. Stalking people on Twitter seems to be cool these days. Please do it!

Latest games added are announced in a rss feed. It’s so Web 2.0 and cool that you might just like to subscribe to it

Piron Games is now looking like a portal. A really small portal. Because the Internet is not yet full of really small portals Also because the next three games – more on the “road map”  in another post – will be released to promote the portal and promoting an empty space full of ads is not nice and productive. You need a couple of flashy thingies to fill the gaps between the ads

The graphics theme is, of course, “Missile Command” and the retro gaming that I enjoy most.

The previous static version was tossed down the drain and, instead, a state of the art (woohoo!) PHP and MySql web application, build on top of the wonderful CodeIgniter PHP framework, appeared.

I know squat about PHP, the last time I used it was a decade ago, same about MySql, excepting that I never ever use it, so I hacked into another wonderful application called Linkster. It’s quite amazing how many similarities are between an arcade and a directory. But anyway, Linkster is under GPL, so expect a release of the sources of this arcade someday in the future, when it will have all the features I dream of.

Speaking of features, although I added database support for high-scores and even for stats/badges (all hail normalization!), there’s still to work on an API for the actual flash games to send the high-scores. It’s on the TO-DO list. Because playing high-score enabled games is the next best thing