In the past few weeks we have been making the most awesome computer card game ever. And what’s more: It’s our biggest project yet!

From a coder’s point of view the most daunting task is to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is challenging, not impossible to beat, with different difficulty levels and, most important of all, to be fun to play against. Truth being told, I’ve never coded a single line of anything resembling AI in my entire life, but luckily I’ve always kept an AI book from my college days (yes it’s collecting dust in a closet).

I’d like to summarize the AI basics of the process to create an intelligent agent (something that is capable of resolving some task in an efficient manner). Every agent perceives data through sensors and is capable of taking actions in response to that information. Those actions are aimed to reach a specific goal.

Here’s a list that gathers all the design information of the agent

Percepts

• Cards currently on hand
• Cards already played
• Cards on deck
• Field control (Information on the game board)
• Powerups (awesome, huh?)

Actions

• Play card
• Shoot (yes you can shoot)

Goals

• Win the match
• I can’t think of any other goal the AI should have right now…

I’ll be expanding this post as I find interesting stuff in the AI book.

A game that ends? What kind of sorcery is that?!

A conversation from the future:

-Remember that game? How was it called? It was on facebook
-TripleTown? CityVille?
-No, the one with… oh! Baking Life! That’s it! It was great.
-Yeah, to bad it ended.

A game that ended, disappeared, it’s not available anymore, it went maybe while you were still interested in playing. It’s something new in an industry in its infancy.

PS. not that that many people were interested in playing BakingLife, but still, it’s interesting.

It’s been a busy 3 weeks since we started our new project. I would love to make an article about all the iterations the design for this game is going trough, but it’ll be too long and nobody will read it because I can’t write. So take my word for it, it’s been a long and interesting road. Instead of a long article I’ll make a list with the key element of the design process that we are carrying.

1. Place a savepoint on the design when things look somewhat solid, take a deep breath and go crazy questioning everything. No matter what.
2. Always look for a better solution, then look again and find the problem behind it, repeat until everyone dies.
3. Find the joy in bringing chaos by finding gaps in the design. Then help fix it, don’t run away.
4. Say: “Let’s leave this problem here and go fix that other one for a moment”. New ideas and solutions will flow your way.
5. Know when to say “enough”.

1 - GET IT
The game is going to fuel an existing show’s audience, you must understand who they are and what they relate to. Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Adventure Time and Hey Arnold!, they all talk different languages, one that their fans understand and you should too. If you do that right, there’s a better chance at making a great pitch.

2 – 80% SHOW 20% TELL
Most likely the IP holder will want to see that you can reproduce the art style of the show flawlessly before even considering hearing your pitch. Make final art examples from the get go, and cover the 80% of your pitch with it. Use the other 20% to tell what’s the game about, what does the player do and how much does it costs.

3 – BALANCE OVER INNOVATION IN GAMEPLAY
The IP is the star, not your new experimental game idea. Adapting existing game mechanics to reflect the show’s humor and mood is always a good idea. Once you sell the game you’ll have to fine tune game mechanics and level design until your brain melts, since that’s the way to deliver a memorable experience without stealing the IP’s thunder.

4 – ORGANIZE THE READING
Start with a one sentence Overview and a gameplay image, follow with 5 Key Features and another image (progress map, menu, etc), lead to end with Core Gameplay elements with more images and finish with cost and production time.

5 – MAKE IT FUN
Have you played games based on shows? If you did, you know why I make this the 5fth point. Please make fun games, even when you use others IP’s. And show that you intent to do it on your pitch.

Hope you find this tips useful. Go sell ideas and make awesome games!

Once upon a time there was a game dev studio called HeavyBoat that dreamed about making exciting games, new ones, with innovative gameplay, just like any other studio out there. But they had to pay the rent and dinner to their countless hot dates, so… they thought “Hey, let’s make some awesome games for an A list client. It’ll give us some spare change to keep going”. Great games were made, the clients smiled with please and HeavyBoat payed the rent.

This went on for a while, and during that time the new game ideas were left behind. It’s time to bring them back.

Here are some images from our new game. You will need three people + 1 mobile + some lying skills to play. Hop on!

Our game The Moops has no plot. You are a Moop (what’s that?), you shoot at sadness (Wait… what?) and turn it into happiness. How in hell can someone relate to it in any possible way? Freaking journey of the hero my ass. But the gameplay is pretty addictive, kudos us!

There has been uncountable articles, posts, tweets, videos, banners, bathroom notes and in whatever medium you like stressing how vitally important plot is to any medium. And yet, we failed at conveying one in our first game.

But, you know, failure is the fuel of success. Our new game code named “Backstabbing pirates” has a plot. “You are a pirate trying to get a treasure before another team does, but there’s a traitor among your own team. So you have to figure out who it is, neutralize it before it’s too late and then reach the treasure”. We’ve worked on the core mechanic extensively and there’s still a long road ahead, but this time we have a cool gameplay + a plot. Of course, we are missing many elements, but we’ll include those on another game fueled by the failure of this new one.

It’s been a lot since my last post, so here I give you a little update on HeavyBoat’s current affairs.

The Moops Challenge is getting fat from all the the features released every Friday. Since it went live, we’ve added:

• Two major gameplay adjustments to better fit the social audience (whatever that is).
• Daily Bonus. Now players get a special score multiplier figure each day on their first session, if they go back the day after, they’ll get two! And so on. We hope Retention will go up thanks to this feature.
• Some bug fixing.
• Added a lot of special events to share with friends. Getting to the 1# place, beating a friend score, getting a Perfect Score, etc. Virality, get up and do your job.
• A ton of bug fixing.
• Mooney! The Moops now have thair own hard currency.
• More bug fixing.

Over the last few weeks we have been sporadically working on a new prototype featuring our beloved Moops.

There isn’t much to see at this early stage but you can play with the movement of the party, which I think is very polished, and there’s the attacking behavior. Yes, that red dot that moves aimlessly is your enemy!

Of course you can expect a lot of bugs, but also we are expecting a lot of feedback of how you feel the party movement. So, please drop us a comment

What a cool company, they rock, I want to place a Zynga sticker in my forehead. They control and brainwash the gaming masses of facebook, bump up the player acquisition costs every day and all that stuff. But they are also paving the road for small devs. With games like this:

Adventure World is teaching facebook players that there is more than harvest and matching jewels in gaming. You can also explore and take part on adventures. Gamers knew this decades ago and Zynga is opening the door for the rest, a door that cost millions of dollars to open. And while it’s open, maybe the core audience will get in to find out that there are good games there too.

Many developers tried to publish similar games on Facebook, but they all remained in a niche. Zynga is opening it up for everyone, they are taking their mass of billions gerbo-like gamers followers to a new place. The one were we, small developers can hunt (I mean, lure) them to our small niche games.

The day has come to its end and this is what we have. Tomorrow we’ll resume with whatever we were doing yesterday.

Juan:

Nonsense! Click on the image to play.

David

When your flash game is out there in the wild it’s tricky to know if your game is launching exceptions. So I’ve made a simple as3 function in which you can send reports

and a simple web server which collects them.

I’m still trying to figure out how to obtain stack trace information in a flash release plugin

Leo

Just a drawing of a girl and her robot. ’nuff said.

Nahuel

Fernando

This a prototype for a game im currently designing. It was done on HTML5 + JS and is heavily hard coded.