Piron Games Insider

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

I think it’s time for a refactoring (production code from a commercial Nintendo DS game).

The method had over 2000 lines. Yes…2k lines!

It’s a discontinued project that we ran at Piron almost 10 years ago and was supposed to be a real-time tactics game, close to the design of Fallout Tactics, Gorky 17 or Incubation games. I find it funny to watch the work we did very long time ago, so here’s the former site and a postmortem of the project (in Romanian language only).

The game engine source and part of the assets live on under LGPL as Pure Power Tactical Engine (with the informal page located here).

FlashGameLicense have recently crafted a nifty add-on to their already rich roster of services: previewer accounts. That is, gamers may sign up and preview (what else?) the latest Flash games. It’s quite cool since, relying on the gamers experience, we can now have better feedback on the games we develop and have the opportunity to address issues before the public release.

The program requires you to be at least 18 years-old as you have to agree to a Non-Disclosure Agreement and is invite-only. I have 15 invitations, so if you’re interested drop me an email to “karg at pirongames.com”

…Orbital Decay made it in the top ten browser shooters of 2009. Thanks for the votes! Hooray!

Don’t ever mess with a lead programmer! (production code from a game for Nintendo DS )