Paco and the Tumbling Seed Box

If you haven't been following Paco on Twitter, you may have missed out on some progress I've made with his tumbling seed box. Why does an imaginary bird have his own Twitter account? I have no idea, and he's not telling me why. He can't. He's imaginary.

In any case, the tumbling seed box tumbles! Check it out and try the preview. If you run into any issues, let me know! (Comment below or email Gopherwood). Currently it is only available as a progressive web app on our admittedly bare-bones game-hosting site. More plans are in the works to target additional platforms and prettifying the site, but right now it's a mystery (aka unfinished).

This is a self-funded, passion project of mine to create fun games that are reminiscent of what you might find in a child's storybook. Thematically, I also thought it would be fun to highlight endangered animals and use them as characters in these games, since, you know, our business is named "Gopherwood" and our logo (if you cross your eyes just right) is an ark. It seems fitting. (Related, I found inspiration from Joel Sartore's work with The Photo Ark - highly recommend checking it out.)

Paco is the first character and game to come to life from this idea. He's a Puerto Rican Parrot with three chicks that he's trying to feed. Yes, I know Puerto Rican Parrot chicks aren't yellow or red... ...I took a few game-design liberties: it'll all make sense when you play.

A big thank you to ARBIMON for recordings of actual Puerto Rican Parrots chattering. Adding their vocal ambiance to the game really brings it to life.

Also, thanks Todd. Your advice was critical.

One final note: this title captures a lot of the game-play from one of our very first games, Sand Trap. I go into a bit of the evolution here if you want to see a few early designs (with awesome prototype art).

Hope you enjoy the game!

Sand Trap 2.0

One of our first successful HTML5 games was Sand Trap, a casual game Todd and I developed over the course of a month for a competition. Todd created the pixel art and designed levels, I created sandy physics, and we conscripted my brother-in-law to compose a chill guitar loop for ambiance. We placed 7th in that competition, but then submitted it shortly thereafter to another competition and placed 1st. It probably helped that it was one of just a small number of games in the nascent HTML5 mobile games space.

I've decided to revisit this little game and create a new version, Sand Trap 2.0 -- working title 😁. (Emoji are allowed in blog posts, right? Or is that a digital faux pas?) Here are a few animations of the prototype with my awesome programmer-needs-a-placeholder-for-this-object art.

Things are looking a lot less sandboxy.

The core mechanic will be the same, mostly.

This one may hit the cutting room floor, but it's totally poppin'!

Not the most difficult labyrinth to navigate...

Why Sand Trap? Why not All the King's Men Entanglement? That's a story for another time...

Why we were down this weekend...

Sorry about the interruption, if you noticed. GoDaddy blocked our hosting due to a "network violation" without giving us prior notice, so I woke up Saturday morning to a somewhat unpleasant surprise. Apparently our web games were stealing more than their fair share of their hosting server's resources. I told them to behave, with my strictest daddy-voice, but that wasn't good enough for GoDaddy.

Fortunately, the latest version of Entanglement uses Google App Engine, and was not affected by the block. Unfortunately, Sand Trap and the older versions of Entanglement were. After being down nearly all day Saturday, I decided to move gopherwoodstudios.com to a new hosting service.

Since Sand Trap functions entirely client-side, it is back up: enjoy!

However, the older version of Entanglement (with the sea-green background) is currently not functional and is redirecting to the latest version of Entanglement. If you have issues with the newest version, please check out our Entanglement support page.

Sand Trap Wins SPIL Games' September HTML5 Competition!

We recently entered Sand Trap into another competition, this one hosted by SPIL Games for their new HTML5 mobile phone portals. I had to rework quite a bit of the code from our original CGDC8 entry so it would scale to different phone resolutions, accept touch input, and run at a decent speed on such a performance-restricted platform. We placed first for September, the first month of competition! SPIL Games is hosting this monthly competition through February 2011 at http://www.html5contest.com/.

Here is the SPIL Games press release, and their US mobile web portal. Be sure to check out the other two September winning entries on the web portal as well: Block Dream by Bruno Garcia and Zombie Troops by Makar Osokin.

Kim Komando Cool Site of the Day

Thanks to The Kim Komando Show: Entanglement is today's Cool Site of the Day! A big thanks to Kim and the rest of her team.

While I'm displaying badges, here's another for Entanglement that I never found a place to post. Chrome Experiments offered the first feedback from folks that Entanglement was indeed fun to play (as opposed to some of our earlier experimental and unfinished games).

And another badge! We have a few more days of judging for Sand Trap. Play and rate it if you haven't. Be sure to check out our competitors' entries as well!

Sand Trap

Casual Gameplay occasionally hosts a game design competition with the latest one having "sandbox" as the theme. Todd and I usually come up with our own topics and compete against each other, but we thought it might be fun to try out a *real* competition that includes *real* prizes. So we brainstormed and thought and pondered and contemplated and finally came up with a "box of sand" as our sandbox idea. Yeah, we're not too great at thinking outside of the box. (I imagine Todd is now hanging his head in shame at my pitiful pun.) Anyway, after several weeks of me coding, Todd drawing art, and my brother-in-law Clay picking at the guitar, we've created Sand Trap.

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, feel free to give us a good rating :-). If not, let us know why. Try out the other entries while you are there: our fellow competitors put together some really creative entries!

Oh, and Todd promised to mail out free boxes of sand to folks if we win! Right Todd? ...Todd?

[update 8/23/2010] Todd, looks like you're off the hook! Congratulations to Mateusz Skutnik and the other winners »

Casual Gameplay Design Competition #8

Contrary to our typical game competitions where Todd and I face-off in a furious two-week coding spree, we are now working together. At least until August 1st. We're finishing up an HTML5 game we are planning to submit to Casual Gameplay Design Competition #8. Sneak peek at right »

Hopefully our game will make the cut. In any case, be sure to check out all of the entries next week!