The Curse of Sylvaniah is a Action/Platform game that I worked on, in collaboration with Mattias Stridsman, aka Strille. It was released in November 2004 and was an instant success across multiple portals: within a few weeks, the game served nearly 15 million players, and even got covered by a Spanish Game TV program.

The whole project started after coder Strille had released his supertile-based engine, using Sonic graphics. The engine was quite a step up, in the world of Flash based platform engines: it performed extremely fast, and was way more flexible than most of the engines that existed at that time. Such a beauty was screaming to be turned into a “real” game, and not just ripped graphics of a well known license

By the time, I had released Two Kingdoms, which was well received, benefited from some attention from Flash developers, and I had been in discussion with Strille for a little while on a possible collaborative work. Both of us had nostalgic memories playing Ghosts’n'Gobelins, and with such an engine on our hands, the next move was a no-brainer.

The Story

While not being very important for the gameplay (well, less than let’s say, a RPG) I wanted to flesh the Lore of Sylvaniah a bit, and explain a little the level progression through a simple storyline.
The Realm of Sylvaniah consist of a giant, idyllic forest inhabited by Elves, Tree-Ents and all sort of magical plants and animals. Unfortunately, all of this changes the day the dreadful dragon, Røyk enters the realm and pick the highest mountain to hibernate. Even asleep, the dragon still exhale deadly fumes that darken the skies and corrupt the fauna and flora of Sylvaniah. Magically preserved from corruption, the Elves decide to send their best warrior in a perilous journey to slay the dragon and free their realm from its deadly grip.

The Game

Levels unfolded to follow the storyline: the player would start in the Forest, then would reached a burnt-down town, before scaling the mountains to assault the sleeping dragon. Levels were laid out directly in Flash, using the supertiles system Strille had designed. The whole system, combined with the way our character moved made it very easy to mix the classic horizontal level unfolding with more vertical approaches: while the first level was basically played from left to right, in a very classic horizontal layout, the second level tricked the player a little bit: Players would run all the way to the right to discover a dead end, and realize that the key to the level was to actually scale those very high trees. The vertical design here is one of my favorite moment of Sylvaniah, as it completely took players of guard and significantly upped the challenge/danger already present in the game.

At the time, we got quite a bunch of comments about the controls (they are all customizable, by the way ) – and the game still generates some discussions on that level. I believed then, and still do, that the control scheme is just fine. Yes, the combo keyboard+mouse isn’t a very popular one, but once mastered, it gives you the precision and “control” you would expect in a platformer like Sylvaniah.

One thing to note is the amount of “customization” the game offered, which was pretty rare at that time: Strille really went the extra mile to allow the game to perform well of the largest range of machines possible, and players had a lot of options to turn on/off most of the game’s features!

One last noteworthy point of the game was the save-and-replays. I believe that Sylvaniah was the first Flash game to ever use such a powerful system: Each game input by the player were recorded, and saved with the hi-scores. When browsing through another player’s hi-scores, you could actually see them play the game, judge their performance, and learn tricks from the best players. As a designer, it was really gratifying to see how other players played through the game, and I learned my share of tricks by watching other people’s take on the level I had designed . If we had been further with the rest of the levels, it would have been a great feedback asset to design better, more challenging levels!

For those of you interested about more technical details, I suggest to read the extensive interview Strille gave to GotoAndPlay, about Sylvaniah.

One interesting thing to note is that the whole game is written in ActionScript1!

The Art

The Curse of Sylvaniah shares a LOT of DNA with Ghosts’n'Gobelins, and more specifically, Super Ghouls’n'Ghosts, its more recent iteration. As for most of my games, Sylvaniah attempts to resurect the glorious era of rich, colorful 16bits pixel-art graphics.

Tiles

As said previously, the engine was tile-based, so the graphics had to be split into tiles that could be arranged and repeated on the map. But that’s where the supertiles system created by Strille was very convenient: I was pretty free on the size of my tiles – this means that elements that would be fit together would need to have the same size, of course, but from one set of element to another, I was free to change the tile sizes.

To give a concrete example, all my floor tiles, because they were meant to fit with one another needed to be one size, but the trees to would stand on top of the floor, or behind could be sized differently.

This proved very convenient, and much, much faster when designing levels and breaking down assets.

Background

In addition to the levels graphics, I wanted to have a very rich and vibrant background that would set the tone for the game (and help visually integrate the foreground elements. The graphic used had to big very big, to accommodate both the horizontal and vertical scrolling, keeping in mind that the levels in Sylvaniah are rather large.

The background was created in photoshop, combining photographies, hand painted elements, and digitally painted graphics, using very similar techniques used in mate-painting.

The whole setup was varied enough to provide an interesting scrolling backdrop, while not taking anything away from the foreground, where the game “really” happened. The general mood of the backdrop evolved from left to right, from “light” to “dark” and was reminiscent of how I wanted players to feel, as they were progressing further from one level to the next.

Sylvaniah was using only one background at release, although several (one per level) were originally planned.

Sprites

Sprites were handled a very classic way, mostly through spritesheets (meaning, one render per animation).

A notable exception was the end of level Boss, the Tree-Ent. Because of its sheer size (almost the full height of the screen) it would have been a very heavy spritesheet to generate the usual way.

Instead, we went with a Rag-doll approach: each moving limb was cut into it’s own asset, and assembled and animated within Flash.

This had two main advantages: first, the overall weight of the sprite was much, much smaller (no need to generate each step for an animation – but also, repeated limbs like legs and arms portions were only exported once). Second, it allowed us a much smoother animation, as the transitions were tweened, and not hand animated, unlike the other sprites.

This end-of-level Boss really needed to stand out, as a reward for the player, and I think that our approach really nailed it!

The player spritesheet was of course the one that required the most work. In-game, our character could use a lot of different weapons, and perform multiple actions. Each of these needed to be animated, on a basis of at least 4 frames per animation. The complete spritesheet for the player includes over 60 frames of animation!

Overall, the sprites drew inspiration from many classics, and even though I think that some could have been better, the look and feel of the game, at the time, was rather uncommon for Flash games.

Reception

When the game got released, it gathered quite a bit of attention! Strille’s engine was already known as one of the fastest and most efficient Flash platform engine. This existing popularity, combined with the brand new graphics and IP, and some refinements Strille had brought to the engine (Ropes physics, for example) really brought The Curse of Sylvaniah under the spotlights.

And that’s where the somewhat sad part begins.

In a matter of days, our game got hacked, decompiled, stolen or hotlinked on various gaming portals. We had some loose plans to get some sort of sponsorship for the game, but hadn’t really come up with any battle plan yet. It was too late: the game already had gone viral, and could be accessed on dozens, if not hundreds of portals linking to it, or even worst, embedding the stolen file at various screen sizes, aliasing or distorting the graphics.

The site hosting the game got literally hammered with intense, constant traffic, bringing our host to its knees. Within a month, the game had served well over 15 millions sessions, and counting. At this time, Sylvaniah.com made the top 100.000 of the most visited websites in the world (90.000 something according to Alexa.com).

We never made a dime on this game, and if it wasn’t for the generosity of our host (Nils at 2iceMP.com - if you read this Nils, give me a shout ) we would have lost quite a bit of money!

Post Mortem

Well, first and foremost, I learned a valuable lesson: don’t-ever-make a pre-release for a game you haven’t secured a sponsorship for yet! – NEVER!

Aside that, the whole project was a blast! It was my second “real” game, and working with Strille has been smooth as ever. The project was completed in a timely fashion (6 months from idea to completion, working on week nights (some) and week-ends(all!)) and got very positive feedback. As with Two Kingdoms, it helped me put my name on the map as a game designer/illustrator, and generated “professional” contacts and friendships that are still kicking in nowadays

Strille got very busy, and ultimately landed a job in the game industry – I got busy as well, and we departed ways, never really finishing the rest of the game levels. At this day, only the first 4 levels are accessible, the rest awaiting to be finished…

The Curse of Sylvaniah, thanks to Nils dedication, is still available for play here : http://www.sylvaniah.com.

Savannah yearly gaming event is now over, and it was a lot of fun! This was the first year I could attend the Game developpers Exchange and I found it to be a very interesting experience. Lots of high-profile attendees gave very inspiring talks, and some among the major players on the market were represented (Blizzard Entertainment, EA Games, Kaos Studios, Big Huge Games, and of course, Electrotank).

One talk I followed with a particular attention was Tony Tseng’s presentation on “Rediscover Gaming in Augmented Reality”; not only because it had some bridges with my own presentation, but also because I’m really interested on how brilliant Game Designers and Developpers can bend emerging technologies and turn them into “fun machines” dedicated to gaming.

Virtual Worlds, real design challenges…

I was giving the closing talk, in the Gutstein Gallery, and I think it went well, specially for the first talk I was ever giving in English
My talk aimed at presenting a quick and sober overview on where Gaming Worlds are going, what design trends they revolve around and introducing some of the prospective technologies and processes that will help make these worlds a bigger part of players’ everyday life. All of this in a 40 minutes talk, so it really had to be “short’n’sweet”.

The full presentation can be downloaded here: http://www.luxgames.net/GDX2010/virtualWorldsChallenges.ppsx.
Keep in mind that most of these slides, although quite wordy (to be able to “stand alone” for those that couldn’t attend the conference) are really meant to be talking points and visual support. They might be missing some information, or transitions meant to be communicated “live” to the audience oh well, better than nothing, right?…

I want to thank SCAD students for their curiosity, their interest, and their tolerance for putting up with my accent, and my “heuuus…” – Go create some games, guys!

And you can read the review on Jay Is Game

The game is present on a few portals, including our awesome sponsor, ArcadeBomb (thanks guys!) as well as on Kongregate and Newgrounds

Now, go play it

The video is a little slow and lags a little, but this will give anyone interested a good idea of the gameplay for K-Million:

K-million is a super-spastic Flash game, coming soon to your browsers, made in collaboration with Alister “Alilm” Maunder.
Alilm, a while ago, coded a frantic game, called Combo X-999, and wanted to revisit it, with “custom” graphics, and gameplay adjustements.

Combo X999 is a strange game, some sort of a cross-over between a BeJeweled, Space Invaders and a Slot Machine game. the concept is quite basic and charged with “fun” potential: you destroy incoming waves of colored invaders (shooting several adjacent, same color invaders resulting in combos), get some cash and unlock powerful special attacks using the slot machine. The result is an extremely fast paced, frantic game.

The “re-skinning” process

My first task was of course to identify what could be improved in the original game, concept wise. One thing that was rather obvious was how the various gameplay elements were still very independent from each other, at least visually. For example, the slot machine stood alone, and had no real visual connection, explaining to the player how the process related to the enemies he was shooting at. The second step was to find a strong game concept that would tie all these elements nicely in one theme, and provide some sort of “back story” to the player, on why he/she is shooting these incoming baddies.

Quickly, I submitted a concept-sketch to Alilm, on what was my vision for the remake: K-million was born!

A – the title, connected directly with the machine – the original K1000000 was quickly changed to the much more reader-friendlyK-million.
B – The slot machine became kind of a big vacuum cleaner sucking crystals of the ground – these crystals are dropped by shot enemies.
The head of the vacuum is operated by two squirrels (C)(don’t ask why!) and they move it laterally, following the player. Once sucked, the crystals go in the vacuum tube (D).
E- the crystals are then turned into some  liquid or dust, that go fill a gauge (E) – that gauge has some markings (under the marking, you can’t use the slot machine, over the markings, the slot machine is ready to use (status can be shown by a green and red light, shown in (G)).
F - The slots – function the same as in the previous version, except that icons will represent the type of bonus attack available.
H – The gauge has a critical mass : if the gauge is too full, it explodes, and cannot be used for a short while.
I – Player score.
J – Player character. There were several additional gameplay elements tied to the Chameleon (Color change adding extra bonus to the same color enemies shot, for example) that were later drop for more gameplay clarity.
K – that’s where the “enemies/stuff to shoot” will be at… I was thinking cute, color coded insects (Ladybug, flies, scarabs, etc) could be fun and fit the chameleon theme nicely.

The concept got positive feedback, and was approved, so I switched to “production” mode.

The Art

The Slot Machine

The first element I started was the Slot Machine. I was pretty happy with the concept, and had been looking at quite a bunch of Steampunk websites (for different reasons), so I decided that the slot machine would be a Steampunk apparatus
The Slot Machine had became quite a central element in the gameplay, and the only UI in the game, so I was really careful to keep it as detailed as possible, with a lot of little animations and eye candy (some of which didn’t made it in the final cut of the game, for performance reasons). I went with a retro/copper feel for the machine, with a lot of little details such as engraving on the cylinder, Warning texts, lots of little bolts and screws etc.

The Squirrels

For some reason, when I started working on that game, I became obsessed with squirrels. I wanted squirrels everywhere! I thought it would be cute and fun to add sidekicks to the player, and introduced two squirrel-operators, maneuvering the head of the vacuum.
But that wasn’t nearly enough squirrels. These guys can become quickly the stars of any show they are on, and, in the case for K-million, the whole setting was screaming for more “squirrely” action!

More squirrels were introduced in one special attack, the “Squirrels Rampage”, triggered by a combination of symbols in the slot machine. When the player successfully align 3 red squirrel icons, 2 squirrels appear on both edges of the playing area, pop machine guns, and start to frantically shoot all the incoming baddies in a rain of bullets. Now we are talking!:)

These cute little dudes where completely animated in Flash, “puppet-style”: I’ve cut in Photoshop, and separated different body elements, and rebuilt the squirrel in Flash, using tweens to animate all the different body parts. This allows for a very “light” sprite footprint, and also opens up a lot of potential animations for no additional file size (or very little).

The game also included some Paratrooper squirrels, that the player had to avoid shooting (under the penalty of a swift retribution from the sidekicks) but these where later removed to streamline the gameplay. Less squirrels was a sad, but necessary evil!

The Enemies

The “enemies” are waves of color coded insects that the player has to “eat”. Each insect was imagined with its own “personality” in case we wanted to explore different movement patterns per enemy.

The cast of enemies includes the bold and daring BeezyB, the anxious Arachgnagna, the proud and slow Wormidable, the elusive Flibie and the shy LoveDot.

All the enemies were drawn and animated directly in Flash, but later exported as a PNG spritesheet, to work around the performance hog that vectors can be in Flash. (the game sports an insane number of enemies on-screen at any given moment).

K-Million

The player-controlled chameleon is the star of the game. I had trouble at first to find the right shapes and volumes to make it recognizable (nothing look more like a lizard’s back than a chameleon’s back!) but thanks to some quick sketches provided by my illustrator friend, Ryan Terry, our little hero finally got it’s makeover.

The Chameleon was drawn and animated completely in Flash, using some vector fills, and some Flash runtime effects to give it a little more volume.

Aside the regular moving animations, the Chameleon also has “special” animations (though, less than originally planned) such as sporting scuba-diving gear when the player triggers the “downpour” bonus attack.

The Forest background

The last item that was created for the game was the game window background. I had a very precise idea of what I wanted: an illustrated forest scene, rich, vibrant, but not overpowering the rest of the game elements. It ended up being a bigger task than I thought – my first version wasn’t working well at all with the rest of the elements, rendered almost invisible by the sheer luminosity I had going. So I restarted the whole thing from scratch, and worked towards a much darker, more atmospheric rendition of the scene. The final result, 6 or 7 hours later is the one that can be seen in-game now. All was hand drawn in Photoshop (using the mouse, which reminds me that I absolutely need to buy a tablet, presto!), with a little bit of photographic textures thrown in the mix for good measure.

Sound

I should also add that the game got some extra attention in the sound department: Alilm came up with some very nice sound effects for all the little buttons, explositions, and in-game events, and Akelixe delivered a very fun, and very fitting “chip tune” compostion for the game. This additional sound work really adds to the general polish of the game.

Post Mortem

The project went very smoothly – we completed it almost within the time we had set (minus a week delay for a few graphic elements and some gameplay adjustments).
Alilm had to resolve a few performance issues, due to the sheer amount of on-screen animated elements, but the game now plays rather fast on your average computer.

At the time I’m writing this post, the game is still being tweaked a little bit, to balance the difficulty, but it should be shared with potential sponsors very soon!

From the art standpoint, it was a very interesting game to work on: it’s definitely a “different” project than what I use to work on (by default, my graphics tend to be more “serious”) and I had a blast imagining and working on this little universe.

I hope players will get as much pleasure out of it than we had building it. I will post again once the game is available to play online.

With 2010 at our doorstep, it’s only fair to have a look back at 2009 and see how it went for the Flash Game developers, portals, and the Flash Indie scene in general.

Luckily for us, a very interesting study has been released by Mochi Media, in collaboration with some of the major portals and developer networks.

Disclaimer

Having read various studies on the browser based game market, I decided to compile my readings and thoughts in an easy-to-understand, executive summary on this blog. Although I tried my best to be as thorough as possible while approaching the available information, the opinion and perspective I state in the following post are based on my own deductions, and are not necessarily an accurate depiction of where the industry stand nowadays.

Generating Income

Online, browser-based games are an ever expanding trend. As pointed by Kyle Orland, in the Gamasutra Network, Free Flash/Java games fit perfectly in the recent Business model of free web services. Of course, we all know that nothing is really free, so who or what pays for development?

In-game/on-site Advertising: (combined, approx. 30%) historically one of the first way to monetize games, advertising is still a predominant source of income for developers.

Sponsorships/licensing: (combined, approx. 33%) Gaming portals offer various formats for sponsored games, ranging from exclusive to non-exclusive licenses, including time-limited exclusivity contracts, etc. As gaming portals are becoming more and more professionally handled (Miniclip, Kongragate, Newgrounds, Armor games…) the licensing/sponsorship offers are rising, and the income generated is becoming a reliable source for developers.

Micro-transactions: (approx. 1%) Micro transactions are the emerging trend of game monetization. Online games can be played for free, but players have the option to buy premium in game items, cosmetic changes, etc. The revenue for the developer depends on the distribution contract with the publisher.

Custom development: (approx. 13%) Online Advertising campaigns sometimes rely on custom, branded games to create word-to-mouth and drive traffic on brand sites and mini-sites. Although rare, custom game development can be a significant source of income and/or exposure for a selected few developers.

Prototyping: (N/A) Prototyping is not necessarily a direct source of income, but some very popular Flash games can be ported to console (or the rising Iphone market). Releasing a game in Flash can be a good way to “test the waters” and strike better deals with publishers and end up as custom game development.

The rest : (approx. 23%) Some games are self-published and sustained. Never financed by a 3rd party, they rely completely on their developer’s shoulders. They are either pure amateur work (in the noble sense of the term) and can often be a way to test the market and audience, for wannabe game developers.

State of the Industry

Free web games are popular! a recent 2009 survey by Comscore on the US identified a traffic of 87 million US players, our of 194 million US Internet audience – around 45% of the web audience, a 22% increase from the previous year.
Yahoo reigned supreme in 2009 with 19.4 million US visitors, followed by EA online and Nickelodeon Casual Games (15 million).
Game syndication is also rising. As of May 2009, the content distribution platform, Mochimedia had reached 17 million US players (91 million worldwide) – on par with the numbers of the top 5 of gaming destination sites.

Prospective

As Advertising money gets redistributed from traditional media (Press/TV/Direct marketing) towards the web, it fortifies this rising browser-based games industry, creating more opportunities for in-game advertising and custom games content.
The Online market can be expected to grow by 11% until 2013 and is the fastest (with the Wireless gaming market ) growing segment for the gaming category.

As the Browser games get more attention and money, we will most likely see an increase in quality and depth of the gaming experience, longest development cycle with bigger, more professional teams. These bigger games will be built to encourage repeated gaming sessions and support the Micro-transaction business model.

Two Kingdom is a Flash RPG/Action game (including animated cut scenes) I started in 2001, and finished in 2003. It was my first game, and the task was quite daunting, as RPGs usually imply a large world, lots of items, a strong storyline, enemies to beat up, tons and tons of lines of code, etc.

The game, and subsequent domain name have been down for a few years, as I was preparing to replace it with the newer, prettier and overall better Two Kingdoms Heroes (another story), so I decided to resurrect it for the purpose of this article (link to play at the end of the write-up).

The Story

Two Kingdoms’ story tells the tale of a young knight that comes back home, covered with glory, only to find that his castle has been razed by an unexpected horde of invaders. After listening to the last words of his dying father, Lothar decides to race the enemy to the capital to warn the king of the impending attack that will most likely take place.

The set-up of the world in Two Kingdoms can explain the urgency of Lothar’s mission: the Kingdom he lives in is split in two: The North, rich, industrialized (well, as far as it can go in a medieval/fantasy setting) and heavily militarized, and the South, being the bread-basket of the kingdom, to the hands of feudal lords, populated with small villages, big forests, and with very little military presence. In between the two sections, a huge mountain barrier (inhabited by Dwarfs – in the mines of Moytura) and a monumental bridge to the glory of past Heroes (Unoram) linking both half-continents.

The threat in the game, a gigantic armada, an hereditary enemy, decides to invade the world of Two Kingdoms, by the South, cutting the rest of the country of valuable food supply (and in the same time, searching the mines of Moytura for very precious, mysterious crystals – trying to stay spoiler free! )

Most of the story is told in-game, either through dialogues, or through animated, cartoon-like cut scenes that pop at each crucial goal successfully reached by Lothar.

The Game

The game starts in a rural area, not far from Lothar’s devastated castle, that includes a few friendly faces that will give Lothar his first quests and items to equip (and that act as a very light tutorial for the player, although much better could have been done by nowadays standards). Quickly, things amp up for the players as they catch up on the trail of the invading armada.

Players will visit various areas as they progress through the game, ranging from dense forests to swampy marches, and from quiet little villages to dark and scary mines.

The combat system is very, very straight-forward: press space and turn into the direction of the enemy to swing your sword. The combat system was originally designed to be more evolved but I hit my limits pretty early and decided to go with what I knew to code (even though I got help towards the end, it was too late to overhaul anything).

The rest of the game mechanics are as straight forward: player slays monsters, gain experience points, get better gear, slays bigger monsters, drinks potions when health is low, etc, no big revolution here.

Most of the appeal of the game for the players was, I think, the scale of the game. At this time, there were very few Flash RPGs, and very little with a world as big as Two Kingdoms was.

Two Kingdoms was also including an online save system: players would register, and every time they would cross a check-point, the game would automatically record their progress and position. They would be able to resume their game by logging in their account.

Another feature, rather unusual in RPGs was the Hi-score leader board. Two Kingdoms includes a timer that records the time spent in-game. Players that would have the best ratio Time spent/Xp gained (by slaying monsters or doing quests) would lead the board. This was put in to encourage replayability and motivate players to explore and get to know the world enough to “optimize” their next playthrough, and maybe take the head of the leader board. I actually witnessed some raging battles for the top positions while the game was live. Unfortunately, the version I’ve recently re-uploaded has none of these feature (save system and leader board) so you’ll have to beat the game the old-school way: in one playthrough – sorry!

The Art

OK, let’s get this straight first: Two Kingdoms is heavily inspired by Blizzard’s 1995 Hit, Warcraft II, the Tides of Darkness. And when I said “inspired”, I mean like a Parrot repeats some sentences it heard, or a monkey doing grins!

The whole idea for Two Kingdoms actually happened during a multiplayer session of Warcraft II, while I was frantically hiding my last peon from my winning enemy, exploring the surrounding forest further and further, forcing my competitor into a game of hide-and-seek to snatch his victory. I then thought “Wow, this lonely peon exploring the world could make a cool RPG, if only I could add some critters, some purpose, and a back story. (Mind you, that was way before World of Warcraft )

The first iteration of Two Kingdoms was this idea…verbatim: It was called “Adventures in Azeroth” and was featuring completely ripped-off graphics from Warcraft II, illustrating a footman running through a maze like-forest (then castle, then desert) and battling various enemies while collecting gold. a glorified Pac Man of some sort.

Then, the game took a life of its own. As I was adding functionality after functionality, it became obvious that it would be safer, more rewarding to have it set up in my own rules, and my own universe, with my own graphics (and also a good learning experience for a wannabe game artist). After putting my hands on several tutorials on isometric worlds, I decided to go that route and to do the Art in that new perspective.

Two Kingdoms ambition was always to feature a big world. I’ve always loved the “exploration” side of various video games I played, so I wanted Two Kingdoms’s players to feel that they were discovering a big universe. I wanted them to feel lost at times. I wanted a lot of variation in the landscapes and locations, so that as soon as players would have seen too much of an area, it would switch to a completely different area.

That means lots and lots of tiles. Two Kingdoms uses more than 280 single tiles and more than 200 hundred various sprites. It might seems low by nowadays standard, but at the time, most of the Flash games were quick coffee-break games, and file size was really an issue.
The creation process was a bit chaotic: I was totally new to this, so had very little “vision” for the game. The biggest time spent on the creation of tiles was actually to draw them, bring them in the engine, fire up the engine and play it, then bring back the tiles in photoshop to correct what I didn’t like, or what looked “off”.
The tiles were all created in Photoshop, following the pixel-by-pixel procedure, ultimately throwing some shading on some tiles, but most of them stay “hardcore”, old-school pixel art.

While the tiles visuals departed more from Warcraft II, I stayed very close to my source of inspiration when it came to character design. A lot of the spritesheet followed closely Blizzard’s own spritesheets, with of course enough variation (at least, I hoped) to make it look new, and somewhat original, although heavily related
Not being a great character animator when it comes to spritesheets, it allowed me to save some time on this part of design, and avoid having to redo the same sheet over and over.

The time I saved on that process, I injected it into the cut scenes. Originally, the cut scenes were some sort of a cheat: I really wanted to tell a story, and using the quest system (a very, very rough one) was difficult and cumbersome. I also wanted players to have a special reward when “clearing out” one level, and the cut scenes where fitting completely in that plan.

Retrospectively, the cut scenes are maybe the elements where I spent the most time in the game, and they might be the least important element of the game But they definitely contributed to the “Wow!” factor when the game first came out.

The cut scenes backgrounds where “painted” in photohop. Some where painted directly, while some others where “paintbrush treated” photo-montages I had made from various sources. The characters were drawn and animated directly in Flash. Performance for playing vector-heavy images on top of the game window quickly became an issue, so I had to cheat by rendering some still vectors into Gifs or PNGs to save a little bit of resource on what really needed to be animated.

Towards the end, I discovered that tools like Poser could save me a lot of time with character animation, so I decided to completely restart from scratch all the animations of the main character (the one that “had” to have the most charisma) departing from the puppet-style animation I was using for the rest, and redrawing everything frame by frame, based on animations generated by Poser (unfortunately, the cartoon shader wasn’t accurate enough to fit the style I had going on in the rest of the cut scenes).

Each cut scene took me between 7 to 14 day of full time work from conception to completion.

The release version of the game features 6 different cut scenes, all themed towards different environments the player is going through, and revealing important bits of the story.

The last important creative part in bringing Two Kingdoms to life was the website and satellite assets. The game was supported by a full-featured site, including forums, a leader board (Hall of fame), a concept art dedicated section, an help section, a storyline section and of course, the game section.

Making websites was my job, so it went quite fast, especially since I reused a lot of assets and concepts created for the game. The website was a mix of HTML/DHTML and PHP/mySQL. It used very little Flash, aside the game itself, surprisingly so. I think at the time, I wanted the point of focus for the site to be the game, and not the goodies around it.

Reception

During the almost 2 years of development, Two Kingdoms got a very good support from the rest of the Flash community. Some refinements to the engine were handled by various, helpful coders, and I relied on a lot of existing tutorials for the gaps I had to fill in ( Tonypa’s isometric tutorials, and Klas Kroon map editor, that I used in a barely modified-to-fit-my-needs form).

Towards the end, a good Samaritan (Yann Geninasca) offered to rewrite a lot of the code, to ultimately get rid of the bugs, and give Two Kingdoms a rock solid Artificial Intelligence, using the A* algorithm instead of my simple quadrant system, for example.

The game got released in December 2003. By that time, I had several playtest sessions that were satisfying, and although all the elements of the game weren’t necessarily where I wanted them to be, the game was ready for release, and I was ready to rest a little

Players were generally enthusiastic about the game, and Two Kingdoms quickly gained exposure. It was a moderate success, got a very reasonable amount of plays and very positive coverage in various indie game development sites and printed press magazines (I even had the surprise to find an article citing in example Two Kingdoms as a money-maker, while I never earned a dime on it because I didn’t want advertising anywhere close to the game )
Two Kingdoms was elected 2nd best addictive game of 2003 by the Flash development board Flashkit.

The game got consistent plays during its online life, although fading towards the end, until I took it down in 2008, to prepare the coming of Two Kingdoms Heroes (that is still “in-progress” at this date, but that’s another story)

Post Mortem

Making Two Kingdoms was an adventure! It was coming from never having made a game before to working on an all time-consuming monster, but every bit was worth it. I learned a lot, learned how to streamline my creation process, how to tell an interactive story, what to change in my original ideas to please players, how to balance gameplay, etc.

It also taught me the rudiments of coding, although, the coding side was definitely the most painful part of the process. I wished I had successfully been able to interest a real coder, but the shear size of the project put off a lot of good souls.

This project allowed me to put my name on various boards as a committed, reliable designer, and led to other very interesting games, this time in association with talented coders.

At the time I started Two Kingdoms, I was a freelancer in New York (I just had left France, and had no green card yet to allow me to work in the US), so I had a little bit more time on my hands than if I had worked in-house for a company. I’m glad I used that time for Two Kingdoms; I doubt I will ever have that amount of time and energy for another project of this scope, particularly now that the gamers expectations, even for online, browser-based RPGs, have risen beyond the scope of what I could achieve alone.

I had to cut many features from the original plan (the whole magic combat system, complex AI for “evolved” enemies, more of the world, more quests, more NPCs, a companion system, etc. All these ideas are still in the air for the planned remake of Two Kingdoms, but now I know it’s not something I can achieve alone

More Information

The game can be played Here.

A lot of the articles on various websites have gone into oblivion, but GotoAndPlay still features a very top-line interview I gave few months after releasing the game. It can be read Here.

If you wonder what the upcoming game IONIC look like, here’s a quick video of the tutorial:

Unfortunately, the video is too short to show the real “meat” of the game, meaning all the enemies and various weapons you can use. I guess you will all have to check it out for yourself when it comes out

…when everybody, all around the world says pretty much the same thing!

So I won’t fail the tradition, and wish you, with a little bit of advance, a

Safe and very Happy New Year 2010!

Ionic is an upcoming Flash game, made in collaboration with my good friends @Gaming Your Way, scheduled to hit your monitors in a few weeks at most.
The game is a Tower Defense type of game, that visually pays homage to the “classic” horizontal-scrolling shooters, like R-Type, Lifeforce, Scramble or Gradius.

I arrived on the project while most of the gameplay was already heavily prototyped, and I was tasked with doing the Art for most of the game elements, as well as for the User Interface.

The Game

The player is in charge of equipping and defending a massive floating spaceship, called “dreadnought” from relentless hordes of Alien attackers, composed of various ships with different capabilities.

The player can equip turrets on the ship, that will automatically take over the incoming waves. Weapons are diverse and powerful, and range from the simple but efficient machine gun turret, to the powerful flame thrower, without forgetting the Tesla coil, and other spacey-lasers!

The Alien attackers are also quite diverse, and do present varied movement patterns, speed or firepower. The first waves are composed of the slow-moving “Raiders”, easy to take down and with minimal firepower, but the game quickly steps-up, as the “Pillagers”, an evolved version of the Raiders appear, followed by the Heavy Bombers, some of them bearing a shield, doing heavy damage to your turrets, or even your core, if your layout wasn’t efficient enough to take down the incoming waves before they can reach your vital “core”, the pulsating source of energy that feeds your ship.

Occasionally, you will be pitted against the Alien Juggernaut, a massive attack ship, slow moving, but doing enough damage to two-shot some of your lighter structures.

As you take down your enemies, they drop gold, quickly collected by drones, the “Chrysus”, that will provide funds to buy more turrets and repair or upgrade your equipped weapons.

The Art

As stated at the beginning of the post, I definitely took inspiration in the golden era of Shoot-them-up.

The treatment for the sprites is pixel-art-ish (overall, the shapes and general motives are drawn and colored pixel-by-pixel, but a lot of shading and texturing is then applied in a more photoshop-friendly manner)

For the Dreadnought, I relied on the existing structure (what one might call “level design” although, for this game, it is more a “layout” than a complex level structure ) that was present at the prototype, and for which the gameplay had already been balanced. So the creation work was more on how to “dress up” that layout and make it compelling for the eye, as well as bring a sentiment of “ownership” of that massive spacecraft for the player. The whole device needed to feel like a run-down, yet high-tech space station, and I used a delicate balance of blues and beiges, with a few light-blue and yellow highlights, to emphasize the coldness of space around it.

The Enemies needed to feel “Alien”, and most importantly, their technology needed to feel different from the one used on the dreadnought. I went with rounder shapes, using yellowish metal textures (so that it stands out against the dreadnought) and combined these metal plates with more organic elements (tentacles and what appears as a blob of flesh) to achieve the “alien-ish”, almost bio-mechanical look that I liked so much in R-Type.
The Alien ships are all color-coded to be easily identifiable by the player, and I worked this color code into a sort of Orb that every ship carries, but that generates a different glow depending on the ship’s nature.

The User Interface takes the codes used for the Dreadnought (as it is the ship’s interface, in some fashion) with orange-ish and light blue highlights to have it standout on the players’ screen. There again, the goal to achieve was to make it look like a beaten-down, abandoned yet high-tech object that players would manipulate.

The game is completely finished, and is currently being auctioned to various gaming portals. It should be available for everyone to play in a few weeks, around mid-January