Browsing Interviews Category Archives

Platform-adventure game Wrath of Anubis launched on Candystand and viral sites a few weeks ago — the game features dozens of levels of mummy-avoiding, tomb-exploring and gem-collecting entertainment, and we were lucky enough to snag a quick interview with the game’s developer, Jeff Louie at JFlashGaming. Read on to get a glimpse inside the game developer’s mind.

Tell us about the development of Wrath of Anubis – when did you start development?
It’s been about 6 months since I started tinkering around with the engine that powers the final build of the game. After developing a level editor and playable character, the game elements were slowly added. However, most of the development time was spent on creating the individual levels that fill the three worlds of Wrath of Anubis. Much care was taken ensuring the player is not overwhelmed by difficult or underwhelmed by a slow-paced game. I believe the current version has a nice balance between the two.

Why Egypt?
Wrath of Anubis was originally just a tech demo for a tile-based platformer. I experimented with different movement and jumping mechanics that are the basis of Wrath of Anubis. Incidentally, I included yellow bricks as wall and ground tiles and the game was formed around that.

Jeff used this playable tech demo to find an artist for the final version of the game.

What are you working on next?
Right now I’m looking in to incorporating new themes into the platformer genre. Re-working some of the code in Wrath of Anubis and implementing some enemy path finding has created some interesting possibilities. Without giving out all my ideas, just think how awesome “platforming zombies” would be. And no, right now I don’t even know what that fully means.

What are some games you’ve been playing lately? Any cool things you see happening?
Jayisgames.com just wrapped up their user-voted top games of the year segment. It’s nice to have a list of the top games in each category and see what gameplay innovations have been introduced. This is especially important for a game designer to see what others have done which is hard given the sheer amount of flash games released.

As for console games, I have been working hard levelling up my character in Modern Warfare 2. However, like many others, I am also getting torn apart by the gamers online. Oh well, I’ll get better some time!

Play Wrath of Anubis now >

We’re gearing up for the launch of this week’s new release, R.I.F.T.! The puzzle-platformer will debut on Candystand.com Thursday morning, along with brand-new trophies. We had a chance to interview lead designer Jan Rigerl about the game.

“I knew I wanted to create a platform game and I wanted portals in it, also I wanted some weird maybe slightly disturbing humor in it… We wanted a robot with tracks and big arms to grab boxes, only after the graphics were done and we put it into the game did we realize that it looked a lot like Wall-E.”

Read the full interview after the jump >
Continue Reading…

We’re launching Cluster Lander in just a few short weeks, and getting pumped up about it with videos and now an interview with developers Mariano Larronde and Santiago Puente (they’re starting a company called Diro-Diro). Check out details about Cluster Lander’s development, inspiration and what’s next for the guys.

So how was Cluster Lander born?
Cluster Lander is the first step of a very large project we’ve been planning for a few years. We’ve been studying and slowly building a game engine that will be the base for our next games.

Mariano and I got together about two years ago with the idea of making a spaceship combat game. At that time we were planning to use the little ships to create a website-game that let the users fly around the site and that way promote our advergames.

I remember that it took us about 8 hours just to get a missile-like spaceship moving around the screen. We didn’t know anything about physics or vectors math so we soon realised that if we wanted to create the game that we were aiming for we had to study VERY hard (I didn’t even know any programming language).

Six months later we had a very basic physics engine and many prototypes for ships. Of the many ships we tried, we decided to go with a Lander since it was the easier one to implement (our physics engine was too basic).

The first version can be seen at http://www.lebox.com.ar/. The game was much more fun than we expected so we decided to make it a full game. That’s how Cluster Lander was born.

What kind of games influenced Cluster Lander’s development?
Any 2D game that has a spaceship in it had some kind of inspiration on us. Gravitation – a net-yaroze game for PSOne – was awesome, Lunar lander and asteroid’s type of ship movement of course, but also classic flash games like Monkey Lander and UFO-Joe.

One of the coolest features of Cluster Lander is the ability to save/share ghost runs – where did that come from?
The idea of the Ghosts comes from the need of giving the player more incentive to keep improving their flying skills. This game is all about ship control and there’s not a better way to improve than to compare against previous runs. Many games use Ghost Replays for this kind of training but what’s great about Flash is that players can share their replays extremely easily with just a few clicks.

Combat with intense bullet dodging also helps!

So what’s next?
We have lots of plans to improve the engine, especially the graphics and physics… and audio (yeah, we know, that’s almost everything…). We are going to build this big project in parts. Each part is a game, and the first one is Cluster Lander.

What are Diro-Diro’s recommended games?
We’ve been playing lots of indie games. Gratuitous Space Battles looks awesome. Fantastic Contraptions is one of the best for us.

All time best: Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu (the first one), StarFox, Poy Poy 2 (!!!), Mario 64, the first Gran Turismos, Forsaken.

Did you know that one of our most popular games was developed by a high schooler? It impressed us, too — match-the-painting puzzler Copy Cat on Candystand.com launched just over a month ago and has already garnered serious praise from sites such as Jay is Games and Gamezebo. We were able to have a quick chat with the developer himself, Adam Abeshouse, in between finishing his senior year and applying to colleges. Check out the interview below!

Tell us about the development of Copy Cat. 
I started development after I came up with the idea on a college visit last February. I had been tossing around the idea of reverse-engineering something for a couple of months and all of a sudden in a car ride, the idea for Copy Cat hit me. I worked non-stop on the main game for about 5 or 6 months, then finished up the level editor in a few weeks. It was tough a lot of the time because I had to balance my school workload and it was a pretty large project.

What kinds of games inspired you to create the game?
I was heavily inspired by the reverse-engineering theme of Bart Bonte’s great Factory Balls. More abstractly, I was inspired by the trend of “physics games” to give the player a sort of sandbox environment in which anything goes to complete the puzzle. With Copy Cat, I wanted to do the same by giving the player an ultimate goal and any number of ways to get there.

What are you working on next?
Right now I’m throwing around ideas about an online board game-type puzzler (think Minesweeper) and I’m working on a game inspired by some things I’ve learned in Physics.

What are your favorite games to play?
My favorite games are of the genre “puzzle-platformer.” For the last few months I’ve been completely obsessed with Jonathan Blow’s “Braid.” I also really enjoy most things by Edmund McMillen, most recently Spewer, and I’m a big fan of so-called “art game” developers, like Jason Rohrer, Gregory Weir, and Daniel Benmergui. I have also really been into Tom Sennett and Matt Thorson’s “RunMan: Race Across the World,” and Erik Svedang’s “Blueberry Garden.”

Play Copy Cat now >

Download Copy Cat for the iPhone/iPod Touch >