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bobblebrook

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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!

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Good luck man! It's a good environment for making games at the moment, especially web games. Doesn't mean it'll be easy, but you picked a good time to do this. Hope it will work out for you! :tup: :tup: :tup:

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I'm getting deja vu. Saw this on yayHooray. :shifty:

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

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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!

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Cool games. I saw the sheep one in a Jay Is Games competition a while back, but the other two are new to me.

Drifts reminds me of an orisinal game. Relaxing, although like orisinal, extended play always makes me notice the shallow difficulty curve. I love the music and background, and the gameplay works well.

It personally took me a bit of time before intuitively getting that my life was also tied to the green bubbles I picked up, so I was surprised the first few times I tried picking up a green bubble that was also touching a purple bubble. If you set a personal high score, the high score screen tells you that you need negative points to beat your personal best. I'm not a big fan of putting help screens in an animation, since each player would probably want to consume that information at his own pace. It went too slow for my tastes, but someone else might need more time.

Twizzle was fun. Neat concept. I liked the gradual introduction of new elements, the instant restart times, and saving the life-ending parts for the latter portion of the game. I loved the painted art level transitions and general sense of polish. I liked how there is room for both logic and reaction time puzzles in the gameplay. I would have liked a level select screen instead of a simple new game/continue. Some of the latter puzzles were a little too simple to solve since the player is only confronted with one or two productive first moves.

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.

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

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

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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.

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I did some game design consulting for Papermint. I remember that exchange, I just didn't remember it right before I went to Vienna. Oh well, maybe next time. :)

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