I’ve met my fair share of sponsors and developers. I have talked to many others. I get access to games early. This is my job. Yet there are still a handful of developers that when I even think about their upcoming games, I get all giggly inside and think how cool it is that I get access early. I won’t give you any names of who these developers are (I don’t think it would be appropriate), but their games are just so cool that I lose some of my professionalism and feel like a little kid. Those are the games that feel like the farthest thing from work.

Now, why do I bring any of this up? I do have a practical reason. There is 1 developer in particular who I was thinking about earlier today… because I’ve done some work on his games and done a walkthrough or two, yet never charged him for it. I just WANT to help him… no return needed. Plus, I still generate some revenue from the vids, so it’s not like it’s completely free. But I was analyzing the difference of how I feel about the games of this guy compared to my normal situation where I’m being compensated for my time and feedback. I was thinking about whether it’s right for me to not charge one person and charge others, purely because I like his stuff more. And I’m ok with it. The rationalization that makes the most sense to me is because I’m a fanboy. I have my share of my own between FFR, Kong, and YouTube, so I understand how they think and act… and my behavior is quite in line with that.

So I am still a fanboy of certain developers. And I like that I am.

PS – To any developer reading this… don’t get any ideas. .

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about FFR anymore… but the fact that I’m still getting about 5 comments a day on my FFR Lo-Down post, I felt I needed to do something for those fans aching for a place to call home. So I decided to purchase a vBulletin license and set up a forum.

To start, I have 2 forums… General and FFR People. General will be for anything… suggestions, feedback, bugs, what you had for breakfast… whatever. If I see certain things are requested (such as a Walkthroughs or Flash Game forum), I’ll add them. The FFR People forum will be for those former FFR users to congregate, meet up, talk about the good old days, that sort of thing.

Hopefully this will be beneficial to some folk. Take a look and register.

There are many categories of games. There are the obviously good games: creative idea, good graphics, solid content, well polished. There good games that aren’t well received. There are mediocre games that become popular anyway. There are games that are flat out awful… often 13 year olds first touching Flash and following some tutorial. But what I want to know is why developers decide to go ahead and release games that they know aren’t very good (for whatever reason), won’t do well, and likely will do nothing more than put a stain on their name.

Money is clearly not a reason, as games like this either won’t be sponsored or will be sponsored for very, very little and they’ll never get a payout on the in-game ads (ad companies have a minimum amount before they’ll cut you a check). Neither is notoriety or e-fame. I know that if I created something that I knew wasn’t very good, I’d keep it to myself… why do you think I haven’t posted my stick figure drawings or macaroni dioramas?

There are really only a few reasons I can think of to release a bad game (as opposed to keeping it all to yourself, tucked deep in the recesses of your hard drive). The most logical is feedback. A bad game is often the result of an unskilled developer… feedback is a great way to get unbiased information about your game and you as a developer that can help improvement moving forward. Another is the “why the hell not?” mentality. I’m sure some people feel that just because they made it, and there are sites where they can publish it, we all want to experience it… let me assure everyone that this is not the case. Just because I’ve had ants crawling all over my house doesn’t mean I want to eat them. Finally are those few jaded or naive people who actually think their content is good and just don’t understand why nobody else agrees… and we need to take away these people’s computers.

To give you an idea… there are almost 24,000 games on Kongregate. Around 210 of them (less than 1%) have a 4.00 or higher rating. Roughly 1100 are 3.50 or higher. Only 3500 games are even 3.00 or higher. And on the other spectrum, there are over 300 games at 1.75 or lower and about 3500 of the 2.00 or lower variety. Almost 14,000 are 2.50 or lower. So over 20,000 games were released that weren’t even rated as “average” by the masses (we’ll debate whether the Kong userbase is an accurate representation of the masses another time). Why? Why did these thousands of developers feel the need to upload their game in the first place, when they KNEW (or damn well should have) it wouldn’t be good. I wish I knew, because it really doesn’t make sense to me at all.

On Friday, Dan asked me to whip up some trailers for Armor’s 4 iPhone games.  I agreed, but always with that small pit in the back of my stomach that I get when I’m making trailers.  Before this weekend, I’d only produced 2 trailers…  1 for Gemcraft Ch0 and 1 for a not-very-popular Rudy Sudarto game.  When it comes to walkthroughs, I’m completely comfortable… the editing for them is straightforward, and no creativity is needed.  For trailers, however, it helps to have solid editing skills and creativity is definitely needed.

So Dan wanted me to make the trailers from actual iPhone footage, as opposed to screen-recorded play of iPhone versions of the games.  This created another issue, as I don’t have any sort of set-up for easily doing that.  Using some thin books and a pair of steady hands, I did my best to record a bunch of gameplay footage.  Then it was off to the editing room!  I went with a simple premise for each of the vids…  Intro, 4-5 screens of text followed by appropriate gameplay to match, End screen.  I tried to make them all funny, yet keep in line with the game itself.

Please watch them and give me feedback.  It will be most appreciated.  Especially if you tell me they don’t suck.  Click the “more” link directly below to get to the playlist embed (it has all 4 trailers in 1 embed):

(continue reading…)

Last March, I was fortunate enough to meet the entire Hero Interactive studio… Jared, Eric, and Steph. Cards were played, fun was had by all. Since then, I’ve done what I can to assist them on their games; my usual stuff… feedback, testing, walkthroughs. They seem to value my input and listen to my suggestions, which is always nice.

Today I was given the opportunity to test their long awaited BTTD. I’m not going to spoil anything or give much away… you’ll get to play it yourselves soon enough. But, what I really noticed was that I had very little to critique. It’s obvious right from the start how much work went into the game. Granted, they were able to learn from all the feedback from Pirate Defense… but actually doing it and doing it well is a feat worth praising.

What I will say is that the game is VERY hard. Like… VERY hard. At least for me. The easy levels are exactly that… easy. The medium levels aren’t hard either. But the difficulty jump on the hard levels is BAM. I spent a few hours messing around on a bunch of different hard levels, and beat exactly 1… imo, the easiest one (only hard until you figure out that specific level’s trick, something none of the other levels have). I’m hoping Jared will take some pity on me tomorrow and explain what I’m doing wrong to fail so miserably.

One note in my defense (read: an excuse)… I don’t juggle. If you watch my videos, you’ll notice every single TD video I have is no-juggle. The only times I’ve ever juggled is for The 100 on DTD and the 4-entrance spawn speed thing for DTD Pro, both of which were badge reqs that were 100% impossible to do without juggling. I will try something 100 times to try and do it without juggling (DTD Pro Scenario 23) before attempting it with juggling. I can juggle; I just abhor the micromanagement aspect of it… not to mention that I feel like I’m cheating every time I juggle.

So I don’t know how many vids you’ll be seeing from me on BTTD. I’d love to do them; I know Jared will feature them in-game and they’ll get a ton of views… I just don’t want to cop out and make juggling vids. Maybe he’ll appreciate my failures and accept my vids on easier levels… then take vids that other people make of the hardest levels with juggling and add those as well. It just really does feel like failure on my part, and that is not something I accept easily.

Most of you are now asking yourself, “Who is John Cooney?” John is more commonly known as Jmtb02 (John MounTain Bike 2002 *snicker*), and he is the Head of Game Development for Armor Games. Basically, he gets paid to go to an office and make flash games as well as oversee the progress of the rest of the in-house team. Now, why is he a machine? Since 2002, John has pumped out over 50 games. Think about that… FIFTY different games. Granted, there are a solid number of sequels, so you’re really talking 30-35 original concepts. But that is still an insane number of ideas that have not only manifested in his mind… but actually been worked on through to completion and release. So I tip my cap to this crazy machine of a developer. He also happens to be a really cool dude… just don’t IM him randomly with nothing to say, he doesn’t like that (really, we ALL dislike it… but again, topic for another day).

Also, a slightly disappointing development took place this week. John released his newest game, I Hate Traffic, to much fanfare and rejoicing. The disappointment is that I had been talking to him for a few weeks about the progress on the game… but apparently there was some miscommunication between us that led to him releasing it without giving me an opportunity to test it, give feedback, and get a walkthrough prepped. In the scope of things, no biggie, but it was a bit disappointing in that the game wound up being released with a memory leak in it that I spotted within 5 minutes of playing. John found it quickly after I described what I thought was causing it, and it was promptly fixed… but I’m sure everyone would have rather caught it before it was public.

In more Armor Games news… I’m REALLY looking forward to getting my hands on Joey’s upcoming puzzle platformer (or phuzzle, I forget which). I can just picture Joey sitting in his chair, lollipop stick embedded in his keyboard, cackling at my inevitable frustration from his devious creations.

I really don’t think I can say it enough times… the guys at Armor are amazing. Not only were they the first guys to work with me on walkthroughs, but they continue to help me out and hook me up. I was just trying to assist John and Joey, giving some feedback and advice on their upcoming games… and Dan sends me a nice chunk of cash. Completely out of the blue. I’ve tried to do what I can to return the favors… running Poker Night in San Fran, sending a Candy Basket… gotta figure something else out now. Maybe they want bowling lessons?

So, yeah. Make sure to play all your games on Armor, because they’re the coolest guys I know (note: nothing against all the other really cool guys I know and work with). And check out Joey’s game that I helped out on, The Competitor.

-Tass