Analysis
Game Flow Study
This post is a quick visual experiment to observe UX flow for the following three games.
Dad n’ Me
Dad n’ Me (DnM) is a multi-level, side-scroll, smash and bash game from Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp. Wearing a white mask, one plays as the purple biped beating and bullying kids. The player can interact with the environment like picking and throwing elements or exploding them by punching it. DnM also features a mini-soccer game which provides good game-play variation. As of today, the game has received over 15 million game plays and has been well received by the Newgrounds community.
Studying the user-experience flow of DnM, this game has a large number of stopping screens. This is probably because the game art assets were updated later to accommodate new information. The updated splash and end pages of the game serves as a callout box to the release of the console game by the same creators. Both the intro animations and the death animation are well integrated into the story.
Cannon Bods
Cannon Bods is matching game at heart, where one has to shoot matching pirates out of a cannon to the parachuting pirates raining from the sky. Use the mouse to control the angle and strength of the cannon shots and create a chain reaction with well placed pirates that rebound off the edge causing more damage. The game is filled with a few surprises and is worth a good casual game. As of today, the game has received over 186k game plays.
Looking at the user-experience flow of Cannon Bods, the starting experience contains two advertisements and the gamer previews the splash. The game requires at least three clicks to get to the game-play.
Portal Defender
Portal Defender is a hack-n-slash side scroll game that pays homage to Castle Crashing the Beard and Pico Blast. One gets to play as Tom Fulp, Dan Paladin or unlock any of the remaining four players. Using a variety of moves, fight a large range of bad guys and mini bosses. The game has received over two million game-plays.
For a game with a well-deserved long play, Portal Defender can be justified for it’s relatively large number of screens before game-play. The end animation is very simple and gives the user the choice to jump back to the character selection page. This offer the gamer a variety of choices with these mixed game variables.
Studying these there games, we can point out that all the three games have a bunch of screen stoppers that serves as a marketing/ad-revenue generating model. This is a necessity as it is one of the many ways to monetize indie-based web games. I guess the big challenge for game designers is to find a good balance of UX and screen stoppers.The basic need to fulfill this requirement would be to create a smooth and uninterrupted game UX, yet be profitable to the developer.
Game Concept – King Solomon’s Mines
King Solomon’s Mines (KSM) is a game concept based off the book by the very same name. Here one gets to play as the protagonist in search of the fabled treasure of King Solomon. The game concept also draws a lot of influence from God of War 3 that puts a huge emphasis on making the player feel minuscule yet powerful as Kratos (the protagonist) compared to the rest of the world and its elements.
KSM is a side scroller 2D pixel-style game with a multitude of enemies and equal number of special combo moves as the player hacks and slashes his way though the kingdom in search of treasures.
KSM is only a test game and will be made with Stencyl (Flash game maker). Working on this mini project would give me an opportunity to collaborate with other Stencyl behavior programmers and strengthen my knowledge on how to make a solid game with Stencyl.
Everything, By Everyone
Last August a few of us Newgrounds followers had caught up with Nathan, an indie film maker for a documentary film on Newgrounds and the Interbutt. It was an interesting interview in which Nathan asked us what got us into animation, the earliest memories of Newgrounds and where we thought this medium would be taking us.
Recently, Nate mailed saying that he’s uploading his documentary to Kickstarter, asking netizens of the Interbutt to help fund his movie. We spoke about other ways to get this message out there so that more people could support this project. My friend and I have been working on a concept to make this message go a bit more viral. We’re also on a tight deadline to get this completed before the Kickstarter deadline. (Project funding closes on September 1, 11:59 pm EDT)
The concept is quite simple: one plays as Nate, the Indie(ana) Jones who is being chased by this big boulder of time to get all the funding he needs for his project. He needs to collect every little gem he comes across and avoid pitfalls and dodge objects that come across his way.
After we worked out a list of art and animation assets to be made, I roughed out some concept art for the game play and dived right into the style that I wanted the game to look like. First targeting the character designs, turnarounds and run cycle.
Now Nate doesn’t look anything like the character and I felt that I really needed to tweak the art style or do a completely different approach to make the character look more like the reference. Deciding to go 8-bit style, I was able to get Indie to look exactly like Nate… 
For the technically curious, Pixel Tools, v2.0 pixel plugin by the neuroscientist Patrick Mineault, is a boon to Flash artists/animators everywhere. I was able to work around the bug that kept crashing Flash.
This game style is a bit new to me as I haven’t worked much on this patience-draining-yet-worth-every-second art approach.
Will keep you posted on further updates.
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