Infinite Tower Defense final playtest

Today I am launching the beta version of a game I created called Infinite Tower Defense. The game is created using Unity3D for my master thesis as part of my studies at the IT University of Copenhagen.

I need lots of playtesters! You can be one of them! There is no prize, other then bragging to your friends that you made it into the top 10 highscores list, that you got more achievements then they got and knowing that you contributed to improving this game.

What are you waiting for? Head to the playtest page, read it very carefully, play the game as long as you can last then answer the short questionnaire that I provided there.

Your contribution to science will be invaluable, since the game is constantly evolving to adapt to your strategy through use of genetic algorithms and more. Will this really provide an infinite gameplay experience? Play the game today and watch this blog in about two weeks to see the results of your accumulated efforts, brave playtesters. And, a big THANK YOU to all of you!

Infinite Tower Defense results

Thank you to all play testers who in the last 2 weeks played the first version of my game, Infinite Tower Defense. I got excellent feedback and suggestions from you. We learned a lot from you and we really enjoyed having you play the game. It is always interesting and fun to see new crazy innovative strategies to beat the game.

As promised in my announcement post, three players that offered the best feedback will have their names included in the credits section of the game (with their permission). These people will be contacted by me in person and you will all see their names in the second release of the game.

The results of the playtest are officially in. You can download a pdf file with all the fancy statistics here. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of reading 8 pages of playtest results, I give you the most interesting right here:

- playtest duration: 10 days
- unique testers: 48
- completed surveys: 34
- gameplay sessions: 126
- countries where the game was played: 16
- country with most players: Romania (35%)
- longest game session: 2h 15m
- most time spent playing in one day by one player: 7h 10m
- total time played: 2d 5h 32m
- top highscore: 557849
- average score: 22700
- average game rating: 6/10
- most battled enemy waves in one game: 132
- average enemy waves battled in one game: 18
- highest difficulty level reached: 83/100

Keep an eye on my blog for the announcement of the second, improved version of the game which I will release in June. I took the game down up until then, but if you still feel like playing a Tower Defense game in the mean time, I recommend my all time favorite,  Gemcraft.

Infinite Tower Defense

Today I am launching the first version of a game I created called Infinite Tower Defense. The game is created using Unity3D for my master thesis as part of my studies at the IT University of Copenhagen.

I need lots of playtesters! You can be one of them! There is no prize, other then bragging to your friends that you made it into the top 10 highscores list and knowing that you contributed to improving this game. The game will be up online for a week and using the results I will gather from this test I will release a second, hopefully much better version of the game.

What are you waiting for? Head to the playtest page, read it very carefully, play the game as long as you can last then answer the short questionnaire that I provided there. The top 3 persons to provide the best feedback will be listed in the game’s credits section.

Your contribution to science will be invaluable, since the game is constantly evolving to adapt to your strategy through use of genetic algorithms and more. Will this really provide an infinite gameplay experience? Play the game today and watch this blog in about two weeks to see the results of your accumulated efforts, brave playtesters. And, a big THANK YOU to all of you!

Quick tip: I recommend you read the instructions provided in the game’s main menu before playing the game.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

Escape from Planet Zombie - one of my popular games

 

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,600 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 5 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 31 posts. There were 6 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 577kb.

The busiest day of the year was March 15th with 114 views. The most popular post that day was Stumbled Upon – Links Experiment #1.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, planetblender.org, facebook.com, gameblender.org, and unityusersgroup.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for animation production pipeline, production pipeline, blender unity3d, elvis alistar, and unity3d blender.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Stumbled Upon – Links Experiment #1 March 2010
4 comments

2

Unity 3D game publishing January 2010
9 comments

3

Short Animation Production Pipeline January 2009
1 comment

4

Blender + Unity3D = Great game December 2009
2 comments

5

Blender, Unity3D and Unreal engines November 2009
4 comments

Unity 3.0 and Sophie’s DreamLeap

As part of my Master in Games studies at the IT University of Copenhagen I get the chance to work with incredibly talented students to create some great games. As a collaboration between my University and DADIU (The Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment), I get to create two games for 22.5 ECTS that will replace two of my electives. For each game we receive some general constraints from DADIU, but there is still room for a lot of creativity.

The first game I created in collaboration with 14 other students during the course of one month (May 2010) is Sophie’s DreamLeap, a game targeted to 5-7 year old kids.  You might have to install Unity’s Webplayer plug-in if you don’t have it already, but it’s free and it gives you the opportunity to play awesome games directly into your browser. For a list of other games created by other teams during the same period of time, check this link. The second game will be created in March 2011, so stay tuned to find out more details.

All games were created with the free game engine Unity 2.6. Unity is a great, fast, powerful game development tool and I totally recommend it to everyone who wants to get started creating games and to professionals alike. And now, for the great news: Unity 3.0 was released today. It has so many new features and additions that it makes my heart beat faster. Right now, I am the happiest game programmer on Earth. For most indie developers out there and for well established companies alike, Unity is a dream came true. Check the success that the game Limbo has, just as an example. The best part for me, is that in the new version of Unity, you write your code once and then you deploy your game on all of the biggest platforms, including PC, Mac, Xbox, PS3, Wii, iPhone and Android. What are you waiting for? Go download your version of Unity and start creating incredible games.

5 minutes PS3 reviews

PS3 - you gotta love it!

A very good friend of mine started a new blog called “5 minutes PS3 reviews“. If you are one of those busy people who own a PS3 but don’t have the time to sit and read through lengthy game reviews on dedicated websites and you are not sure which PS3 game to buy next, then this blog might be just the inspiration resource you were looking for.

Other then being a true, dedicated gamer, my friend is also very good at writing. It’s worth reading his game reviews just for the clear, professional, fun way they are written in. What are you waiting for? Click here and give it a try!

Stumbled Upon – Links Experiment #1

A few weeks ago I discovered StumbleUpon. If you wonder what StumbleUpon is or what it does, then read the following description (directly taken from their website):

“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 8 million+ other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”

When I first read this, I thought: Hmm…is this really true? And then I tried it for myself! The good thing about the website is that you can actually test it without having an user account. Of course, creating a user account gives you the opportunity to refine your personal preferences and receive even more high-quality specific content from the internet. The “bad” thing about this is the fact that it requires a lot of free time on your part and it can create addiction to it (so, be warned before trying this or creating an account).

This first experiment consists of me sharing links to some of the webpages that I found particularly good, funny or interesting (of course, these were chosen according to my personal taste). If you like these links and you have a StumbleUpon account (or have created one) and you want to receive regular updates about pages that I like, you can subscribe to my account on StumbleUpon (search for the user: elvishstar). That being said, here are the links:

1. Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish

2. Wolfram|Alpha

3. CIRQUE DU SOLEIL

4. The People Search Engine – Whoozy

5. Neave Webcam …play with webcam effects

6. Skinput: because touchscreens never felt right anyway

7. Dropbox – Home – Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy

8. Gamasutra – The Art & Business of Making Games

9. Blendswap.com Come swap some blends with friends

10. Joel on Software

11. Microsoft Pivot

12. The Kings Singers – Masterpiece

13. Arimaa – The next challenge

14. 99 Amazing Widescreen Wallpapers To Spice Up Your Desktop

15. Photo Manipulation At Its Finest

16. Planet-Tolkien.com

17. Open Source Windows

18. I will survive

19. 33 Striking Differences Between Winners And Losers

20. So You Wanna Work in Movies

21. MetaGlossary.com

22. Dolmetsch Online – Music Theory Online

23. Antipodes Map

24. Thirteen1: The Online Games Magazine

25. Toyota human touch

26. http://www.linuxkungfu.org/images/fun/geek/project.jpg

27. SermonAudio.com

28. one hundred push ups

29. “Chocolate Rain” Original Song by Tay Zonday

30. file-swap.com is fun: Give one file – get one free!

31. Best RSS Reader News Aggregator – FeedDemon for Windows

32. Metacritic

33. Stunning photographs of animals inside womb

34. Instructables – Make, How To, and DIY

35. Amazing Guitarist

36. The Big Picture

37. Can You Run It

38. EYEZMAZE –FLASH GAME–

39. Kickstarter

40. Films | Participant Media

41. Worlds Most Amazing Musical Instrument

42. Ukulele kid

43. What if Mario Wasnt a Plumber

44. Hang Drum

Nordic Game Jam

It’s been one month since Nordic Game Jam ended, but it fells like it was only yesterday. Nordic Game Jam is part of the Global Game Jam, a competition where professional and indie developers spent 48 hours creating a game with a specific theme and requirements. Nordic Game Jam took place in Copenhagen, Denmark and it brought together  developers from all Nordic European countries.

This year’s Game Jam theme was: deception. As an additional constraint, each game had to include one of the following: a key, a monkey and a donkey. 48 games were created and the quality of most of them surpassed my expectations.

My top 3 of the games created here:

1. Only one can ride the donkey – download and play this one with your friends

2. GrappleGrapple

3. Berserker Breakfast

My team created a game called: We, Ourselves and Us. It’s a complex and twisted game for 4 players on the same computer (Xbox controllers are recommended). The main character is a patient in an asylum. Each one of the players controls one of the four personalities of this patient. There is a good personality and three bad personalities. They all try to take a hold of the patient mind. Would you manage to get the patient out of the asylum as the good personality or will you destroy it as a bad one?

Crunch time

The game was created using Unity Professional. We were six guys in the team: 2 game designers, 2 artists and 2 programmers. We didn’t knew each other before, but we got along and worked together very well. A Game Jam is such a great opportunity for meeting new people and networking. If you ever get a chance of participating in a Game Jam, don’t miss the chance. It’s definitely worth it!

Unity 3D game publishing

The first complete 3D game that I (along with another 4 students) created entirely using the Unity game engine is called Escape from Planet Zombie. Now, this game was created as a semester project for a Game Design course. It is a complete game, though we are still working on tweaking some parameters to make it even better. But, it’s not the game I want to tell you about. As a game developer using Unity to create games I was wondering what are the possibilities to get the game published somewhere where people could easily find it and play it. Of course, I could host the game myself, but then I will have needed to do a lot of marketing to get the game some exposure. After doing some research I found two good solutions.

1. Wooglie

Wooglie is a game portal that is hosting only games created with Unity. Any Unity indie developer or professional can submit their game to this portal for free. The game will go through a review process (takes 2 days at most) and if accepted, then your game is hosted for free for an unlimited time. If your game still needs some work, it will still be posted in the “In development” games section of the website and you will get an e-mail from one of the reviewers telling you what your game needs in order to make it to the category you wanted it submitted. The website is well known among Unity developers and game players, so other then free hosting you will get your game voted and a lot of feedback. You can try Escape from Planet Zombie on Wooglie right now to get a glimpse of how the website looks and how it runs. You will have to install Unity’s Web Player plug-in in order to play the game.

2. dimeRocker

dimeRocker is even more interesting and appealing, at least from a developer’s point of view. As they say on their website: “dimeRocker is a self-publishing platform enriched with turn-key API designed to enable independent Unity game developers to deploy, monetize and grow traffic for their 3D multiplayer games across the social web (Facebook, mySpace, etc.)”. Their mantra is: “You concentrate on making great games. We’ll concentrate on making great tools to support them.”

Now, this sounds excellent, but it is actually working? I created an account to their website (it’s only in it’s beta stage, but rapidly growing and maturing), I downloaded their API, I created a new profile, read through the easy to follow, short documentation, added a few lines of code to my game, and magic happened: Escape from Planet Zombie can now be played on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/escape_planet_zombie/).  All that in a few hours. This dimeRocker API can only be integrated with Unity, but hey, Unity is great and it’s free. If you want to get up and running really fast creating and publishing nice looking games, give it a try right now!

One year of blogging!

I made it through! It has been one year since my humble attempt to writing a blog. It has been an interesting journey and I have learned a lot. I am not fit for being a hardcore blogger and my time doesn’t allow it either, so the statistics below may seem impressive only to me. Statistics are not exactly what mostly matters to me. This means that anytime I have something interesting to say or show to the world, you can bet I will post about it here.

With this special occasion I enabled individual post ratings for the blog. If you click on the name of a blog post to open it separately, you will see on the top of it a 5 star rating system. If you are reading my blog, I advise you to go back and see a retrospective of what I have posted so far. Rate every post you especially enjoyed reading and maybe leave a comment. That way I will know what you, my reader, enjoy the most and I can post more information about that specific information domain. It’s still a pity that WordPress doesn’t display ratings on the main blog with all the posts listing.

A few stats from the last year:

Total views: 5,421 – for individual country statistics check ClusterMaps here.

Busiest day: 160 — Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Posts: 25

Comments: 34

Categories: 13

Tags: 31

Top most viewed posts:

Short Animation Production Pipeline – 889 views

Dire Desire – the game – 417 views

I have been using Unity3D a lot in the last few months, so you can expect a few blog posts about it in the next few weeks.  But, until then, I wish you Happy Reading!