2011 is going to be great for me. Many endings bring many more new beginnings.

Two weeks the game company I work at, released its first game, Gladelings. Gladelings is Facebook social game we have been working on for the last 9 months. I was mainly responsible for the AS3 programming of the various mini-games that the game includes, the sound work (originally I even did the dubbing!) and other programming tasks. We continue to work on the game for a big upcoming worldwide release in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully the game will succeed and I will be more relieved. Success means I get to work on my own projects with less pressure :P.

What'ca looking at?

Besides Gladelings, I have other big news. I finish my Computer Science degree at the end of January. This means two things:

1. SCREW YOU TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY!
2. More time to develop my own games.

Since Star Relic, I have really never sat down to work seriously on a new project. There have been a few ideas and few start-ups here and then, but due to work, studies and personal issues, nothing materialized into a future game. Now this changes. There is Physics Defense. I started working on the game a few weeks ago (and even bought a domain – no idea how nobody bought it before), and if things go well, I hope to release it by the end of the year (just in time for the next Israeli Game Awards).

To end this post, I will mention that my university AI project, Fivel, now appears in the blog. The game was made by myself and with two friends and we received very good feedback for it. Originally, we made a different game called Petri but be cancelled it due to its simplicity.

It has been a while.

I’m covered by work on my company’s game, university projects and my own new game. The game I’m working on at Imba Games will be released next month, I’ll post about it for sure. It’s my last semester in university (!) and one of the courses requires to build a game and implement some AI into it. As the only game developer in the course, I started working on a game even before the project was announced. I experimented with an small engine for board games which allows to change rules easily, and after a few hours of drawing I received the early version of…

PETRI

>squeak<

The game is made along with two fellow students. Now that the game is ready our main goal is to create impressive AI and develop the game furthermore. We wonder whether we should write the game’s logic and AI in Java in order to use multi-threading, the obstacle of Flash getting dumb under deep recursions, and the fact that Java is faster than Flash by many ways. On the other hand, there’s the option to use chunking (a method to split recursion into smaller ‘chunks’) which will make this project more challenging and fun. Eventually this will be handed as a university project so you will only be able to find it here and not commercialized in the web.

As for my own project, I started really working on one only last week. I had many ideas since of what I want to develop since Star Relic, most of them are big and demanding project I have always wanted to produce. Last month I decided that I should focus on smaller scale projects due to the current lack of time and resources (three concurrent projects are enough, no?). And thus, I started working on the third game under the Indigon label:

More information in the future to come.

And for the end – good news: Star Relic is nominated this year for the first Israeli Game Awards under the independent games category. The winners will be announced on November 9th.

Exam periods are the best periods for a game developer such as I. Stochastic was developed over a week in my 2008 exam period. Nautilus was developed over a month in the 2009 exam period, and Star Relic received a major in development in that summer’s  period. I have found that the biggest motivation boost to study something not particularly interesting is to do something you really like in breaks – in my case, developing games of course. This is not always a good choice, since I find myself developing games 10 hours a day and studying only 2.

Anyway, this exam period started 2 weeks ago, and I already find myself spending more time at work and developing my own ideas. I know some of you are eager to know what I’m brewing next. No, it’s not Star Relic 2 as some asked, but rather a tribute to my favorite game of all times. If you’re curious, either: find out what is that game OR find a clue I left somewhere in the site ^_-.

When this exam period is over, I’ll try to update the blog more frequently. Those of you who are interested in my new projects – stay tuned.

Update: Star Relic was also featured on Rock Paper Shotgun this week! Take a look.

Star Relic has been published by now only on a few sites but is already quite successful. With 120k players so far, a NewGrounds’ Daily 5th prize, and an awesome 4.3/5.0 review in JayIsGame I cannot complain. And that is not all! I already have fans! I never had fans! Players wanting to create RPGs based on the lore of the game,  a few more non-exclusive licenses sold to sponsors, and… take a look at this:

“Just wanted to drop you a line to say thanks for such a great flash game, developers like yourselves keep the gaming community fresh and fun.”

(Holy.)

I decided the best approach to handle this is to start building a small community around Indigon. I always believed communities are the core of small/indie games. It’s time I shall nurture one. There is nothing like a small group of loyal fans who track every update about your future projects and try to document the small text of the Klosian Nebula star systems… Thus, the AMAZING INDIGON’S FLASH STUDIO FORUMS were formed. Currently they look like a shoe-box, but in the future they will be fully integrated into the blog. (Update: the link is no longer valid).

Now that they are set up and I told you a little about the success of Star Relic, some plans for the upcoming two weeks: I am planning to continue the distribution of Star Relic to the many-many Flash portals across the web, hopefully getting more than one million views by the end of June. Work on my new mega-secret game currently called Unannounced Project (creative) has begun, but now consists only of writing a design document (I am not going to repeat the mistake of Star Relic again…).

The factions of Star Relic in their full glory

Soon in a table-top RPG? O_o

To conclude, I decided to share some early Star Relic graphics, from the time I had a completely different idea in mind. If you don’t know, Star Relic was originally an arcade/simulation game, where the player controlled a fully upgraded star ship in the Klosian Nebula, fighting Sodinar scum and warping to various adventures. While I adore this concept, I didn’t feel ready enough to develop something in that scale back then. And now? Who knows what the future holds for Indigon Flash Studio ;)?

Enjoy, and don’t forget to visit the forums!

Warp Gate Online!

Star Relic is now out to the public! You can play it on the sponsor’s website here. The game will be distributed to more websites in the upcoming weeks.

What a relief. After a year in development (and a few vacations in between), it’s finally out. Now… Now it is time to start working on another game.

Enjoy the game!

Play Star Relic