[Play] Kickflip :-)

Printable View

08-13-2007, 12:16 PM
tomsamson

[Play] Kickflip :-)

Maybe some here remember the game preview i showd here a while back, well, now the game is online :-)
http://www.candystand.com/play.do?id=18111

Its funny, as i didn´t make this game for a single specific client initially i didn´t fear any client restrictions so i just added things i like like beatboxing sound and street art. Funnily when i recently showd the game to Wrigley´s they loved the game for exactly those things i added because i didn´t fear client restrictions =D
They wanted to have the game right away and now its online on their site here: http://www.candystand.com/play.do?id=18111

As i said the game features backgrounds by several artists, like walls made up of pictures from Chase´s awesome "Remember who you are" series
http://www.stimunationgames.com/medi...anel1Chase.jpg

or the not less wicked photo collages from Anastasia Muna´s Project Chimera Series

http://www.stimunationgames.com/medi...ScreenDraft.jp

which give those levels a very surreal feel =)
Visit the creds section for links to the artists´sites =)

The game also features several custom made tunes by 2 times german beatbox champion mando :) (You can select the one you want in the pre level screen =) )
There are also several beatboxing sfx, i think its especially funny that it builds up to a beatboxing tune when one lands a longer combo =)

On the gameplay side there are several more tricks supported in the game, the most important ones are probably manuals since one can use those to chain together air,ground and rail tricks.
When doing the manual balance bar i obviously got heavily inspired by the loading meter malee did in a game before regarding the look of it, hope you don´t mind :)

http://www.stimunationgames.com/medi...nKickflip1.jpg

Anyway, hope people like it and play it a lot because then we can do a second part later with propper budget where i´d like to add more tricks, more gameplay modes and also more art :-)

For now i hope you enjoy this
08-13-2007, 12:39 PM
Cortana

I love the music (even though it loops untidily).

The other mouth sounds effects are brilliant too :)
08-13-2007, 01:02 PM
VENGEANCE MX

:p You gave the game link three times.
08-13-2007, 01:24 PM
renderhjs

pimp lord :p , ah well nice game
08-13-2007, 01:48 PM
Xploder

Wow, with such a line of great games you must be working with a really amazing team. This is another wonderful and polished additon to that line. Great work! Nothing to complain about and I like the style.
08-13-2007, 05:29 PM
BlinkOk

superb mate! kudos
08-13-2007, 08:02 PM
mr_malee

yesssss, i love it

I accept paypal for the loading meter ;)
08-14-2007, 12:39 AM
ImprisonedPride

Quote:

Originally Posted by VENGEANCE MX

:p You gave the game link three times.

6 times actually. Loved the game though. Reminds me exactly of how frustrating tony hawk can be.
08-14-2007, 02:09 AM
hooligan2001

Great work mate. Looks good and runs good.
08-14-2007, 05:04 AM
tomsamson

:scared: <- that´s me on game release day, in total craze whether people will like the game or not, always takes a while to halfway get back to normal =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cortana

I love the music (even though it loops untidily).

The other mouth sounds effects are brilliant too :)

I´m glad you like em (and yeah,the unclean looping is a flash bug will see if i can get rid of it =) )
We also had a video recorded day with mando where he made way more nice beatboxing and other crazy things, sadly i didn´t get to add that in the game anymore, if we do a second part its one of the first things i´ll add in =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by renderhjs

pimp lord :p

haha, yeah, im just trying to beat squize :shhh: =)
seriously speaking though, in my game release craze all goes into auto mode, don´t think much propperly those 24 hours really =D

to all: Thanks for the cheers mates, its a great relief to hear you like it =)
I more and more only see the bad sides of a game the longer i work on it, so yeah, i try to tweak existing stuff and squeeze additional stuff in as much as i can till the last day and then hope it gets liked so i maybe get to do a part 2 some day where i can do the 30 other things on my "didn´t make it into part1" list =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xploder

Wow, with such a line of great games you must be working with a really amazing team.

yup, i totally do =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr_malee

I accept paypal for the loading meter ;)

haha, ok, cool, i´m in =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by ImprisonedPride

6 times actually.

haha, yeah :rolleyes:

Quote:

Originally Posted by ImprisonedPride

Reminds me exactly of how frustrating tony hawk can be.

yeah, i imagine =) somehow with games like this there´s a much larger cap between player groups, one type of testers couldn´t get a single grind going while another type would get used to the controls pretty quickly and then begin to do crazy combos and then moan that they had no challenge yet on level 112, made me tweak the difficulty forth and back a lot ;-)
I´d love to add a freeride and training mode for beginners and more crazy tricks and challenging stuff for the experienced gamers in a later version, well, let´s see if we get to do that =)
08-14-2007, 08:01 AM
T1ger

Very nice game tom, too bad I'm just no good at it:P

Love the polished look:)

Those cones in the start screen.. Are those inspired by a guy who made some sort of camera smoothing algorithm for papervision3D?
08-14-2007, 08:25 AM
walsher

Very cool Tom, remember seeing the demo of this not too long ago. GLad to see it done in a timely fashion.
08-14-2007, 09:27 AM
tomsamson

Quote:

Originally Posted by T1ger

Very nice game tom, too bad I'm just no good at it:P

ay,sorry :( normally once you got manuals and grinding down the rest is easy :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by T1ger

Those cones in the start screen.. Are those inspired by a guy who made some sort of camera smoothing algorithm for papervision3D?

haha, no, the cones are there on the title screen since over 2 years :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by walsher

Very cool Tom, remember seeing the demo of this not too long ago. GLad to see it done in a timely fashion.

well, depends on the angle from which you look at it :)
On the one side the oldest version of the game i still have on the hdd is from 12/2004, so yeah, while it was a freetime project i often didn´t get to work on it for ages, on the other side once i focussed on it it made quite a lot of progress in a very short amount of time and then got into its current form in less than 2 months :)
08-14-2007, 11:01 AM
Sietjp

Wow, impressive, as usual I would say. Congrats :)
08-14-2007, 11:08 AM
Squize

Good work blue, bet you're so glad it's finally out there :)

Presentation has improved so much, even since I last saw it. btw, I fall into the camp of people who suck at it to start with :)

Squize.
08-15-2007, 06:29 AM
chriserrorplain

tom have you tried importing all the sound loops as WAVs or AIFFs and not MP3s? MP3s have header info that flash just hates and will never loop them properly. you might have already tried this, so maybe just ignore me :)

Chris error x
08-15-2007, 07:44 AM
programicks

I like the physics you have going on when the skater rides over the bumps. Great renders.
08-15-2007, 08:25 AM
BlinkOk

Quote:

MP3s have header info that flash just hates and will never loop them properly

wasted a couple of hours on that today. ended up using .wav like chris says. i kept trying to chop off the silence at the front and back and it would just add it on again when i imported it into flash
08-15-2007, 08:27 AM
tomsamson

Quote:

Originally Posted by Squize

Good work blue, bet you're so glad it's finally out there :)

Well,i´ve got mixed feelings, one side of me is happy to have it out, the other side wants to work on it for another year to add and tweak everything i have in my mind (even though noone would pay for that ;-) ) =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Squize

Presentation has improved so much, even since I last saw it.

yeah, we´ve remade around 90% of the artside in the last month, glad you like it =)
a note to all: keep old builts of your stuff, no matter if you save several fla/png/psd workfiles on your hdd or on a versioning server, its fun and a great motivation push to compare the latest version of a project with one of the first after a long dev time =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Squize

btw, I fall into the camp of people who suck at it to start with :)

d´oh! :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by chriserrorplain

tom have you tried importing all the sound loops as WAVs or AIFFs and not MP3s? MP3s have header info that flash just hates and will never loop them properly. you might have already tried this, so maybe just ignore me :)

good call and no, i haven´t tried that yet since i wanted to use the mp3 id3/ header info for something so i tried to get around that flash looping bug in other way but yeah, it still occurs on some machines (not all as its related to how the machine internally times things), so yeah, its annoying, will go the just not using mp3s as you said now =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by programicks

I like the physics you have going on when the skater rides over the bumps. Great renders.

i´ll forward the render props, artside i´ve only worked on the 2d stuff =)
and i´m glad you like what´s left visible of the physics sim that´s going on now :)
initially we had a full blown ragdoll sim raigan made but yeah, while it looked way cool in N with its totally black character i felt it felt sorta off with the more detailed character we have ( we talked about that topic here a bit more when i first showd the game here, remember? =) )
well, now the character only slightly changes his stance..
08-15-2007, 08:30 AM
tomsamson

Quote:

Originally Posted by BlinkOk

wasted a couple of hours on that today. ended up using .wav like chris says. i kept trying to chop off the silence at the front and back and it would just add it on again when i imported it into flash

yeah,its a shame really, there are several workarounds for that issue but none seems to work on all machines, so yeah,back to wav etc :( :)
08-15-2007, 08:45 AM
T1ger

Quote:

Originally Posted by tomsamson

haha, no, the cones are there on the title screen since over 2 years :D

Maybe it was the other way around then? :p
http://flash.straleks.com/cones.gif
I like yours better;)
08-15-2007, 08:51 AM
tomsamson

haha, yeah, funny, that looks familar and yeah, could be the case since i showd the game on the pv3d list a while back, too :)
then again its just cones, it could happen that other cones look similar to our cones ;)
08-15-2007, 09:01 AM
T1ger

That's true.. Cones do tend to share some similarities with cones..:p My bad, I just have too much time on my hands at the office;)
08-15-2007, 09:12 AM
tomsamson

haha :D
08-15-2007, 02:01 PM
Alluvian

I know EXACTLY what you mean by your launchday :scared:

I get insane amounts of anxiety leading up to launching projects that I truly expect to be successful or well received. The more I expect/hope it will be well received, the more anxiety I have and the more positive reinforcement it takes to return back to some level of normalcy.

Let me lump on then, and share some positive reinforcement.

Awesome job! Love the look of the game, and even moreso like the idea and implementation in the beatboxing.

For me, personally I like the difficulty setting. Hopefully you get enough positive feedback to justify addition of a few difficulty settings to increase the size of the audience who thinks it is 'just right'.

You got some really interesting assets in this game (the people you credited in the OP). Any interesting stories on how this came about? Any hints on other devs getting access to cool third party art and audio assetts? I would not know how to start getting rights to any assets outside of my sliding over and begging my wife to make me yet another sprite (I have no artistic bones in my body AND I am colorblind).
08-16-2007, 11:09 AM
tomsamson

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alluvian

I know EXACTLY what you mean by your launchday :scared:

:) cheers, old saying,still truth in it: shared happiness is twice the happiness, shared worries are half the worries :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alluvian

Let me lump on then, and share some positive reinforcement.

Awesome job! Love the look of the game, and even moreso like the idea and implementation in the beatboxing.

thanks, i´m glad i´m not the only one who thought it was a cool idea :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alluvian

For me, personally I like the difficulty setting. Hopefully you get enough positive feedback to justify addition of a few difficulty settings to increase the size of the audience who thinks it is 'just right'.

i´m not really that much a fan of different difficulty settings in games, i more prefer starting out easier and then adding more variety and challenge over time but yeah,would be cool to work some more on that :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alluvian

You got some really interesting assets in this game (the people you credited in the OP). Any interesting stories on how this came about? Any hints on other devs getting access to cool third party art and audio assetts? I would not know how to start getting rights to any assets outside of my sliding over and begging my wife to make me yet another sprite (I have no artistic bones in my body AND I am colorblind).

:)
you have several options to have art/sound in your game, for example:
-create it yourself
-have an artist do contract work for you
-ask an artist whether hes into having his art featured in return for shared profits or credits/showcasing
-instead of contacting an artist directly contact a company/organisation which handles media assets/rights managment for a fee.

I don´t like the last way i mentioned a lot since it normally means that you have to pay way more while the artist probably gets less monetary and other return (since that intermediary org will grab as much as it can) so yeah,i went for a combination of the others.
In our team we have several artists and when one works on a project he can write an invoice for that to me, so so much to most of the 3d prerendered art :)
With the backgrounds i always liked all sorts of street art (i was into spraying myself some years back for example,of course only on allowed walls ;) )
so i looked around and tried to contact all artists i wanted to have featured.
Of course due to the nature of the art some of them rather stay hidden (mostly graffitti artists) so that actually wasn´t easy.
On the other side those i could reach all liked the idea when i told them what i had in mind.
It was quite similar with Mando on the sound side, i saw him on TV and quite liked what he did so i called him by phone, told him who i am, showd him some stuff i worked on and explained my idea to him.
He instantly liked the idea so we talked about how to get it going (book a day in the sound studio and a day in the tv studio to have things recorded) and then did that.
That was one of the more risky parts about the project financially since the recording sessions costed a few k euros and at that time i didn´t actually know if/how much money the game would return at all but yeah, i thought do it and they will come :)
08-18-2007, 03:19 AM
LeechmasterB

Very nice game, it plays a bit like tony hawk. Great job once again!