I recently had the pleasure of working with the nice people at Little Lives on a reskinned version of Witchcraft to celebrate the Singapore National Day Parade.

In addition to all new graphics and sounds, we added a game timer and high score system to keep track of who could solve the puzzle fastest.

Play ‘Unleash the Singapore Spirit’ at LittleLives.com.

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You may have noticed I’ve been on hiatus for a bit, but I’m back and I’m starting on a new project. I don’t want to give too much away but it should be good.

Stay tuned.

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I had a bit of trouble getting my new Airport Extreme (802.11n) wireless router to work with my Nintendo DS when I first set it up. Hopefully this post will help others who are having the same problem.

The Problem
The Nintendo DS can only connect to a wireless network if it is secured with an older (and less secure) WEP password (or no password at all). It also uses the 802.11b spectrum. This shouldn’t be a problem because the Airport Extreme is 802.11b+g compatible, and it lets you choose a WEP password during setup. But even when I setup the base station with a WEP password my DS still complained that my network used an incompatible security mode.

The problem seems to be with the type of WEP that the Airport uses—something called Transitional Security Network. This would seem to be a great thing to have as it claims to support older WEP-only devices, but allows other devices to connect via WPA. Unfortunately the DS will have none of that.

The Solution
I began to panic when it didn’t seem that the Airport had any options to use straight-up WEP. Did I just blow $200 on a new toy that won’t play nice with my other toys?

After some frantic Googling I stumbled upon a little secret: Open the Airport Utility app and select your base station. Choose Manual Setup from the Base Station menu (or double click the base station). Select the Airport icon and then the Wireless tab.
Here comes the kicker: Next to Radio Mode option-click the drop down menu. Suddenly there are 4 new options in this menu. Choose 802.11b/g compatible [not 802.11n (b/g compatible)—confusing, I know].

With 802.11b/g compatible selected you can now choose WEP 128 bit next to Wireless Security. Enter a password, update the base station and you should be good to go.

The Downside
The downside of this setup is twofold:

1. WEP security is far inferior to WPA, and can be easily broken. Not a big deal if you’re just trying to prevent the upstairs neighbor from hogging your bandwidth, but could be an issue if you care at all about real security.

2. The base station is no longer ‘n’ compatible. You’re 802.11n devices should still be able to connect via b or g, but you’ll not get the benefits of an ‘n’ network.

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Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds

This is one of the Flash games being featured on the Fun Page of The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, called ‘Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds’. [UPDATE 3/10 : The game has been removed from the Olympic site.] The opening screen of this game looks strangely similar to the opening screen of my own game, Snow Day:

Snow Day

Probably just a coincidence though, right? The instruction screen will surely show that this is a completely different game with a unique mechanic.

Fuwa Instruction Screen

Snow Day Instruction Screen

Hmm. They do use the same mechanic. The visual composition of this screen seems remarkably similar to Snow Day as well.

Let’s take a look at the game itself:

Fuwa Game Screen

Snow Day Game Screen

Wow. Just wow.

Flash game theft is nothing new. I’m actually quite used to having my games taken without my permission, and without receiving compensation. The difference here is that this is not some crappy no-name portal. This is The Olympics.

I’d also like to point out that this is not just a clone of my game. They didn’t see my game and set out to make a similar game. They actually stole my game. I’ll say it again:
The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.

I did some research and it seems that the web site was created by Sohu.com, the company that last year busted Google for plagiarizing from one if its products. At the time Sohu made three requests of Google: that they stop offering the software for download as quickly as possible, that they make an apology, and that they discuss compensation for the offense. I’m currently considering my legal options, but I think these three things sound like reasonable requests to make of Sohu.

The Beijing Olympic Committee has also not been lenient with copyright infringers. Back in October the director of the State Intellectual Property Office, Tian Lipu, pledged to prevent Olympic piracy. Indeed, the Olympic web site even has a page set up where you can report infringement of intellectual property rights. Evidently, they are slightly less concerned when The Olympics infringes on the rights of others.

I’m sending cease and desist letters to both Sohu and the BOCOG. More news to follow as the story unfolds.

In the meantime:
Click here to play the real Snow Day

* Thanks to Alex at Miniclip for bringing all of this to my attention.

UPDATE 3/10: The game has been removed from the Olympics site.
Also, read some nice coverage about the ordeal in the Sydney Morning Herald. Pretty much the same story as here, but with better writing…

UPDATE 3/14: Additional coverage of the story on Ars Technica, Joystiq.

Link | Comments (2) | Tags: copyright infringement, games, Olympics, Snow Day, theft

I’ve posted a prototype version of a new game called Bug Lab.

This is a Zendo-like puzzle game. The object is to determine which characteristics make up each type of bug. You earn points by guessing if you think each bug belongs to a particular bug family. Once you think you have figured out the rule(s) that make up that type of bug, you can choose to solve the puzzle. To pass the level you must identify 5 bugs as either belonging to the bug family or not. If you get them right, you move on the next level. If you get even one of them wrong though, you’ll fail the level and lose the game.

The game gives you incentive to attempt to solve the puzzle early though, as you earn bonus points for each level based on how soon you were able to solve the puzzle.

Ultimately, Bug Lab will be a downloadable desktop game. In addition to the game mode you see in the prototype, it will feature a time-attack mode, and possibly a bug-creation mode, that allows players to create their own playable bug levels.

Right now the game is still a little buggy (no pun intended), and a long way from being finished, but it should be playable (and hopefully fun) for the most part.

Play the Bug Lab Prototype

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Yin Yang is a new game from Nitrome that appears to be based on one of Sean Howard’s ‘Three Hundred Game Mechanics’, Negative Space.

I immediately recognized the game mechanic from The Three Hundred, and was impressed that someone had actually taken one of the ideas and produced such a polished game from it. There was a lot of buzz about The Three Hundred a while ago, and while I noticed that Sean stated on the site that anyone could use the ideas, I wondered if anything would ever come out of them.

The concept is brilliant. A white character lives in a world with black sky and white ground. The white ground from that world is actually the sky for another character, who is black and walks on the black sky from the other world. In Yin Yang the player controls both characters, alternating between the two by pressing the space bar. This inversion becomes really interesting in later levels where the gravity of the two worlds is also transposed, so a deep valley in one world becomes a giant mountain when the character is changed and the worlds flip.

Keep reading “Yin Yang” »

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I noticed something spooky today while checking my web stats for my new Halloween game Witchcraft.

I’m not sure if that is a good omen or a bad omen.

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I posted a new game for Halloween called Witchcraft.

Witchcraft is a Mastermind-style puzzle game. The object of the game is to discover the secret spell that will lift the witch’s curse. You cast spells by placing your five cards on the table in a certain order. After you cast your spell the Spirit will give you hints by lighting candles next to your cards. An orange candle means one of your cards is right, but it is in the wrong position. A white candle means one of the cards is in the right position. Unfortunately, the Spirit cannot tell WHICH card is right. You have to deduce the correct pattern of cards by trying different spells. If you can find the right spell within ten guesses, you’ll break the witch’s curse.

Play Witchcraft

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The idea for Freeze Pop Frenzy came to me while riding the subway one day. I wanted to create a summer-themed game, and I thought it would be fun to make a Tapper-style game with you as the ice cream man, having to drop ice cream on the kids as they climb the side of your truck.

Gameplay
It took me a while to nail down the gameplay model for Freeze Pop Frenzy. The game would be too easy if you simply had to drop ice cream on the kids, as I initially envisioned. I decided that there should be some distance aiming involved, but that didn’t make sense with dropping stuff out of a truck, so I changed it to be a top-down view of a park with you tossing the pops out to the kids running across the grass.

I still felt that it was missing something, so I added the two flavors. This adds another level of difficulty, because if you give a kid the wrong flavor, he gets mad and starts running faster. It also forces you to decide if you should run across the screen to grab strawberry for the kid that is far away, but running fast, or keep chocolate to give the slower, closer kid.

Keep reading “Development Notes: Freeze Pop Frenzy” »

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I’ve made a couple of small changes to the site.

I’ve noticed that if people link directly to a single game, they don’t always notice the “Games” button on the side, and don’t realize there are more games on the site. Similarly, since I only have the 3 newest games on the home page people sometimes don’t know those aren’t the only ones. So, I added a large “View All Games” button on the home page under the games list. On the individual game pages I added a small button for each game where the comments used to be.

Which brings me to the next change: I disabled commenting on the games. It was great to get people’s comments on the games, but I was having to weed through a lot of spam. After I started requiring people to log in to comment, I stopped getting comments altogether. So I decided to get rid of them entirely, at least for now.
If you have a comment about one of the games I’d love to hear it.

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