My involment:
Game idea, designer, (the only) programmer, created the complete game alpha with mockup art which was later picked by a publisher.
Tech used:
Microsoft Visual C++
Results:
Top #7 at Big Fish Games US, Top #6 at Big Fish Games Germany, retail version selling in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, UK. Non-retail sold about 20K+ units, unsure about the retail sales.
Fever Frenzy was my first and so far the last serious attemp to self-release a casual computer game. It achieved and surpassed my goals. In the end I was coordinating 2 graphic artist and 1 music artist, working with 2-3 producers from Legacy Games to finish the game. Legacy Games invested into better art and more programming and overall it was a great experience working with them, very professional publisher. The demo can be still found at
http://www.feverfrenzy.com
My involment:
Programmer, level designer
Tech used:
ActionScript 3.0, Flare3D, PHP, AMFPHP, MySQL
Results:
Game published on MediaMarkt's NL Facebook page, several thousands of players.
Samsung Stars was interesting in being my first complete 3D game. It was also a web game, produced in Flash - involved some simple checks to prevent saving of fake scores and AMFPHP for Flash <-> PHP communication.
My involment:
Game programmer, level designer
Tech used:
ActionScript 3.0, PHP, AMFPHP, MySQL
Results:
Game published on iSport.cz during Tour de France, as well as on Polish and Slovak websites.
This was a cool experience, delivering a game to officially promote Tour de France. I created a simple pseudo-3D engine for the game, and players could select their Facebook profile photo for the funny winner photo. They could upload the winner photo to a special Facebook album. I created a simple in-game level editor and designed all of the levels, tweaking them based on the valuable input from the artist, producer and few beta players.
My involment:
Lead programmer, artist, project coordinator.
Tech used:
SmartFox server 1.6.x, ActionScript 3.0, PHP, AMFPHP, MySQL
Results:
First social MMO in Czech Republic, covered on Czech TV GamePage. Got about 10K users with 30-60 people being on-line at the same time commonly. It had everything - public chat rooms, shops, custom private rooms with furniture to buy, minigames etc.
This was a bittersweet project for me - while I enjoyed working on this for about 2 years, the scope of the project soon grew too huge to maintan mostly by 1 person(me). Monetization started to take place about 1 year into the project and was too slow(still before the F2P model explosion). There was an investor behind - I don't want to name but I strongly don't recommend working with people not understanding your field. In the end I had to stop the project because of the red flags I started to get by the way my investor acted, and my health dete.
My involment:
Programmer, level designer.
Tech used:
SmartFox server 1.6.x, ActionScript 3.0, OpenSpace 2.0, Java, PHP, MySQL
Results:
'Mini AmuCities', my third SmartFox project. Another web 'MMO'. This project is yet to be launched. This is an extension to Ernya (
http://www.ernya.com) avatar forums. My involvment was contract programmer but it's steadily growing since - I'm programming, throwing in ideas as well as creating all the maps right now in OpenSpace map editor. The biggest difference to AmuCities is the isometric map and the much smaller scale of the project so far. However, this solidified my SmartFox knowledge, together with another contract SmartFox game I'm not mentioning in in this section.
My involment:
Everything.
Tech used:
Everything, but mostly C/C++, Notepad and GrafX for pixel art.
Results:
Very limited fame.
I've been teaching myself how to finish a project by finishing these games. I've been programming since the age of 5 or 6, but with 1 exception, it was all experiments until later in my life. I was basically playing, trying to mimic various game engines and art styles, without really focusing to finish anything. A tetris clone-game was my first really finished game in my early 20's, followed by several more original games. The last in the freeware realm was called 'B.I.R.D.', and yep, it features a flying bird, it was frustrating, and it was not called Flappy Bird or Angry Birds. My timing was too early, as usual. Nevertheless, it received some freeware game awards in Czech Republic and nice ratings.
My involment:
Programmer, author of the "codebase" framework
Tech used:
ActionScript 3.0, PHP, AMFPHP, MySQL
Results:
Built a specific Facebook app framework for rapidly producing simple to medium Facebook promos, contests and apps for MediaMarkt NL. It's being used for over 2 years now and lots of Facebook apps were built on top of it(probably 30-40+). The apps were used to promote brands such as Samsung, Sony, Nikon, Canon and others by MediaMarkt NL. The framework is developer-friendly rather than end-user friendly(because of the variable feature requests) but still I managed to isolate various components and a quick process get from PSD design to finished app.
My involment:
Everything (programming, marketing, UI design etc.)
Tech used:
PHP, jQuery / JavaScript, MySQL, PayPal IPN
Results:
Self-sustaining business for around 2 years. This was one of the first Facebook contest apps which were standalone and solid compared to what was available at that time. The app was later expanded into an automated web service with PayPal's payments integrated through IPN. The app and service was used mostly by social media companies providing their services to their own customers. Those customers included pretty cool brands, such as Pizza Hut, Orange, MediaMarkt, SAY Media, San Sebastian Film Festival and others. I've communicated with some of those directly, and for example MediaMarkt NL became my best customer also for other apps since. The project basically ended when the other companies matured enough to get so many customers they could lower their prices to something I couldn't compete with(such as $1/contest etc.). Competing further would mean starting to agressively pursue Facebook contests, and I didn't feel it went along with my goals and motivations at that time.
My involment:
Programmer
Tech used:
ActionScript 3.0, PHP, AMFPHP, MySQL, SmartFox, jQuery
Results:
I've been very active on vWorker (currently merged with Freelancer.com) for almost two years. Throughout that time period I've been working on various larger or smaller projects and accumulated nice ratings from my customers - over 20 projects with 10/10 rating. For all the ratings my profile still exists here:
https://www.freelancer.com/u/falcan.html
I've been taking part in lots of other things that I either forgot to mention, are too small to mention, are not related to my current work or I'm still working on them.
I'd like to point out only three things - I've been working with Big Fish Games on their latest MCF game, which was a cool experience. I had only a small part in the game but still I enjoyed the experience. Basically I had to implement a system for their UI to align over various mobile devices - it was interesting to work with a team of other people / programmers and learn about the tools and processes they use.
Also, I've been experimenting with FlasCC - I've started to port some C/C++ games to Flash and presently I'm still doing that. FlasCC also spawned FlashyWrappers which should be available on my website. With FlashyWrappers came the need to understand video encoding (and ffmpeg API) at least on a basic level.
A bigger part of my pre-programming "career" was a career of a game artist, which probably sounds strange, but it's the truth. I was one of the very few pixelartists in Czech Republic when this art started to rise (again) when first mobile Java games arrived. I've been working on games using pixelart for few years and was being paid for it, before coming up with Fever Frenzy(my own game). I'm not doing pixelart actively these days, even interestingly it's back again with Kickstarter and other "indie" games.
As for the future, I've just ordered Oculus Rift...
