Archive for the ‘WebGames’ Category

Posted on January 26, 2010 - by Eric

Come ye Fusion Tanks!

FUSION Tanks (mutiplayer edition) – a.k.a Ftanks

Experience multi-player tank mayhem unlike any other. 5 chaotic weapons, 4 battlefields, destructible terrain, smooth controls, and the all-new Fusion system. Collect fallen tank turrets and fuse them with yours. Rain terror with up to 4 turrets!

Powered by Come2play, Fusion tanks allows you to challenge your friends even if you are on different websites or social networks like Facebook.

Battles don’t have to be just fun, put your coins at stake with come2play’s betting system which enables the TankSaw ™ – cut tanks in half and automatically fuse their turrets!

Watch out for the public beta in a few weeks.

Posted on January 26, 2010 - by Eric

the $11,000 Come2Play Challenge!

Our friends over at come2play.com has two cool offers for game developers.

GET up to $3,000 in funding for your previously released game!

If you have a single-player game with over 100,000 game plays and a rating over 3.5 on Kongregate or Newgrounds. Come2play will pay you up to $3,000 to create a multiplayer version of it! I would recommend our fellow game developers to extend their old game with a simple multiplayer concept. The key is do not overspec the multiplayer version and just go simple. It will be a good way to earn more from an old game, extend the game’s IP, and learn the basic of multiplayer design.

IN ADDITION to the funding, your game will be included in the judging contest with over $8000 in prizes!

$5,000 for first place,

$2,000 for second place

$1,000 for third place.

You can enter a NEW game or a retrofitted (with the come2play API) game. Contest runs through January 1st through March 31st, More details here: http://come2play.com/dev_inner.asp?f=1&newsid=337

We are using come2play on our next game: FTanks . Good luck and aim for the prize!

Posted on January 24, 2010 - by Eric

Ftanks update – approaching beta

Still late but we think we can go beta this week.  The terrain destruction system is undergoing some heavy optimization because it drops the framerate by 50% when it recalculates the terrain during an explosion. We are trying a ‘grid based recalculation by area’ method to restrict the part it recalculates. The come2play API is quirky and has some learning curve to make it behave optimally but nothing a deep dive can’t fix. Thats all for the technical wizardy my partner is doing. As for my part, here are a few new assets in the repository;

Posted on January 9, 2010 - by Eric

2010 New Year’s Resolution

Look at all the cobwebs and dust here! its 2010 and there has been a tectonic shift here at Cavalcade Games, the ground is still moving but one thing that’s sure is Cavalcade Games will emerge from this cocoon – better, faster, stronger. To help us commit ourselves to the plan, we are going to lay them out here for all to see. Unto the list;

1. CavalcadeGames.com will be redesigned and outfitted with more community and showcasing features.
2. Ftanks will be done and ready on or before February.
3. Word Mansion will be released before February ends.
4. A single player Ftanks will be released middle of 2010.
5. release at least 1 new Iphone game in Unity
6. release 1 iphone games in native code

Heres to a more successful 2010 for all of us in this industry!

Posted on November 4, 2009 - by Eric

The Flashiest Podcast on Flash Game Dev

Our good friend, Joseph Burchett, manage to gather so much flashismo in one podcast that it’d be hard for anyone to top this one. In the 1st slot is , Ryan Henson Creighton from Untold Entertainment – known for being in kahoots with interrupting cows. Next is Iain Lobb, an agency/firm embedded flash game developer now working freelance. Penultimate is THE Edmund McMillen, popular game developer known for creating edgy games, lastly is Mr.Love-Letter-to-Flash Daniel Cook. As you can see in the list below, a wide swath of topics was covered in the podcast.

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Posted on October 18, 2009 - by Eric

Virtual Game Development pt. 1 – People

Here at Cavalcade Games we create games in a virtual office setup. Both me and Shikii, live in the same city but create games virtually. With games being a highly collaborative and creative product, this setup has molded our output in more ways than one. In the next year, we will be moving into a physical office. This makes for a good time to conduct a roundup of what we learned during our time with virtual game development. Part 1 – will be about the people component of a virtual game developments setup, part 2 will be about the tools and part 3 will be about everything else.

As a background, virtual office is defined as replicating a working environment – online. This mostly involves substituting concepts and tools found in a physical environment with web or desktop applications. The substitutions starts from the very act of talking to emulating office fixtures such as whiteboards and the conference room.

Virtual Game Development is defined as creating games in a virtual office setup. Virtually creating games is a special case in the sense that, first, the discipline is a creative endeavor in nature; second, it requires participants to be constantly in-step (requiring varied types of communication) and third, game development is known as a huge hard slog to the playable part, much more so when done with less human interaction. So with these characteristics, Virtual game development is much more under duress than the typical virtual office setup. Hopefully, with these tips, other game developers planning to go virtual can get off to a good start. First up! – the people.

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Posted on October 1, 2009 - by Eric

Unity3d Game Portals

In Flash game development, the primary way developers earn is to have flash game portals sponsor their game. Sponsoring primarily means turning a game into a traffic building content as well as a brand-building product. This is done by inserting sponsor’s logos all around the game’s scenes. This has been the main driving force in the flash game content business for some time.

Unity3d on the web is slowly but surely gaining traction amongst game developers. So its only a matter of time before the sponsorship model will be adopted in the space as well. A few  pieces of the puzzle need to be in place for that to happen. One vital piece that is missing are game portals. 3 notable ones are gaining momentum and may become the Kongregate, Newgrounds or Miniclip of 3d games in the near future.  Let us take a look at each of them.

Muse games is first with a pure Unity3d slate of games. As you’d expect its a slim selection with only 4 games but the site’s got a strong stake on microtransactions with a store for some of its game. A card deck and some clothes, furnitures are available for purchase.

Still in top secret beta phase, dimeRocker seems to be poised for some action with zombie and pirate games in tow. They are a constant presence in activities where the Unity devs are so hopefully this close association will result to something awesome when they go live. Perhaps some plugins for high scores and trial / full version locks.

Finally, there is Wooglie.com who is actively courting Unity developers to upload their games to their site. Some sort of CPM-sharing is offered there. Its got a good approach of mixing flash games and the unity3d games. Flash games drive the traffice while the unity games gives it differentiation. It seems it only looks like flash game portals and do not have any flash games at all. Still its a good strategy to capitalize on the familiar user experience. Wooglie has the best selection of unity3d games amongst the sites featured here.

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These game portals are trying very different approaches to building their audience and its very interesting to see how it plays out. But one things for sure,  any success from these website will grow the whole 3d web games market and when the rising tides comes, all boats are lifted.

Posted on September 30, 2009 - by Eric

Ftanks and Pushbutton Engine

Our next big release is codenamed Ftanks. Its a ‘refinement’ of the classic Worms formula featuring tanks (or Scorched Earth for the older readers) . It is funded by come2play to showcase their very groovy API. It is also being built with the Pushbutton Engine. PBE is a game engine for the Flash platform which by itself is great enough. But what made us jump into using it is the fact that its open-source, comes with a marketplace to buy/sell components and is made by Torque alumni. We knew it was gonna be much tougher than building our custom engine but we figured it will be good for us in the long run.

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Posted on September 17, 2009 - by Eric

Webby Gaming Links – September 09 Edition

I didn’t realize that i skipped August for the both roundup series (web games and iphone) until just now. Bad blogger == me.August had some good news so ill mix them in here.

• Danc published part 2 of his Love Letter to flash. >> here .  If someone love letters this comprehensive they would surely feel amazed, confused, tired then amazed.
• Joseph Burchett of Gamedevradio.net interviewed Ben Garney, lead guy on Pushbutton engine. >> here.
• GDC is ongoing and some very interesting information was lectured and shared.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25264 ($175,000 in 3-4 months!)

http://adachen.com/2009/09/16/gdc-austin-mmo-and-virtual-world-monetization/ (MMOs and ARPU FTW!)

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25284 (Blurst works 20-hours / week! no way that’s gonna work here.)

• Mochi Media did a couple of v. interesting interviews featuring Ninja Kiwi and Nitrome. (flash outliers or replicable success, who nose?)

Posted on September 16, 2009 - by Eric

Concept Art for Project FvsW

Fun stuff are still being brewed here within the confines of our virtual office. With Word Mansion delayed yet again and our next project still ways off (1.5 months at least), i thought a nice tease would be in order. So, here is a concept art for one our early 2010 project, codename FvsW. Enjoy!