[Pimp] The Game of Life

[Squize]

Well it's finally live, and I've got a big grin on my face ( Like this but less yellow ).

It's what I consider the first real GamingYourWay project and really was a team effort with both nGFX and marmotte bringing tons to the party and making it at good as it is.

Anyway, play it here:
http://www.taktak.net/portfolio/sele...ameofLife.aspx

And if you're half way interested, here's the blog posts about it's development, from design docs to it going live. Nice.
http://blog.gamingyourway.com/Catego...egory,GOL.aspx

As always, enjoy,

Squize.

[marmotte]

Haaaa, finally ^_^
Congratulations!

(And Hi everyone, I didn't post anything here since... Months)

[alillm]

Awesome job guys . I really like how each game is very different, yet they all seem to compliment each other so well. I loved the painting game and the soup bowl game (although I sucked at that one).

Graphics sound and gameplay are all top notch, and the casual air to the game makes it really accessible.

Great work, the level of polish in this one is amazing, and it’s educational! I learnt that I will live longer if I don’t mow down the plants in my garden .

Ali

[rachil0]

Hehe, was expecting this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

[BlinkOk]

nice work. graphics were uber cool. are they yours marmotte?

[pimpofpixels]

Cool. I particularly liked the lawn mowing game

[Ray Beez]

VERY nice!

[marmotte]

nice work. graphics were uber cool. are they yours marmotte?

Yep, most of it.
Anything that looks really 3D-ish is from nGFX (the baby, the high jinks guy...)

Thanks for your comments btw.

[happinessSam]

Congrats guys, that's really fantastic, (I even found the gift shop one strangely compelling) all the games are a cut above most stand alone advergames out there. You should really be proud. I especially loved the painting one.

Apparently I'm going to live till 104 for being good at serving soup to students. Am I the only one who deliberately let them reach the guy and was disappointted they didn't rip his head off? Been playing too many of those zombie survival flash games.

[Viza]

Really nice set of mini games. As others have mentioned, they're all very diffferent games, yet they feel linked/related in some way. The most notable things about the games are the creativeness of the ideas (super easy to play, original, and still fun to play), and the polish (EVERYTHING was perfect).

I'll admit, some of the games aren;t my cup of tea, but they were all lots of fun! The only bad things I could point out were:
-No quit button during mini game - I had to wait until the time limit finished on one of the games that I didn't enjoy as much as the others, which was a real pain in the a**.
-I can;t replicate this but when viewing the 'intro' page to one of the games I turned the sound to mute, then clicke the instructions page and all of a sudden the music came back on in 1/2 volume. I then clicked the mute button again (so now it's set to volume on) and the sound volume increased to normal volume. I again toggled the mute button, and this time the sound went completely mute. Sorry if that doesn't make much sense :P.

Overall, it was worth the bloody long wait

Viza.

[EDIT]Man, that mute button sure is buggy. I've got another bug which occured during loading of the paint game: I clicked on the sound button a few times (yeah, yeah; I was looking for a bug, I'll confess) during the loading and when it reached 100%, i got this image:


tsk, tsk. Squize, I think you need a new sound management system :P

[tonypa]

I managed to get minigame on Pause and then restarting it, resulting Pause screen staying there and not being able to do anything. Wasnt expecting that kind of bug.

[Squize]

Thanks for all the replies

Thanks Ali, and it's not just not cutting down plants, mowing down moles will help you live that little bit longer too. I often have a glass of mole milk just to get rid of the wrinkles.
Bit of trivia seeing how you mentioned Holding the Baby, when olli first sent a working build where you could paint, the first thing I did was draw a nob on the wall in paint ( C'mon, that's what everyone does ). So adding the photo at the end to see your finished art was such a no brainer.
All the extra work just 'cause we knew people would paint rude bits and then would have a right giggle when seeing a photo of it. Oh dear.

rachil0, I can only apologise for your disappointment.

Thanks Blink, Pimp and Ray

Cheers Sam. This was my first big-ish project that I designed and project managed ( The joy of having to do roadmaps ) so it's a real important one to me.
During it's development I was actually working at Endemol on the Signs of Life project, so I was killing myself there to get ahead so I could have a couple of days off so I could finish parts of this. I can't recommend working that way.

Considering the budget I think we brought together a pretty good package, and it pleases me no end that so many people here have mentioned different games as their favourite, that's exactly what we wanted. So often with mini-game packages there's a stand out title or two, and the rest are fillers.

Viza, although it's far from ideal, there's only so much testing we can do if people are going to screw with the mute button over and over.
I can't stand DAU testing ( DAU is a German phrase which escapes me atm, it basically means "Dumbest possible user" ), to me it's on par with adding protection to a game, complete waste of time.
So although we did test the mute button, I didn't sit there obsessing over it. The time spent on that was better spent elsewhere imho.

I think the issue is caused where the volume is fading up and down and it's just getting mixed up during the enterFrame that runs it due to it being on/off/on/off.

tonypa, pretty much the same reply as to Viza I'm afraid. We never had that bug once and it was tested a fair bit both by us and Tak ( The agency we did it for ). What game was it out of interest, and was it in-game or pausing it during the countdown etc. ?

Thanks again for all the feedback so far, glad most of you guys seem to have enjoyed it.

Squize.

[LeechmasterB]

Thats an excellent series of minigames, very nice graphics and good presentation. At first i was also a bit confused from the title and expecting something similar to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

like rachillo and wondered why the mighty squize would want to do the game of life in flash lol. But was very positivelly surprised of course...

The soup game was a bit hard for my taste, best i liked the lawn mower game although i really missed the reverse gear (as technically its possible to pull a lawn mower). Also the lawn mower game is pretty tricky, somehow its a bit like having had a few bottles of jack daniels over the grief of having to mow the lawn before actually getting to work.

Great job all together!

greets

[Squize]

Thanks Leechy.

The name was supplied by the client, it wasn't our first choice to be honest ( Partly because of the confusion. Googling for this game isn't going to be easy ).

DoT ( Lawnmower game ) just has standard asteroids controls. It's funny, I know olli wrote that one, but it'd never enter my head to have reverse either. It's like FK's cool Vector game, so many people asking for reverse.

Guess we're both just too old skool

Thanks again for taking the time to post and play the games.

Squize.

[tonypa]

I was playing the Baby game and was pausing it near the end, it resulted gameover screen appearing above pause screen (I think).

[walnoot]

Looks very good. Plays very smooth.
I have my points too that I would probably have done different in UI, but I'll keep them for myself for the sake of positivity.

Maybe it would be nice though if the results of the 5 games together would make your life-expectancy, instead of one failed gardening-job

Congrats on the GamingYourWay-premier!

[Squize]

Thanks T, it's too late in the day to fix it now ( It's been 6 months since this was done ) but it's something we'll check on to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Cheers walnoot. The UI did go through a major change quite near the end of the project, as it was originally designed to be expanded just by adding a couple of lines to an xml file ( It's fully translatable too ).
From memory we were going to add more games to the package once it was released, but there wasn't the budget to do it ( So there's a lot of code in the front-end which is under used ).

As to a combined score, in the original plan where there was going to be something like 13 really mini-games, you were going to go through life, so it would start with dropping coins into piggy bank when you're a kid etc.
That was all going to add up to a combined score.

When that story arc went we dropped the idea of a combined score as it's got to appeal to as many people as possible.
So none gamers may well like Gift Shop and the Glider game, but Holding the Baby and DoT may well be too much for them, so we didn't want to force players to play every game to get a good score.
The theory being that hopefully people will give every game at least one bash, but then migrate to favourites to try and improve their score. Having to play a game you don't like to improve your overall score is a bit sucky. It's like not being able to skip past a bad track on a cd

Hopefully that explains the rationale behind it.

Squize.

[walnoot]

Well, that's actually pretty true,
I hate it when I'm forced to do sucky mini-games when I'm trying to save the world in a big console-rpg.

[nGFX]

Just to add a bit of trivia:
The baby game was the worst game ever to to code, so many changes and alterations, it's untrue.
But for the lawnmower and the hanglider game well made up for it (both in terms of time needed and fun doing them).

And Squize can be a tad annoying as project manager ... all this "the client wants this and that and could you".

nGFX

ps: oh, and Marmotte redid all those ultra simple 3d images and gave them their unique style (just want to have that mentioned)

[Squize]

Holding the baby was a tricky game 'cause it was original ( To us anyway, I imagine there's a similar game out there somewhere ).
I had it in my head it would be like spinning plates, juggling between painting and sorting the baby out.

The main problem with it was I was wearing two hats at the same time, the project manager where I knew we had very little budget to play with and that the game would turn out ok, and the game developer ( Whose voice I didn't listen to at all ).
So I pushed Olli into making a game that wasn't very good, as I knew that if we spent more time on it it would have eaten into the other games which I was really worried about, and it was only when both Olli and Dom @ Tak said that it sucked that I managed to stand back a bit and realise that in that state it actually did ( My line was "Wait til the assets go in there, it'll look less rough and it'll all come together". I wonder how many people have taken that attitude and made crap games ? A lot I imagine ).

Luckily I got my head out of my arse and we threw a lot of Olli's ideas into it, and it turned out pretty well. Big learning curve for me too, it's one thing to just keep an eye on your own project, but doing it for others where you know if you suggest an idea it's costing money, and could be crap and have to be ripped out, is totally different.
You may be cool with working silly hours to get a job done, it's another to expect others to do it with you, and that needs to be taken into account.

The other two games Olli did, Day of the Triffids and High Jinx pretty much fell into place which covered the over spend on Holding the Baby ( Day of the Triffids was great, it just seemed to all work first time and played well straight away. By that stage we'd got our mind set exactly the same so throwing in ideas wasn't an issue as we were both thinking along the same lines ).

"And Squize can be a tad annoying as project manager ... all this "the client wants this and that and could you"

Someone's got to be the nasty one now and again bitc'h

Squize.