I wrote some more code to check you’re driving the right way round the track and count laps completed. The game engine code is still pretty rough, there are some collision detection glitches that need fixing, but I’m not too worried about little details like that at the moment.

The finished track artwork for the first track is currently about 50% finished. It’s taking a long time to get the first one completed (about 3 full days so far), following that there will be components I can reuse, plus I’ll be able to streamline the process and get remaining tracks artworked much quicker (hopefully). At least it’s finally starting to look somewhat like a game now, rather than just having flat grey and green for the track and grass. There’s still a fair way to go before you’ll get a proper idea of what the finished game might look like, but it should at least give you a flavour.

That’s pretty much it for now. I’m hoping to have the first track artwork complete before the end of the week, who knows though because I’m off for a long weekend then, so I’ve got other things to sort out. Anyway, here’s the latest video of the game as it stands now:

Most of the car game mechanics are in and working (if a little buggy). plus the different car attributes are working, which you’ll be able to buy as upgrades in the garage between races (assuming you’ve collected enough money).

I’ve set up a rough test track in the video below, although this is not finished track artwork it’s purely for testing purposes. As you can see the different upgrades affect the car’s top speed, acceleration and the way the car handles. If you want a bit of fun, you can go to top speed, acceleration and brakes, then you’ll need to brake hard for corners and go drifting round them. Tyre upgrades will give you more traction and stop you ending up in the barriers.

Although as I said before the main inspiration for starting development on this game was playing Supercars 2 on my old Commodore Amiga, there are going to be no weapons. A pure top view racing game just seemed like the best way to go, especially as there aren’t any decent free Flash ones.

Anyway, here’s the video, hopefully the first of many. I’ll try and post regular updates as development gets moving.

We’ve had a few enquiries over the last few months from bands looking into advergames to promote their music, but getting a custom advergame is usually beyond their budget. So, we’ve decided to offer bands/labels on a budget the opportunity to get the huge exposure offered by advergames without the cost of getting a custom game developed.

From £500 you can get a music track of your choice (or short loop from a track) featured as background music in one of our self-published free-to-play online games. You’ll also get a prominent credit/link back to your website (‘Music by Your Band Name’).

The potential audience is huge. All our games get distributed to our extensive database of worldwide online gaming websites and often achieve millions of plays. This translates into millions of people hearing your music and having the opportunity to click a link to your website to find out more and buy your CD or download your music. What other form of music marketing could get you in front of that size of audience for that kind of money? Also, once the game is released it can continue to get players for years, meaning it’ll continue to promote your band/music over the longer term.

We only release a small number of games per year, so places are very limited and will be filled on a first come first served basis (assuming there is a game in development that suits your style of music). So, please register your interest by contacting us now with the name of your band, genre of music you play, specific track you would like to have included and a link to your website (or Myspace page) where we can hear it.

I’m hoping most of the main artwork will be close to finished come the end of the week. Then  next week it’s on to track designs, with coding beginning in a couple of weeks time, assuming no other commissioned game projects come up in the meantime.

If you haven’t already picked it up from the post title, the game will be called ‘Supercar Road Racer’. I’m hoping to put together around 12 tracks and have ditched the idea of having weapons in favour of making it a pure racing game (maybe adding weapons could be a possibility for a sequel).

Please feel free to make any suggestions you’d like to see in the finished game. I’ll try and read all comments. We may also be looking for volunteers to help with beta testing the game further down the line, if you’re interested in getting involved, just let me know. Anyway, I’d better get back to working on this and I’ll hopefully try and post some screen shots as soon as artwork is finalised.

The game’s currently in the early stages of development (with just the concept and a small amount of artwork done so far), expected to take around a month to put together. Some of the features we’re hoping to include are:

Large, scrolling art based tracks – I toyed with the idea of making it tile based, then ended up dismissing the idea, just because after trying it out on paper I realised it’s too restricting, and the play area won’t be more than 4 screens big. So the massive number of tiles needed would just make it more complicated to put together with no memory saving or speed increase.

Around 12 tracks to play – I wanted to make it more like the old style arcade games, rather than the tendency for Flash games to make each level independent and unlock them as you go. So it’s going to have around 12 tracks that you play through from start to finish, each game being different depending on what choices you make (upgrades etc.)

Garage – As well as racing the other cars, you’ll need to collect cash that appears on the track along the way. At the end of each race you’ll be able to spend the money in the garage. This is where you can have some fun upgrading your car. Planned upgrades so far are engine tuning (acceleration), engine tuning (top speed), tyres (give better traction for cornering), brakes (enable you to slow down faster to take corners).

There are a few things yet to decided, for instance:

Do we include weapons or just focus on the racing?

Should we include cumulative damage to be repaired in the garage? (Although this implies that the game will be over if you wreck your car).

Do we include jumps, gates, trains and possibly other hazards from the Super Cars 2 game?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on these. Feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll keep checking back. Anyway, that’s about it for now, there’s artwork to be done!

How much was the seeding budget to achieve this, I hear you ask. Believe it or not the answer is absolutely nothing! The budget covered production only and was seeded by us, free of charge using natural methods only, not a single paid placement.

The fact is, if you have a great advergame you don’t need paid placements. While some other ‘viral game specialists’ are creating poor, substandard games that no one wants to play, with the sole purpose of advertising a product, we’re creating great games that people want to play and put on their websites first and foremost and it shows in the results. As I’ve said so many times before, it’s all down to making a great game, with the advertising being secondary. This way we can get huge exposure using only free channels, rather than having to push a sub-standard game by spending thousands (or sometimes tens of thousands) on top of the production costs, to pay for prominent placements on appropriate websites, as many advergame producers do. The fact is, paid placements aren’t necessary, putting the game first is and we prove it time and time again.

Play Ultimate Street Car Racer Now

This time it’s 16 levels of platform puzzle fun. Control the red Little Furry Thing who’s in search of her lost babies. Find all 5 and get to the exit within a time limit to complete each level.

Instead of the usual running and jumping we decided to make the main character bounce constantly and have a left and right acceleration control for movement (inspired by the iPhone accelerometer controls). We’re pretty pleased with the way it’s turned out, the control system adding a nice (if at sometimes frustrating) skill element to the gameplay.

It’s possible we may be revisiting this series of games at a later date, if we can come up with some more game ideas that will suit the little creatures. But in the meantime we still have The Village (which is currently on hold) and a few other Flash games in development.

You can play Little Furry Things World now and here are a couple of screen shots:

Anyway, we released the sequel to our popular puzzle game Little Furry Things a few weeks ago now and it’s doing rather well.

As well as vastly improved graphics we’ve ironed out some minor gameplay issues from the first game and added a few things. We’ve reduced the number of colours to match and given you 2 or 3 eyed furry things to worry about. We’ve also ditched the matching or rings or furry things and replaced that with 3 different ‘Furry Bombs’ that appear occasionally. The first type clears the line where you place it, the second  type clears a ring of furry things in line with where it is placed and the third clears all furry things on screen.

Here’s a couple of screenshots, and you can play Little Furry Things 2 now.

The main one we’re working on at the moment is a side scrolling horror first person shooter. The best way to describe the game is probably Operation Wolf meets Silent Hill & Resident Evil. We’re aiming for around 6 locations with an array of creatures for you to dispose of along the way.

As well as having multi-layer parallax scrolling we’re taking some of the visual effects we used in the Cyberkill game and building on them within this game. As well as atmospheric lighting effects, we’ve got some nice fog effects and are going for a cinematic look to the game by using a cinemascope aspect ratio and a nice real-time film grain effect on all visuals. Obviously all of this is not easy on the processor, so it’ll need a half decent machine to run.

It’s in the very early development stages at the moment, we’re currently working on artwork and very little coding has been done so far but we’re hoping for a release around May. Check out the video below for a look at an early running version of the forest level (no enemies yet) and keep an eye on the site for updates as the game progresses.

You can play the game now here. Or download the game pack to include on your own website here.

We’re going to be keeping an eye on the play stats over the next few weeks. If it continues it’s success at the current level we may consider porting the game over as an iPhone app. Keep an eye on the website for details in future.

In the meantime check out the Little Furry Things gameplay video below. We have more Flash game projects in the pipeline, details of those soon.