I’m here today to show you our awesome new teleportation shoot ‘em-up that is packed with innovative features – and it’s a game that YOU named!

Big Tease

Many moons ago we ran a mystery puzzle teaser here on the blog, the reveal of which invited you to suggest names for the game.* We can now reveal that there are FOUR winners who now have their names immortalised in the game, and each will win a promo code to download the game for free, or to share with a friend!

We had hundreds of entries, for which we were very grateful, and settled on ‘VELOCITY’, as it described the concept and gameplay very well – and is a cool word!

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Hello folks! James here from FuturLab, creators of the hit PlayStation minis game Coconut Dodge! Our newest game is quite different than Coconut Dodge, but there are some strong similarities:

1. A tried-and-tested game mechanic with a new twist
2. Extremely addictive gameplay
3. Quality throughout and value for money

These things have made Coconut Dodge one of the best scoring minis games so far. We learned a whole bunch of tricks making Coconut Dodge, and we’re applying the same level of care and attention to gameplay addictiveness on this project!

If that sounds good to you, read on!

September 7th, 2210

Vilio — the beating heart of the Toron nebula — exploded last September, becoming an ominous red giant in the process. Luckily, and somewhat miraculously, no one was hurt, though a galaxy wide electromagnetic pulse shuddered through our fleets, nullifying mining ships and colony vessels as well as our Special Forces fighters. Power and communication ceased instantly; those ships now survive on fossil fuels, remote and helpless. A rescue mission was launched in October; those craft are now expected to reach Toron in approximately ten months time. This much you know.

However, close monitoring has revealed that Villo has begun to collapse in on itself, the spectral red light bending inwards to form the beginnings of a black hole. The speed of collapse is debatable, but at best we expect Vilio to be a full-blown black hole within a matter of months.

As we expected, our director of operations was invited this morning to brief the government on the current state of our Quarp Drive project. It was concluded that all resources necessary for the completion of our testing period should be redirected as appropriate; their intention being to use our prototype Quarp Jet as the basis for an immediate rescue mission.

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Hi folks,

I didn’t think I would be back here so soon, but we’ve been hard at work creating a free update to Coconut Dodge!

It’s essentially a Director’s cut, as we’ve had a bit more time on our hands to add extra polish and extra features! We’ve also listened to all the feedback you’ve given us so far, and implemented a bunch of your suggestions

Here’s a list of the updates:

1) 3 Lives – This has been the most requested feature. The game is still a great challenge with three lives, and to reward you for playing the game without being hit, you’ll get 20,000 bonus points on levels 10, 20 and 30 if you manage to do it without being hit at all. So, the hardest of the hardcore will have the highest score

2) Quit and Restart from Pause menu. This is something we wanted to do initially, but didn’t have the time. It’s now in all modes of the game (gave something away there!) and works as expected!

3) A different SuperTurbo run animation. It’s faster, with bigger plumes of sand, so that you can tell easier when you’ve activated SuperTurbo speed.

4) A subtle sound effect for SuperTurbo. Again this helps to distinguish SuperTurbo from regular Turbo.

5) Easter Eggs. We’ve added a few easter eggs for you to find! – they are things that have been requested from the community over at www.pspminis.com. They are very easy to find, you just have to look beyond the boundaries of Maze Master

6) Level 10 Bug Fix. This one slipped through our QA and Sony’s QA because it is very rare. Sometimes Level 10 would have no coconuts in it at all. We managed to track down what was causing this bug after a few days non-stop play testing, and eliminated it! Yay!

7) Finally, two of the earlier mazes (from levels 1 and 2) are now featured in Maze Master, replacing mazes 6 and 13.
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Hello Again!

This is my third and final post in the series, and today I’m going to describe how we evolved our very first Flash game to a level worthy of publishing on PlayStation Store!

CONCEPT
Back in 2005 we were working on less-than-exciting Flash projects, and I was dreaming of making games.

One day I decided that it would be best to just start making a Flash game, so I started making Prism; a hugely complex project to attempt as a first game. Ambition and stupidity are hard to tell apart sometimes.

Meanwhile, Dan (Bibby) was watching me bang my head against the wall with all manner of collision detection horrors, and decided to go the opposite way and make a very simple Flash game instead. About three hours later he had the essential foundations of Coconut Dodge up and running. There was a crab, on a beach, dodging coconuts.

Despite the fact Dan firmly believed it looked beautiful, it wasn’t very pretty:

Seems we had the puns sorted early on. (more…)

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Hello again!

Today I’m going to spill the beans on how a bunch of Flash developers managed to become licensed to make games for PSP and PS3!

Contrary to popular belief, we didn’t have lots of games under our belt; none of us had worked on a commercial video game before, and none of us knew anything about C or C++.

What we did have was a great idea and the naïve enthusiasm to rock up to Sony’s Liverpool headquarters and present it in person.

It all started back in 2007 when I’d just finished building our Flash game engine, PRISM. We decided to use the engine to develop an idea I’d had at University. The idea was essentially a game that reaches outside of the console, with characters in the game contacting players through instant messaging, email and telephone calls.

You might have heard of this kind of game, it’s called an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG – pronounced A.R.G.).

So we used our engine to build a Flash demo and started looking for places that would fund and publish Flash games. This was before Kongregate and other portal sites existed, but we did find one company (which shall remain nameless) in the US who were offering to fund Flash games. We showed them our idea, including all the ARG stuff, and they essentially said:

“We love the little robot running around and shooting, but…not sure about all the email and text messaging – that all sounds a bit weird”.

Hmm. Bit disappointing, but their offer was a lot better than the Flash work we were doing at the time. Still, I had this nagging feeling that we could do better.
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