Markus

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    46

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Markus

  1. Posted

    Unfortunately my impression is that this is a problem not restricted to games journalism only, but journalism in general (just looking at the press coverage of the election campaigns here in Austria makes me sad). And it's always the topics closely related to oneself that you really start to notice how bad things are.

    Surely there's a small percentage of journalists with enough respect for themselves and their work, who don't invariably tend to always take the easiest route. I don't think the percentage has increased in any way though, which leads me to sadly conclude: there's just too few readers even noticing to make it worth the effort on a broader scale :/

  4. Posted

    We had an amazingly high amount of traffick the last few days, after a lot of blogs mentioned the game. Yay!

    The highscores have finally ventured into impenetrable regions though.

    I tried playing a few rounds with the tablet yesterday. Does indeed 'feel' good to play, but didn't help me score higher than 1.100.000 either.

  5. Posted

    Thank you for the kind comments!

    I'm happy the game is getting so much positive Feedback :)

    Neat idea. I like the atmosphere. You still have the negative "more to beat your high score" bug from your previous games if it's your first time playing or if you beat your high score that round, though.

    Oh, damnit. Gotta fix that. Thanks for pointing it out.

    Does your cloud generator work for every sprite you feed it?

    Yes. We used only 16x16 Icons for this game, because it turned out to be a pretty ideal size for this kind of game, and because they were a lot of fun to make :)

    Technically the cloud generator works for sprites in any resolution though.

    394,020

    How on earth can you possibly earn the 940,000+ required for a highscore?! As you get further into the game, the "time bonus" you get from each picture becomes nominal (it's so small it seems like it's subtracting time!).

    Practice ;)

    But seriously, the current highscores are even beyond every record we reached during development and testing.

    A slow computer also helps a bit, as does concentrating on the early icons, because they get you a lot more time bonus.

    My personal record is somewhere around 1.000.000, which might not get me into the highscorelist anymore either :shifty:

  6. Posted

    After launching our site some months ago and spending far too much time on contract work, Philipp and I finally finished our next little Flash game:

    coign of vantage

    http://www.bobblebrook.com/games/coign-of-vantage

    cov_screenshot_1.jpg

    Adjust your camera pointing at a 3D pixel cloud to form the icon shown in the upper right. The goal is to build as many icons as possible before time runs out.

    Please let us know what you think, and spread the word if you like it :)

    Markus

  7. Posted

    Thanks you very much for taking the time to give us such detailled feedback, Noyb!

    Lots of useful input.

    If you set a personal high score, the high score screen tells you that you need negative points to beat your personal best.

    Oh! I'll take a look at the highscore-script - quite an embarrassing bug *cough*

    I would have liked a level select screen instead of a simple new game/continue.

    You're absolutely right, still I don't know if there's a great motivation to replay certain levels in a game that - like Twizzle - doesn't count any kind of highscore. On the other hand, some kind of Level Editor would fit the concept quite well, I think.

    I'm not entirely sure the arrow keys were the best choice of controls, since I tend to think of them as straight x/y movement and not the slightly more abstract polar movement. Then again, you'd still be dealing with the relative positions of whatever different keys you'd choose, and choosing "up" as moving outward does reinforce that outward movement is important.

    We've been contemplating which keys to use for a little while (tested a few different setups), but since the playing-field rotates all the time, we found that every setup felt somewhat wrong in certain situations. In the end, Up/Down still seemed to be the least confusing one, although I admit we didn't get many opinions on this before releasing the game.

    Dude! I was in Vienna like 2 weeks ago (I was working at Avaloop for a week). We could have totally met up. Fail.

    Ah, damn. Well, it's not like you already knew you had any forum-members here :)

    What did you work on (in case you can talk about it)? Philipp, my colleague here at bobblebrook, programmed the first prototype for Papermint at Avaloop in 2004.

  8. Posted

    Marek: Thank you! :)

    Hey, you guys looking for some flash game makers? Freelancers?

    As much as I'd love to just shout "Yes!", the truth is: we don't know yet. Next weeks and months will be lots of collecting statistics and calculating scenarios, which will then give as a clearer outlook on possible ways to go. But right now we don't even know ourselves yet, whether we're going to stay as a team of two and focus solely on our own games, or rather think a bit more expansive with lots of games and developers.

    I'm doing a few games right now on the side and looking to keep doing it while I travel/live in Europe this summer and am open for more work (and might have some to provide myself if all goes well.)

    Sounds great! Will your trip through Europe lead you to Vienna as well? Make sure to pay us a visit when you're here!

  9. Posted

    Hey,

    been a long time since my last visit to the forums, but here's the reason Exciting News:

    I've quit my job some months ago to team up with an old friend of mine and take our first coy steps into the jolly realms of game development! For starts we're mainly doing small Flash-Games and only just launched our website with three small games: www.bobblebrook.com

    Right now we're still pretty occupied with doing various media-related jobs (ranging from Flash-Development to TV-Advertisements) to make at least enough money to pay the rent. The plan for the next months now is reaching a point where we will be able to create Flash-Games on a fairly regular basis of about one game a month, while trying to also develop one bigger and far more ambitious (not browser-based, probably) game a year.

    Please don't expect too much yet though, the site lacks a lot of content (there'll be a developer-blog coming for example) and we're just trying to get the hang of game production, so existing games might be a little shy on daring design-concepts and still have a rough edge or two, but yeah, I'm pretty excited about all this - mainly about finally having the guts to try and make games for a living - and happy to share the news, as well as excited about getting some feedback on our work so far!

    I hope it's not inappropriate to spam the link here - if so, I apologise, and please feel free to delete the thread.

    So, I'm off now to read all the new articles I've missed in the last months - good to see Idle Thumbs has become more active lately!

  10. Posted

    Oddly for me it was a game that just clicked, almost all the rhythms seemed natural (damn you offbeat Ready Steady Go!) so I didn't have that great a difficulty.

    Unfortunately, I have absolutely no natural feeling for rhythm whatsoever. I'm even bad at masturbating.

    Still, I managed to finish the game on easy mode at least. And I will keep on trying till I've beaten "insane" too, even if it takes me years to do so.

  16. Posted

    Hey, cool, not such a long shot then. Do you know Lev or Barbara over there? Good people.

    Those are the two I meant.

    While studying, I had Lev as a game design teacher for some time, and i know Barbara through one of my friends. Vienna is tiny :)

    Where do you know each other from - GDC probably?

  17. Posted

    Hang on. Do you know a game company called Avaloop? (Long shot. Just curious.)

    Yes.

    One of my best friends has been working there for a few months.

    Also, I know two of their current employees, although with "know" i mean: met them once or twice in my life.

  18. Posted

    I'm working for a New Media Agency in Vienna - began as graphic designer only, but doing more and more programming and development work in Flash now.

    Some of my work includes branded games, although this means the more or less boring kind (learning games for kids, different kinds of quizzes, memory etc.).

    I am experimenting with browser based (Flash, mainly) games in my free time, but i just don't seem to have enough time to finish one of them. Still, this is something i seriously want to expand, and will find a way to do so.

  20. Posted

    Also, I'd like to see some kind of amalgamation of the arcade and SNES versions of Turtles in Time. The four player fun and speech of the arcade, but the extra levels and bosses of the SNES version.

    Oh yes!

    I have some nice memories of Knights of the Round too, but they get punched in the stomach (from behind!) by the frustrating memories everytime i think about the game. Also, i never managed to use the horse to my advantage. The armour upgrades were great, though.

  23. Posted

    A definite purchase. 100% completion in the last one means they did something right.

    Same here.

    And OMG Yuzo Koshiro! Shinobi on Game Gear was the most important Soundtrack of my entire childhood! Even today i seem to remember every music to every stage and boss.