I produced this game really quickly and it was a great deal of fun to make, its aimed at a young market visually, but as you play it proves to actually be quite difficult (I’d forgotten how difficult hangman could actually be). The game is Stage3D accelerated Flash, again using the Starling framework (http://gamua.com/starling/) and again also using the scoreoid.com api for high scores.

It’s coming to mobile devices soon, but can be played online here: http://mrtobi.com/humpty/

Here’s a video showing it running on the iPad 2 with me explaining things briefly …

Big thanks to Andrew Rose for his suggestion with the game logo.

Some screenshots from the game …

Made with Stage3D enabled Flash, on the Starling framework (http://gamua.com/starling/) and uses Scoreoid (https://www.scoreoid.com/)for the high scores.

You can play it online here: http://mrtobi.com/princess_lake/

It’s available on the Nook here (I’ve gone with distributing it through a publisher): http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/princess-lake-difference-games-llc/1110692259?ean=2940043900142&itm=23
Coming soon to iOS as well(once Apple approve it).

A job he worked on recently involved taking a flat image and creating the lenticular image out of it to be used on soda cups sold at cinemas. The image is from one of the recent batman movies.

He had to separate each of the elements from the original image, while cloning in replacement parts of the background. Items were traced in illustrator then created as objects in a 3D space, textured and looked at from different angles, creating the 3D perspective (excuse the very simplified explanation).

Here’s the original shot he worked from:

Here’s a couple of shots showing the different textures used.
Rocks cloned out of the original image …

A new image created with all the rocks …

And an alpha mask created for the buildings so as to show a background cloud layer …

And here’s how the 3D objects looked …

And here’s a few details of the amount of work it took …

• 16 or so hours of cloning and touchups on texture maps before the 3D scene was started.
• There are 815 separate rocks and debris which were cut out by hand, assigned to matching 3D objects and moved individually into their own separate places in the 3D scene by hand, taking about 5 hours.
• Rendered 13 frames, taking 15 minutes per frame – 16000 x 12000 pixels.
• All together about 40 hours of work including PS work, 3D modelling and renders.

Here’s an animated gif showing each of the 3D frames.

Neat eh?! If you’re interested you can contact Warren Hyde here: warrenhyde[@]mac[.com]

Also here’s a special ‘Stereoscopic view’ of the 3D image, if you look at it while crossing your eyes, merging the two images together you’ll see it in 3D! (It’s a bit difficult but worth it once you see it).

I decided a modest budget of $10 a day at a mere $0.01 bid per click. The data I show is from only 3 days, though I’ve run it for a total of 5. Due to me stop/starting the campaign (I made a mistake), I’ve decided to only show the 3 days as the data is pretty consistent anyway. The game runs on pretty much all iOS platforms so I chose to advertise the ads in all spots available on iOS.

Here’s the ad I ran:

The game then links through to the games page in the app store: http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/waste/id520325735?mt=8

And here’s a couple of charts showing some data I collected from the advertising …

Even though my ad got 1,000 click throughs I can’t say the advertising made any real difference. The day before the ads started I sold 3, and the day after the ads stopped I sold 5. In the end the advertising cost more to run than the sales I made, so it was a loss. At least it gave me some experience in running ads.

So was it worth it? No.

For that particular project it’s just not worth it for the few people that would download it.

Stef Stivala made a few comments which prompted me to write further on the topic …

I simply don’t sell or distribute enough games on iOS for it to be worth it. ‘Waste’, my recent game, has only had something like 100 downloads. For the amount of effort it would take to get DSD2 remade, there are simply more important projects for me to focus on … cross platform is more important unless I REALLY want to make a project, which in this case doesn’t apply. I still want to port this to 3D to give it the treatment I originally wanted, but financially it’s not a good idea at the moment.

Yeah it’s a multifactor issue.

I never really expected Waste to sell well on iOS, the market is simply too flooded for me to stand out with the limited marketing I do. My real focus with it is the Nook market, where I currently see my only practical way of making money from mobile at the moment.

I could publish DSD-3D cross platform mobile with Flash, but the iPad 2+ is the only reliable platform it will play on, and there is no chance in hell the Nook hardware could run the 3D engine and the physics.

Waste has only just recently begun sale on the Nook, so I’m waiting on stats to judge the reaction to it. If it’s successful I will continue to focus on simpler gameplay in 2D aspects with my more ‘bread and butter’ style games.

I’ll still be continuing creating 3D games, like ‘Burn’ as that is a pet project I really want to do and will only run the iPad 2 or greater in terms of hardware. DSD-3D isn’t quite at the ‘I really want to make it’ stage.

Enjoy!

My recent game ‘Waste’ has been approved for the iOS store and is now for sale. To celebrate I quickly made a version that can also be played in a desktop web browser (I hadn’t thought to do it till today).

Can buy it from the app store here: http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/waste/id520325735?mt=8

You can play it for free online here (ad supported): http://mrtobi.com/waste/

The game is made with the Starling Framework. http://gamua.com/starling/

For the high score engine I used Scoreoid, a super easy API that’s not tied to any platform: https://www.scoreoid.com/

Here’s some screenshots showing how the game turned out:

You can check out all the pages in high res at my flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/terrypaton/sets/72157629878639119/

Or view this slideshow:

Here’s some of my favourite pages from this sketchbook:

And as usual if you want to see the rest of my sketchbooks, you can find them all here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/terrypaton/collections/72157623562011731/

A short video showing it in action, I’ve dropped out all 2D in this version and collection of objects doesn’t visually show yet.

In seeing this it’s led me to start considering changing the environment of the game slightly from what I’d originally done. If I want this to run on mobile the 3D objects are going to have to be fairly low poly, so the final conversion may end up looking a different style than the 2D version.

Made with Flash, using Flare3D and Stage3D