Bloat.
Our company president created Bloat. in roughly twenty-two hours at TOJam 4, a weekend-long game development expo.
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Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.
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>> When choosing a Flash game vendor, it’s often tempting to go with the least expensive team. When speed and quality matter most, Untold Entertainment is your best choice.
Hear, hear. :) Well, I’d put my own development on the table, too, but I’ve got less to show for it. And I don’t think I could have done Bloat on my own in 22 hours.
Thanks, mang!
Great job, Ryan! Dropping Unity was a wise decision – you don’t need extra handicaps, the TOJam is already challenging enough!
The level progression was quite nice, and from a design standpoint, you have variety, risk, and reward…all in less than a day. You get 3 brownie points ;)
Thanks, Andres. I LOVE BROWNIES!!!
Love it! The level progression makes me feel good about myself while still stepping up the challenge. Nicely done. I’m very drawn to this game and the visual style is quite appealing.
I think that doing a zillion tiny games would bring in great variety, volume and growing ad revenue. Will you do the “Pimp My Game” treatment on Bloat? I’ve noticed you’ve thrown in MochiAds. Was that a part of the 22 hours spent making the game?
Thanks, Mark!
i spent a few hours today making those level orbs clickable so that you can re-visit levels, and integrating MochiAds. i set aside the whole day for publishing/deployment, which included two blog posts, cross-promotion on the message boards, and a bit o’ Twittering.
i AM actually considering giving it the Pimp My Game treatment, but first i want to make a few modifications. There’s still zero money to be made in the free-to-play model.
Still, great game. Once I’ve finished it, I feel like I’ve just graduated and now I’m ready for the real world. The real world for Bloat means more levels. I guess it’s another one that can eventually get the iPhone treatment.
I really enjoy the surprise of the ravenous Blimples eating other Blimples and then continuing to putter on as they were as innocent as before. It’s very endearing.
You are too kind!
That truly is a great game! :) You must have had that idea in your head before you got to the expo though right? If it were me, I’d have wasted lots of time just thinking of that.
No, actually! The scariest part of the weekend was suddenly abandoning my iPhone app plans, and then abandoning my Unity3D plans, and then sitting in a dark room with the jam going on all around me trying to cook up a viable game idea on the spot, and not knowing whether it would work!
You can read all about it in the Making of Bloat article here:
http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/05/05/the-making-of-bloat/
I’d say he probably discarded about 5 other fairly well developed ideas before going with this one. There is no lack of Ideas at Untold. Time is the limiting factor.
I really miss a save feature (my browser crashed 3 times now, and it’s not that fun to complete most of them again). This is a must! (I don’t think it’s the problem, but if you don’t know how, check out MJWs’ post 11 in his avoider game series.)
Besides that, I really love the game, I think that you should have considered getting it sponsored by some one (APMID got 150$ for some game worse than this – http://www.apmid.org/100000-flash-game-experiment-part-2.html)
Thanks, Snurre! The great repsonse from everyone is tempting me to sink another 20 hours in to give the game levels, high scores, save features, etc. i may create Pimp My Game 2 for this title alone, as Markergreen suggested.
This is really fun! I love the chomp noise. NYOM!
Hahah – thanks, Michael! Funniest moment for me at the jam: Sunday afternooon, making various and very loud NYOM sounds into the microphone and drawing concerned, fearful looks from people across the room.
I didn’t realise you made the sounds yourself! I figured you used SFXR or something like that. Hahaha, that makes it even better.
onReleaseOutside
would be nice
(please)
Ain’t no such animal in Actionscript 3. What problem would you like me to solve?
Bloat was definitely one of my top picks from the event and I was very surprised it didnt snag a peoples choice award. Look forward to seeing you next year.
Thanks, Alex! i’m used to being robbed at TOJam on an an(nu)al basis – hahaha!
coolest game!!
I played Bloat at the TOJam Arcade and it was one of my favorites! I loved how the progression of the game was logical and the goal for each level was clearly defined. It also had a very appealing look to it and fun! I probably giggled the entire time I played it! I can’t wait to see what else you’ve created!
There’s an event you can detect for when the mouse leaves the SWF. You should have that turn off the dragging. I keep dragging off the screen and then the blimple I was dragging is stuck even though I released the mouse. I have to click again to fix it.
Thanks, Scarybug! What’s the event? MOUSE_LEAVE? We’ve had problems detecting the event in other games. Our game dev Jeff was just building a game where the MOUSE_LEAVE event wasn’t firing reliably. He changed the wmode in the embed tag to something other than “opaque”, and it fixed the problem in Firefox. Any perspectives on this? (Or hacks. i’ll take hacks.)
Nice game Ryan!
It’s impressive how you came up with such a good concept and how you managed to develop it in that short time window.
Gotta love the lil’ money poopers!
Keep on the good work :)
Thanks, Astroboy! Haven’t talked you you in a long time! Hope everything’s well.
Nice work Ryan. I’ve often read your posts on LinkedIn so good to see some of your stuff.
Thanks, Nick! Is it just me, or is the usefulness of LinkedIn petering out a bit? The groups i belong to used to be must-reads, but lately they’ve just been packed with people promoting their own work in the guise of articles. i’ve done that once or twice, but i also try to contribute actual content – Q&A kinda stuff. Looks like marketing is winning out over content in a big way. (Or do i just belong to the wrong groups?)
[...] September 19, 2009 // Big thanks to Jay Is Games, the casual games review site, for featuring Bloat. in their Link Dump Friday feature. Here’s how it helped [...]
[...] It is worth anyone’s 10 minutes. For more info: Untold Entertainment – Main site Bloat – Play this [...]
[...] Things Mentioned: Bunnie Andre Spierings Coil Grey-Matter Spewer Time Fcuk Interrupting Cow trivia Bloat Aether Gish Machinarium Electro server Cunt (Not work safe!) Dragon Age: Journeys Kahoots Meatboy [...]
[...] the Flash way of doing things, where we can bang out a complete game in under a week (see our game Bloat., and fear [...]
[...] Click here to play Bloat.! [...]
Ryan, I agree with you completely about marketing winning out over content on LinkedIn. I get so damned angry every time I look at a LinkedIn update in my inbox it’s full of people telling you “why you didn’t get that last job” or “how to screw up an interview in 5 mins”. Nice. It didn’t used to be like that at all. I’m in a ton of groups and very few are NOT like that.
Nick – i really miss what a useful site it once was. If you have any groups to recommend – on LinkedIn or elsewhere – i’m all ears! Please share!
[...] One thing that TIM introduced me to was this idea of playing the game while it was paused. You’d put the physics on hold, position all of the elements on the screen, and then unfreeze time and watch the chain reaction unfold. i don’t know if TIM was the first to do this, but i see it all over the place now, and in interesting places, like the pauseable combat system in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I was considering using something similar for a sequel to our TOJam game Bloat. [...]
[...] two TOJams, i put this knowledge to work on Bloat. i realized there was way too much going on in the game, so i broke all of the controls and features [...]