Because it’s holiday in here, I’ve got a lot time to play now. And as I grow old, my gaming habits change. For example I rather finish one game, than start three and throw them away a few hours after. And after finishing a game lately (I don’t want to spoil anything, so take it just as an example) I was pretty surprised to see a sad ending.

You know, it’s hard for me to accept an ending like this after 30+ hours of playing.  I lived the story with the character, the story pushed me forward and even if I was able to clear all the things a game prepared for me, there was a bad ending. And I don’t mean anything like death of main character, his sacrifice for a higher good. This would mean that at least the idea I was fighting about was successful. But the ending where you didn’t accomplish anything at all. All the time was for nothing.

For example – all the game you’re after a killer. And the end? You captured the killer, but there’s no evidence, so after the court, he’s gonna be free again. Your little sister is in the hospital and may die (of course you don’t know, how it’s going to end, ‘cos it’s the end of game) and you move away, so you won’t see your friends (that helped you all the time) again.

I do understand sad endings in movies, but it’s different in games, cause in some way, you’re the hero in here. And of course you spend a lot more time playing a game than watching a movie.

What about you? Do you enjoy even sad endings in games, or are you disappointed as well?

I spent this morning observing Kongregate for new interesting games and it looks like we have kind a new game genre, which I start calling throw-out-the-thing. First two games we mention are two sequels of Gravitee. This game is kind a similar.

You have some fireball floating in the room and you need throw it and burn one or more torches. And that’s it. In fact I do not enjoy this game as much as Gravitee, but if you like this game genre you might enjoy it and if you find yourself bored you can crate your own levels or try levels from another player (some of them looks very interesting).

Play this game here

After few posts about game development is time to actually play some game again. It is quite hard to find something creative and novel in this flood of tower defense games, but I was lucky today. Multitask is very simple game in term of graphic visuals: just few basic colors and geometric shapes, but this is biggest advantage of flash games: you don’t need to create stunning graphics and add tons of content to be author of memorable game.

This game is about multi tasking, which means that you will need to split your focus between couple of different tasks. You start with one task: just balance the ball, then you will get couple of others, like avoiding the arrows or collect the squares.

I am very one thing focused person so this game was very hard for me and I can’t play it very well, but it was fun and I can imagine that you will perform much more better then me.

Play this game here

I stop playing convention games completely with one exception that appear six months ago. This exception is Quake Live: reborn of classical game to the browser game. If you ever played this game you can be sure that everything is same from graphics, speed to gameplay, so be careful, it could leads to same addiction like 10 years ago.

Best new thing are statistics and badges for those of use who are fans of this kind of stuff. And that is all, no RPG elements, weapons, maybe just couple of new arena. Game is free to play so, go to their website, create new account and just give this game a try. You can add me (QL acc: Dejv) or Gee (QL acc: Gaspoda) to the friends and we can do some death match some time.

I am very future oriented person and I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about the future technology. Right now I have interested in next gen graphic system, where next gen means graphics in about 2013+. A lot of new stuff going around, mostly new kind of multi core CPU architecture, which will need new kind of thinking about how to program games (and other software) on them.

Right now you have about two cores, most games are single or couple (say 6, maximum) threaded.  For future games you will use hundred of threads. If you know something about multi-threaded programming you probably get headache right now. It is very clear that we will need to invent a lot of new techniques to deal with this, probably based on functional programming.

I stumble upon some great slides that takes this to very deep level, so if you are not scared of it take a look: The end of the GPU roadmap by Tim Sweeney (CEO, Epic Games).

John Carmack, lead programmer and technical director of ID software (game like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein) giving keynote presentation on QuakeCon each year. It is usually very hardcore speech about the technology, advances in computer graphics and so forth. This year it is little bit more accessible for most people with interest in gaming technology and business and if you have two spare hours I recommend to take a look on this video.

In this keynote he talks about how they was acquired, iPhone development, Rage and its technology for level designers, growth of ID software (from 15 people to about 100) and also put some random bits on things they like: rockets, his experience driving Tesla electric car and so. Video is located here.

Making living writing flash games is very hard. Target audience is very price sensitive, best (and mostly only accepted) price is zero dollars.

I wrote small piece about flash game monetization last year and now I found great new series that goes really deep and I do not afraid to say, that these two links are most comprehensive and inspiring articles about making money using flash games today.

Take a look to the:
Flash Love Letter, Part 1
Flash Love Letter, Part 2