Piron Games Insider

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

Play

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

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

Welcome to the Born of Fire TD game guide.

Born of Fire is a rather different kind of tower-defense, bringing in a couple of new game-play elements.

First, there are the role-playing elements: your heroes are not just “upgrading”, but they are gaining experience points, unlocking new skills (over 10 for each class) and improving their stats. Their experience is carried over from one mission to another.

You don’t build anything, all the heroes are available at the mission start.

Unlike the common TD, where you build towers and forget them, in BoFTD you may move some heroes around the map, using some of their skills.

The maps are not just one-screen, but scrollable and sometimes very large. A minimap is also available to help you navigate.

Each character also has hit-points (HP) and mana, just like in the mainstream RPGs. Monsters that reach the exit will damage and ultimately kill the heroes, but there are skills that will help the heroes recover their lost health.

Then, each hero may have up to 2 skills active at any time: you can use 2 attack skills, or just 2 support skills, or any other combination necessary given the incoming monster waves. In the normal campaign, there’s little need to micromanage the skills, but in the hard campaign and “Eternal Damnation” mode, you’ll micro-manage quite often.

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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!

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

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 )

This is the walkthrough for Ninjas!

Feel free to ask questions

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This is the walkthrough for Orbital Decay

Comments are welcomed.

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