Post-mortems are terribly, horribly interesting. I love seeing how Flash games died. Some developers are willing to describe all the gory financial details, writing up accounts so that we can all learn from their mistakes.

I have written two post-mortems in the past, and now I have finally added them to this site (with some longer-term stats added to the bottom):

The Man with the Invisible Trousers
Slide Racing

PS: I have a secret wish that people will read those and decide that I should be paid far, far more. 4 million plays per game is worth more!
PPS: For what it’s worth, Unevolve has 210,000 plays and earned $200 for 2 people, so that’s alright for a 2 day game.

But I am not the most interesting developer, nor the richest, nor even the most bitter! I present to you, a list of every post-mortem I could dredge from the mirth of the internet.

Concerned Joe
Community College Sim
Gravinaytor (Which I always read as Gravy-nator, and you should too.)
(I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors
MegaDrill
The Moops – Combos of Joy
Pixel Purge
Plastic Attack
Robo Riot
Solipskier
SpeedRunner
Steambirds
Tentacle Wars
TumbleBall

I will attempt to keep this list updated with all the post-mortems I can find. If you know of any I’ve missed, comment or shoot me an email with the address at the bottom of the page.

For what it’s worth, this week I also added three more short stories, if anyone still does fiction!

Until next time… *Batman swoosh*

I picked up the original Uncharted in the pre-Christmas rush for a little more than it usually sells for. Alas, the effort was wasted, since I failed to plug in the disc for well over a month. But hey, now I know that I could have saved a couple of pounds around the deadlines doesn’t make me bitter, not at all. Nope.

Uncharted comes from a heritage of Jak and Daxter games, which are staples of any good previous generation gamer’s collection – certainly, they were in mine. (P.S., Calum, if you’re reading this, give me back Jak 2!) Slowly, Naughty Dog has evolved from producing games with luxurious amounts of platforming and no gunplay, to a climax in Uncharted where there is a fragment of platforming among hours upon hours of dreary shootouts.

Allow me to summarise the plot of Uncharted, without spoiling a thing: you play as Nate Dogg. He hunts for treasure, and uses all his meagre wits to open innumerable secret passages, work out complex puzzles, and generally prove that the Aztecs were fantastically good mechanical engineers. And every time you break into a tomb where no-one has treaded for 400 years, there are bad guys to shoot. How? How do they get into every single chamber before you, when you’re solving all the puzzles? It’s like Nathan is going a complex route, when they just used the stairs. (Hah, I made a reference to my own game. Bite me.)

To kill an enemy, you shoot 10 rounds of ammunition into them. They have no fear. I was playing on ‘easy’, because I’m a wuss and also terrible at murder (is that a positive?), and I would shoot 9 rounds into some guy’s neck. As he stands in a pool of his comrades’ corpses. That brave fellow would continue shooting at me for all his worth, without the slightest worry that he would never see his wife and toddler ever again. Truly, I would love to see a game where you shoot someone, and they go, “ARGH, YOU SHOT ME, YOU ASS,” then hide in the fear that you’ll shoot them again.

The only other method is headshots. Unfortunately, all the high-ammunition weapons have a built-in inaccuracy. The enemy’s eyes can be in the crosshairs, and you’ll hit the wall behind them, and their shoulders, but no head. I surprised myself when I took out a room full of guards with a pistol, rather than my ultra machine gun thingmabob, because the pistol actually fires where you point it – an amazing development, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The making-of videos were hilarious. One of the developers joked that Nathan Drake was supposed to be an imperfect character! He had a straight face. I chortled heartily.

The 5 minutes of platforming interspersed in the 8 hours of shootery is good. If your tastes are anything like mine (and they’re not – I have found nary a person who is as disdainful of shooters as I) then it might be worth picking up for the platforming. Just don’t buy it before Christmas.

You know that emotional pull, when a story grabs you in just the right way? It’s what makes Final Fantasy VII so revered, as generation after generation relives that moment where Aeris dies. Or at least, they would if it weren’t so commonly spoiled that yes, Aeris dies. Takes the fun out of it, right?

I love stories, and it is one of those things that drew me towards game creation. Because while I could make a Flash video series, realistically I would never animate more than perhaps 2 minutes. Game stories suit me: limited animation required, and the player has an automatic reason to care about at least one of the characters. My challenge is to make the player care about multiple characters, in such a way that by the climax of the game, the player has white knuckles from gripping the keyboard so intensely. One day, I shall make a game where the story will make the player squirm, as they wish they could save the day.
And perhaps, just perhaps, they won’t be able to.

I like the idea of a game with an unhappy ending. How about you?

_{I am going to update my blog every Monday for as long as I can muster. If you want to follow my ramblings, use RSS!}

Hey, you know that game I’m not making, called Murderous James?

I’m still not making it.
Deal with it.

Hey, you know that feeling when you don’t have the resources/time to develop a particular game, but really want to?

Murderous James: The Cutest Massacre is that game for me. Who knows, maybe this is a project for next summer?