Codename: ULTRA is a game concept that I entered into the game design competition at SXSW this year. The game was selected as one of the casual game semifinalists, which means I won a free pass to SXSW Interactive....

Link | Tags: games, SXSW

I still get asked about what happened with the Olympics stealing my game last year. I'll try to bring everyone up to speed here.

Link | Tags: games, Olympics, Snow Day, theft

Body Mailin’ is a game I made based on some jokes from a podcast I listen to called You Look Nice Today. It would be too difficult for me try to explain the nuances of the game concepts here,...

Link | Tags: Body Mailin', games, YLNT

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...

Link | Tags: games, Witchcraft

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.

Link | Comments (4) | Tags: copyright infringement, games, Olympics, Snow Day, theft

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

Link | Tags: Bug Lab, development, games, prototype

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.

Link | Tags: games, Halloween, Witchcraft

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.

Link | Tags: development, Freeze Pop Frenzy, games

I've been meaning to write about Samorost 2 since way back before it won Best Web Browser Game at the Independent Games Festival. If you haven't seen this game yet, I recommend you go check it out right now. You should be warned, however, that it may take a good 30 minutes to complete the first chapter, and it's incredible hard to stop playing once you start. There are a number of things that I think make this game really great:

Link | Tags: games, graphics, review, Samorost

I've decided to remove Roach Attack from my list of games on this site.

Link | Tags: games, Roach Attack, site update

Tim Rylands is a teacher who uses video games in the classroom to teach his kids English and creative writing. I found some videos of his class. Pretty amazing:

Link | Tags: education, games, Tim Rylands

I've got a new game coming out really soon. In Freeze Pop Frenzy you control an ice cream man who has to toss freeze-pops to the approaching kids before they reach your truck.

Link | Tags: Freeze Pop Frenzy, games, ice cream, summer

There has been a long-standing bug in my game The Lake that allowed people to get scores in the millions. I was pretty sure that it was a problem with the game itself and not just people hacking my high-score system. One reason is that this is the only game that was getting bogus scores. Also the scores were never round numbers (like 1,000,000) which is what I would suspect if people were simply sending bogus scores to my database.

Link | Tags: development, games, The Lake

Here's a preview of the pixel-art game I'm working on right now. Press the mouse button to make the bee fly (up), release to allow him to drop down. Collect flowers in your basket, and avoid the other bees. If your basket hits the ground or the other bees, you'll lose all your flowers. If your bee hits another bee you die.

Link | Tags: games, pixel art

All of my Flash games up until this point have been made using mostly vector graphics. While this looks really nice and keeps the file sizes low, it can also slow the games down quite a bit as Flash has to frequently redraw the images. For my next game I've decided to try using pixel graphics.

Link | Tags: art, games, graphics, pixel art

I've had a lot of people asking about the music tracks I used in Snow Day and [Love's Arrow](/games/loves_arrow/?id=1). I've been using Apple's [GarageBand](http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/) to create music for all of the games. It works really well for me, since I'm not particularly musically inclined.

Link | Tags: development, games, GarageBand, Love's Arrow, music, Snow Day

I posted Love's Arrow for Valentine's Day.

Link | Tags: games, Love's Arrow, Valentine's Day

Yesterday I stumbled across this poster visually depicting the names of bands. I thought it would fun to play the game for a while, so I set out to find the game online, which I was sure must exist in interactive form. It was much harder to find than I thought. The Virgin Digital site only has static wallpaper imagesto download and no links to the actual game. I finally found the actual game on Heavy.com.

Link | Tags: games, M&Ms, review, Virgin

I posted Snow Day and some new extras in time for the holiday season.

Link | Comments (2) | Tags: extras, games, Snow Day

I've got a holiday/winter game in the works. You play as a kid who has to keep enough snow on the ground to make sure school doesn't reopen. You make it snow by throwing ice cubes up into the rain clouds. I'm hoping to have it ready to release just after Thanksgiving. Stay tuned.

Link | Comments (2) | Tags: games, Snow Day

Sunken Treasure has come a long way since my first prototype back in July.

Link | Comments (1) | Tags: development, games, Sunken Treasure

I posted 'Sunken Treasure' today. The object of this game is to dive down to the ocean floor, find gems and bring them back to the surface without getting hit by any sea creatures.

Link | Tags: games, Sunken Treasure

A couple days ago I came across Google's Image Labeler. Essentially, the Image Labeler is a system to allow users to tag images with keywords, with the goal of providing more accurate image search results. The genius of Google's method is that rather than trying to convince users to give up some of their time to sift through and tag millions of images, they turn it into a game.

Link | Comments (1) | Tags: games, Google

Recently, I came across a posting on the FlashKit forums asking for feedback on a game called Regeb. When I attempted to play the game I was confronted by this instruction screen:

Link | Comments (7) | Tags: games

I've been looking into getting some of my Flash games to run on the PSP. Sony released an update in April that allows Flash content to be played through the PSP's web browser. Unfortunately, there are some limitations that prevent this from being a great option for homebrew developers. Here are some of the fundamentals to getting started with Flash on the PSP:

Link | Tags: Flash, games, PSP, Sunken Treasure

I've been working on Sunken Treasure, mostly on the art and sounds. I haven't made a lot of progress because I can already tell that the game is fundamentally flawed. It's cute, but it's not fun to play. I believe the game needs an element of risk, so you can risk loss or damage to achieve a possible greater gain. This is the route I'm going to pursue:

Link | Tags: development, games, Sunken Treasure

As more people start to find this site, I find references to the games popping up on various blogs and forums from all over internet-land. The most interesting ones are the non-english sites because I have to run them through a translator to see what they say about the games.

Link | Comments (1) | Tags: Back to the Garden, games

I started working on my Sunken Treasure game idea. So far I've mostly been trying to figure out the game structure and goals.

Link | Tags: development, games, ideas, sketches, Sunken Treasure

Back to the Garden started out as an idea to make a series of games based on the music of Jason Webley.

Link | Tags: Back to the Garden, development, games

I've begun noticing the small details in my favorite games that make me want to keep playing them. Here are a couple of my observations:

Link | Tags: games, Makos, review, Rocket Mania, sound

I posted 'The Lake' today.

Link | Tags: games, site update, The Lake

The June issue (#111) of PSM featured an article titled "WARNING: Games are Under Attack!". The article presents the riduculous and irresponsible argument that buying used games will bring the industry to its knees.

Link | Tags: games, PSM, rant, review

I'm working on a new Flash game that should be ready in a few days.

Link | Tags: games, The Lake

Some ideas for new games that I came up with--Pumpkin's Dream, Donut Factory, etc.

Link | Tags: games, ideas

Roach Attack was the first complete computer game that I created. It began as a simple programming exercise to create a representation of a real-world relationship using only the mouse and a plain square. The program I wrote had a...

Link | Tags: development, games, Processing, Roach Attack