One of my first team projects on the road to becoming a game developer was Plan of Attack, a full-conversion Half-Life 2 mod I made with a team of great people including my good friend Mikey aka DRMIKEY, the unlockable survivor from Zombie Puncher!
Plan of Attack was an awesome team-tactics shooter, like Counter Strike with capture points on a variety of wide maps. Our first and most popular map was called 'Light', and was set in a run down city with an office building, destroyed garage, and coffee shop as its capture points.
As my first Zombie Puncher Easter Egg to be revealed, check this out:
This is a screenshot from Plan of Attack, looking up the street from the American Base toward the Coalition Base, with Cafe Sully on the right and a sniper's nest walkway in the distance. Look familiar? This is the scene that inspired the city background shown in Zombie Puncher's title and character select screens!
...I took some creative liberties, but you can see the three buildings on the right, including the ramp up to Cafe Sully, the multi-tiered levels on the left, a car (flipped since the zombie apocalypse), and the walkway in the distance.
As an extra treat, check this out:
If you pan the camera back a bit further, you see an Easter Egg in Plan of Attack itself. There's a building labeled Kenny's Antiques, perhaps a previous business venture before Kenny's Apps, LLC?
Well you might not recognize it now! It just got a complete overhaul, in an update released today. Take a look at the before and after screenshots:
A major complaint I was hearing regarding my first release was: WOW terrible artwork, what's with the font?? Of course, a lot of my friends are really talented artists, and I DO appreciate their feedback!
With the exception of some standard Apple UIKit widgits I used (UISlider knobs in the Settings page, and a text field / number pad for guess input) there was not a single font, PNG file, or anything resembling art in Number Guesser. Every line was drawn in code, using Quartz 2D.
I thought that was cool, it looked retro! But the nerd-cool factor was hard to convey in screenshots. At a glance, the game looked crude and unpolished, certainly compared to Frustrating Tic Tac Toe's photorealistic graphic style.
Also, based on poor numbers of ad requests, I could tell that few people were continuing to play the game. I think this is because the game was really slow paced. You might have to remember what you guessed last, and enter up to six digits by hand. Did I want to guess 457750 or 457760?
Number Guesser Deluxe 2.0 is COMPLETELY overhauled. I made it a challenge for myself to take my ugliest app and turn it into the slickest looking thing you've ever seen in your life! Not only do these screenshots look nice but remember you can still change the colors to absolutely anything you want using fully customizable RGB color sliders!
And as for the game play, I think the new slider control for guess input is a lot more fun, faster, and more addictive than the previous input method! Let me know what you think, and enjoy new and improved Number Guesser Deluxe!
The nodes on this chart represent weekly earnings. Most of these hover around $7, or $1 per day. After Number Guesser launched, my earnings crept up to about $1.50 and then $2 and $2.50 per day. Around Thanksgiving, I started earning closer to $5 per day and was ecstatic!
I've been tweeting new records for ad revenue earned in a single day, and yet just in the past month, within days of new records, I keep making more and more revenue - and it seems to be consistent!
Zombie Puncher launches, and all of a sudden I'm making about $10 per day. Then $15 or $18 per day. THEN Christmas comes along and I earn an unprecedented $59.94 in ONE DAY! In my chart (which ends on 12/26), you see I made just under $200 in the past week alone!
We'll see moving forward if I keep this momentum, though I will slyly hint that a certain poorly performing app of mine is getting a complete overhaul VERY soon. Will this re-release cause numbers to spike even higher, as they did for Frustrating Tic Tac Toe's 1.1 update?
Anyway, this is all great news and I hope you enjoyed the chart! However, my goal is to earn closer to $100+ in a single day. After taxes and business expenses (about 20% of my earnings), this would amount to roughly a $30k salary, enough to live off of!
...which would be a dream come true, since I'm making whatever apps I feel like making, and releasing them to the world for free!
Perry is also an iPhone developer himself, at leading iPhone development studio, Venan Entertainment. Perry has worked on iPhone games that are waaay better than mine, including Monopoly and NBA Live 10!
Zombie Puncher currently has 6 Unlockable Survivors, in addition to the two survivors playable at the start of the game, Kenny and Anton!
All of these survivors, like Perry, are good friends of mine!
Keep playing, and see if you can unlock them all!
Simon thinks the game needs some sound effects. I agree, though I'd like to include an option to turn sounds off since I like to listen to my music while I play!
How do YOU like Zombie Puncher?
And what would you like to see in a future update?
So I know what you're thinking...
Where did you come up with such an AMAZING idea as Zombie Puncher, Ken?
Well it all started in a conversation with my good friend Tom. Number Guesser Deluxe hadn't been released yet, and we were talking about app marketability:
11:50:19 PM Kenny: honestly i think the trick is to make something addictive, free, high quality, not necessarily small but definitely reasonable scope 11:50:25 PM Kenny: like geometry wars for example 11:50:37 PM Kenny: that's a game that if it was free with ad support, people would play it for a while 11:50:47 PM Kenny: more than tic tac toe i think 11:50:54 PM Kenny: but it would have to be that novel 11:50:55 PM Tom: oh absolutely 11:51:05 PM Tom: but tic tac toe is at the disadvantage that it's tic tac toe 11:51:08 PM Tom: in that people know what ot expect 11:51:35 PM Kenny: yes and no, i think that's also an advantage, it's recognizable the same way tony hawk is recognizable 11:52:00 PM Tom: no, a better example is the same way that rock paper scissors is recognizable 11:52:22 PM Kenny: well right but i want to make the connection that people respond well to franchises and things they're familiar with 11:52:35 PM Kenny: if you make zombie puncher deluxe you're banking that people like zombies 11:52:51 PM Tom: or that people like punching zombies 11:53:00 PM Tom: ...i think that would get more dls than TTT 11:53:09 PM Kenny: and if you get more obscure than that i think you risk being completely unknown - like darwinia for example, that needed a novel art style for people to even care what that's about 11:53:14 PM Tom: novel and stupid seems to be a winner 11:53:14 PM Kenny: hahaha 11:53:19 PM Kenny: maybe i should make that, good idea
If you're an iPhone / iPod Touch developer, you know that the new release queue is CRITICAL to the success of your app! It's brutal when your app misses the queue. It also takes balls to release an app starting with the letter Z, knowing that apps are listed alphabetically by release date.
In a previous post, I had vented that Apple's release date functionality was messed up, but it seems that they've made some fixes. I don't fully understand it, but it seems to work some magic to list your app alongside a date that's 'fair'. For example, mine is currently listed with a post date of the 15th (the date it first appeared on the App Store), alongside apps released on the 16th, probably because I got the e-mail that the app was approved late in the day on the 15th, it was only live for a few hours on the 15th, and only accessable via search. I'll keep you posted, but I wanted to give Apple some credit, it seems that the release date issue is being addressed, and I appreciate it!
The reason Zombie Puncher took a while (almost 24 hours) to appear in the new release queue wasn't because of iTunes Connect, just that the App Store was being slow, and not updating ANY apps in the new release queue! I suppose that's its own issue, and while I'm going to suggest again: Twitter style feed of new apps as soon as they're released? I'll cut Apple some slack, I'm happy with the changes they've made so far and that they're currently making!
But anyway, I'll tie up this post with some good news: I've already earned $0.56 in ad revenue from Zombie Puncher for tomorrow! Not bad!
I have a million and one things I want to post about, including high res art, Easter Eggs, behind the scenes stuff. I'll give you a few weeks to look around for Easter Eggs before I post screenshots; I have allusions to Plan of Attack, Oregon Trail, Evil Dead, and an embarrassing YouTube video of myself in the game :)
Merry Christmas from Kenny's Apps, LLC!
My third app is now available (for free) on the iPhone App Store! Download Zombie Puncher
Zombie Puncher is an addictive action / arcade game with lots of zombie punching! Key Features:
Zombies
Sweet Graphics
Secret Unlockable Survivors
Leveling Up and Stats
Punch zombies, unlock new survivors, and try to survive as many rounds as you can! In the future, I'll be adding new zombies, new survivors, and new features. Let me know what you'd like to see in the next update!
Zombie Puncher is available now (for free) for iPhone and iPod Touch!
Frustrating Tic Tac Toe has been sighted, years ahead of its time, in the movie WarGames! In fact, it saved the world when Ferris Bueller made the computer play itself, so it could learn that there are some games you just can't win... including Frustrating Tic Tac Toe and the game of global thermonuclear war!
You can see why I didn't include a feature to allow the AI to play itself... it would BLOW UP YOUR IPHONE (or iPod Touch!)
Note the moral of the story, the only winning move is not to play...
This doesn't seem to have stopped players from enjoying my game, because I have some good news! I'm consistently making about $4 a day from Frustrating Tic Tac Toe alone. Not too bad, considering that my latest project hasn't even hit the App Store yet - stay tuned!
Here's a question for game developers: Since you make games all day, do you get tired of playing video games?
Aspiring game developers ask me this every once in a while, but the only person I can speak for is myself! If YOU are a game developer, feel free to post your thoughts on the issue!
Here are my thoughts: IF you feel that you don't want to play games in your free time, it's rarely because of boredom or an overdose of games, unless of course you feel like you've played everything there is to play, like all the games out there are the same - but that's not an issue unique to game developers!
A more common issue for game developers, especially in preproduction I think, is the blurring of the line between work and play. Are you playing this game for research? Or are you genuinely unwinding? I think it helps to play different kinds of games on different platforms. When I'm pwning zombies in Left 4 Dead 2, I'm unwinding. If I'm playing an iPhone game, I might find myself slipping into hmm... how did they code this? How can I create that effect in my games?
...in conclusion, game developer or not, you might as well read some books (I recommend the Picture of Dorian Gray), or turn on your TV (or Hulu) and watch some quality television like Psych or the Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. This way, there's a CLEAR distinction between work and play, and let's face it, you can never get bored of both Shawn Spencer AND Bruce Campbell!
Something I think every game designer should attempt, if only because it looks awesome in a portfolio for little to no effort, is a simple game mod.
What's that?
Mod is short for modification.
Counter Strike for example, began as a mod of Half-Life. The core Half-Life engine was leveraged to create a completely new game experience. Having guns, and players running around in a 3D world are distinctly Half-Life. But the levels are new, the game rules are new, the experience is new!
Counter Strike specifically is what's called a full-conversion mod. That is, a mod that modifies SO much, all it's really using is another game's core engine. A full-conversion mod does NOT use art assets or levels from its source material.
Does a mod have to be as complicated as Counter Strike? Of course not. In the past, I worked on a full-conversion mod called Plan of Attack, which was the first full-conversion mod of Half-Life 2, and which was nominated for Best Half-Life 2 Mod in the 2006 Independent Games Festival. That was an amazing experience, BUT it was a lot of work! If you're just starting out, and especially if you don't have a dedicated team working with you, you DON'T have to make the next Counter Strike!
All you need in order to make a MOD, or modification, is ONE variable!
Consider Game Genie. In one line of hexadecimal nonsense, you get something like infinite ammo. This completely changes the game play experience, for next to no effort.
...now imagine, instead of Game Genie, you're looking at a game's source code. Somewhere in the game's code, there's a variable for how much ammo is in your clip. You can make sure that value is never updated. Or maybe you want to be able to empty a clip and reload, but you always have unlimited ammo in your backpack. That's a different variable, and you can make sure that one always stays at 100%.
Want to moon jump? Might be a few more lines in Game Genie, but it's the same idea. Gravity is one variable, let's decrease that. How high of a distance you can safely fall from might be a second variable. Let's increase that one.
You can see how changing just ONE variable, or several, can vastly change or improve a game play experience. And how hard can that be?
Not hard at all if you spend some time on Google. A lot of games including Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 provide tools and resources for folks interested in modifying those games! With minimal effort, you can make your guy run super fast, or become invincible. You can make rockets extra fast, or extra slow, why not? You can make a new weapon that fires a cage of grenades so as soon as an enemy moves, KA-BOOM! Hey, it's your mod, not mine!
Here's a video of one mod I made in Crysis for fun. I call it the Boxing Mod:
All I did? I made the value for punch strength ten times larger. THAT'S IT.
You can download this mod, and a few others I made for Crysis here.
Not only does this kind of thing look good on a portfolio for minimal effort...
YOU might find new ways to enjoy your games more, just like good ol' Game Genie! Only this time, you'll be learning to read and write code in the process!
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