I made this game in collaboration with a colleague of mine (Berthjan Achterop / http://www.berthjan.com/)
I started of with the coding of the engine and Berthjan made the design. After applying the design to the game I animated most of the characters to bring it all to live. The result is a “colums”-like game wrapped in a world of weird (but wonderful) creatures

Enjoy and let me know what you think of it…

PS: here is a nice wallpaper to accompany the game

I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:

Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080302.htm

The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.

Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).

Besides the designs I also needed a nice transition between the background and a map that will be shown somewhere during the game (as some sort of level selection). Because the style is kind of “old” I thought it would be a good idea to make some sort of dissolve transition.
Whaddayaknow; I managed to get a decent result in just a couple of hours.

Despite the fact that I used a perlinNoise and a copyChannel the  result runs pretty smooth. Check it out:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080201.htm

To accomplish the dissolve effect I used an alpha mask on the top image (in this case the “map”-image). The mask itself is created by combining a perlinNoise and copyChannel. The perlinNoise creates the randomness and the copyChannel transforms the randomness into a transparent layer.
The size of the mask is half the size of the image and stretched to match the size of the image. This way only a small perlin noise has to be created which increases performance.

http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp061203.htm

At the time I made the engine I didn’t feel like creating nice graphics so the experiment still looks a bit boring.
Because the engine works fine I thought it would be a wast not to use it, so tonight I created some graphics for the tiles (check them here).
The symbols are taken from a photo of real Mahjong stones. so they should be quite accurate.
The tileset is not 100% complete yet and the current tiles still need a little work on the coloring as well, but I’m sure I’ll finish it somewhere next year

I also moved the game to a new location. From now on you can check the game here:
http://games.justgreat.nl/bubbleschmubble/

Besides the online highscore option I also added some sounds (again)  and I animated the creatures inside the bubbles a little (quick and dirty).

Last but not least I removed the MochiAd from the game because it was way too annoying and I needed at least a 1000 players a day (!) to make just a little profit from it . Instead of the MochiAd I added normal google-ad-banner though,  in the hope it will pay me off some day .

I hope you enjoy playing against each other because your highscore will be visible to everyone who plays the game.

You can try it here: http://games.justgreat.nl/bubbleschmubble/

I already added some functionality to the game like local highscores, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done:
- some bugfixes on the current code
- overall highscore
- better tweens and animated creatures
- sounds
- a splash screen
- a setting page
- a credits page (so far it’s only gonna contain my own name :P )

I added a MochiAd just to check how it works. If the ad becomes too much of a nuisance or doesn’t bring in enough money (according to the number of players) I will remove it again.

Let me know what you think of the game so far. Also suggestions are always welcome…

The engine is based on a game called “Jawbreaker” which is a real fun and addicting game.

The final game needs a nice scoreboard and a menu and of course some nice sounds, tweens and animations to spice it up…

For the time being I added the result as an experiment to the lab:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp071204.htm

Go check it out and let me know what you think of it…

It is gonna be a game based on the classic (but not really well-known) game “Qix”:

As a kid I played this game for days on my old GameBoy (the original) so I know it’s going to be a very addictive game.

The eventual goal is to create a complete game which I’m going to distribute across the web (ofcourse not before placing some adds in it ).
For now I started off with the design and decided it’s going to have a futuristic, electric and hi-tech theme. Here is a little preview:

I named the game “spark” for the time being, but as I’m not fully satisfied by it I’ll probably rename it later on.

Since I have a little spare time this week I hope to have a little demo ready by the end of this week. (did I really say that … omg  … well we shall see about that)