Piron Games Insider

So here it is: Invisible Ink. It’s not the epic kind of game and it does require to put a little bit of imagination and thinking at work. Watch the pen move and guess the doodle being drawn in invisible ink.

The game is available in 5 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Romanian.

And, seriously, it’s a coincidence it was released on August 23rd, the former National Day of Romania

A few words about the game:
Idea: Not much of a game-play to be honest, but mostly inspired by a “pillow game” , that kind that usually go with the pillow talk And a bit by Z-Rox.

Production: about 3 weeks, including localizations requested by the primary sponsor (Spil Group).

Graphics: Doodles were traced with Inkscape. Rest of the “graphics” were done with pen on paper and a scanner.

Programming: required attention in two spots. One was the SVG path reader, that was ported to HaXe and tweaked to fit the specifics of the game from the DrawSVG AS3 source. The other was a Bezier curve (adaptive) subdivision algorithm, again ported to HaXe from the works and research of Maxim Shemanarev. If anyone needs the HaXe sources for these two, please ask and I’ll post them.

Licensing: the game was added to FlashGameLicense and after a month and a half, 6 sponsor views, 7/10 editor rating, 5.05/10 developer rating and one bid later, the primary license went to Spil Group.

Feel free to suggest possible answers, if you think they fit the doodle, and please enclose them in spoiler tags ( [spoiler ] and [/ spoiler] ).

Public stats for Orbital Decay are available here.

Stats are for game impressions: one Mochibot ping before the game is loaded/initialized.

The game was also licensed to Armor Games, where it got 300k+ plays and an unknown number of plays at Big Fish Games (but probably around 100k). All in all, 2.5 million game plays for a game that scored 3.75 at Kongregate, 4.15 at Newgrounds and 7 point something at Armor Games and received overall mixed feelings of awe and anger

Jayisgames reviewed it and their readers voted it  in the top 10 browser shooters of 2009, while later on, the reviewer, Josh, remember it as:

the “battleship” premise is unique and under-utilized in this genre, sporadically popping up in occasional gems like Orbital Decay.

Our players said that it sucked badly enough that it deserved a lengthy bash or that it ruled and is the best game evar. No compromises, love it or hate it. Just as I intended to

Play

Then please share and shout hard.

The Immortal Heroes
Vladislav “DreamRunner” Lobanov
Robert Gonzales
Jon Adamich
Tasselfoot

The Doom Warriors
Traian Pop
Stelian Serban
Stefan ‘Max the Fireraven’ Giurgiu

After lots of months in development and lots of other months laying dormant, waiting for a better fate, Born of Fire, the tower-defense and RPG hybrid, will go live on my portal on April 27th.

This is what’s waiting for you that day:

• 4 classes (demon incarnate, kitsune, shieldmaiden and king);
• 7 characters;
• over 40 spells/abilities to choose from when obliterating your enemies;
• lots of enemies to slay, each with different strengths and weaknesses;
• 4 play modes;
• 40 missions to master, in a journey from the darkest pits of Hells to the gates of the Cloud Citadel;
• a sword&sorcery short story, written as a tribute to the works of Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan.

Show you have the guts to stand against the combined armies of Hells and Heaven. Be here on April 27th!

Stats for That Word Game are available here.

Stats are for game loads, but since most of the plays come from Mindjolt and their API is implemented, this may actually means “game plays”.

There’s also a site-locked version for Big Fish Games, but their contract says “no outgoing links”, so no Mochibot and no stats. I guesstimate, based on the size and audience of BFG, anywhere between 100-200k game loads – at some point there were over 2k people playing the game at a time (yeah, BFG has strange metrics )

Here are the Mochibot stats for Ninjas!

The stats are for game “impressions” (or game loads – one mochibot ping after the game loaded).

It’s not quite a “success” due to its rather obscure gameplay: what started as a cute&light puzzle turned into a hardcore action-puzzle. But I guess having “ninja” in the title helped a lot to get gameplays

Coming next: That Word Game.

Here’s the king making a lonely stand against the armies of hell.

The skill icons are placeholders, they will be replaced in the final version. While not much to do on the programming aside from fixing occasional bugs, there is still a hell with over 30 maps to lay out, 4 hero classes totaling 40 skills and 9 monsters classes to balance the game with. But there is hope,  in the end, heroes go to heaven

…or how to make the graphics (when you’re not an artist).

I planned Orbital Decay as a solo enterprise and making the graphics took most of the time: out of the 5 months it took for the project to finish, 3.5 were allocated for the graphics. I opted out for a retro-pixel art-”16 bit graphics” style, as a homage to that gaming era and because I wanted total  control for the details on the assets, a thing pixel art is good at for this small resolution (e.g. ports, turrets, hatches, etc).

For each ship, I followed, more or less, a routine: researching for a design (this included the general shape and the details, big and small), 3D modeled the shape and the rough details with Truespace, rendering a side view of the ship, then start editing at the pixel-level in Photoshop. The whole process usually took about a couple of days to a week, intricate ships like the Radiant Star or the Aru Destroyer took even more.

Here’s how this worked, in visually comprehensive but not exhaustive way:

Perspective View

Making of, frame by frame

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This is the first post in a series that will detail various stages of the development of Orbital Decay. I felt “postmortem” sounds ugly or maybe way too common, and since this is the unusual blog, things are getting done a bit differently than in the gaming industry

This part will detail the idea and the sources that influenced the design of Orbital Decay.

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Some players complained that the story moved too fast and I somehow feel they are right. At least for the non-native English speakers, reading the story and shooting down baddies was probably a not-so very pleasant experience. Later on, a while after the release, I had the brilliant idea to add a “log” button that would enable to see all the past messages…but it was too late, the game had already spread on portals.

So, here’s the story transcript, in case you missed something or you simply want to live the adventure of Radiant Star once again.

The story is release under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

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