Friday Free Game: Viking Defense Friday, January 09, 2009

As my reader(s?) may know, I'm a sucker for a tower defense games. Viking Defense is one of the best I've ever played. It's flavorful with a thoughtfully-designed difficulty curve that I still haven't conquered after a solid week of playing it.

Like other defense games, the interesting decisions here are where to place what kinds of towers, but I love the idea of the escalating series of challenges to unlock more powerful ways of defending your waterway from drakkars and giant whales.

This is going to be the last Friday Free Game for a while... why not visit Jay is Games for all your casual gaming needs? And play S3QUENC3R on Kongregate and rate it for its elegant-yet-challenging gameplay and not whether the intro screen was implemented correctly. To be honest, I lost the source code to the game in a hard drive crash (RAID is now my friend) and can't fix it. It'll have to remain imperfect, like so many other games (and people).

Not for Morning Muzzle Wednesday, May 09, 2007

So this is what Google says the German guys at PlasticThinking.org said about S3QUENC3R:

S3QUENC3R is a small Game for occasionally. It resembles the play "Simon says". Types the numbers in reverse order its appearance.

I suppose "small Game for occasionally" means "casual game".

One guy did comment on the game, but Google's rendering of it wasn't entirely illuminating:

Definitely nix for Morgenmuffel… are still much to unausgeschlafen for sowas. The play is completely nicely, although no Uber Game; -) The Highscore is unfortunately limited on 1540. If one would turn there still a little at the speed, one could make the open ended.

So I tried a different site: PROMT-Online. Theirs was a bit better:

Definitively nothing for morning muzzle ... has still unslept off a lot to for something like that. The play itself is quite nice, even if no Uber-Game;-) Unfortunately, the high score is limited to 1540. If one became there still a little bit in the speed turn, one could do open ended.

Not sure what "morning muzzle" might refer to; this has got to be some sort of idiomatic thing. Anyway, he did call the gameplay "quite nice"... I'll ignore the bit about it not being the Uber-Game.

I have some ideas for a slightly more developed version of the game. Based on the feedback, the main features I'm considering are:

• A timer to keep the pressure on. This is more for feel than any real game function. I don't think people are taking too much time to repeat the sequences. I find myself playing at a decent clip just to keep my memory fresh.
• Adjustable difficulty levels.
• Switching back and forth between reverse and forward puzzles.
• Open-ended gameplay. It's always been my feeling that a good game should have no ceiling, though S3QUENC3R seemed to so naturally call for an end when all 9 digits were in play.

If anyone can shed some light on what "nix für Morgenmuffel" means, that would be greatly appreciated.

S3QUENC3R Picked up by PlasticThinking.org Wednesday, May 09, 2007

A German gaming blog called PlasticThinking.org has picked up S3QUENC3R, causing another very nice spike in traffic and another 500 unique users in a single day. To sum up, S3QUENC3R has had about 2,000 unique users in just 5 days!

And, once again, no Diggs.

Everybody I talk to has the same response. First: what's Digg? Then: too much effort to sign up. Okay, I get it. Nobody wants to give away personal information just to promote my game. Personally, I've had a Digg account for a while, so I'm not even sure what kind of information they ask for.

But everything I've read about the whole self-promotion thing says that Digg is one of the best ways of driving traffic to your site. Maybe it's the wrong tool for this case? Maybe a deeper game would be more likely to get dugg?

Jay is Games Link Dumped Me Friday, May 04, 2007

As in put me in his "Link Dump Friday" post. Not that he dumped me. I don't know Mr. Jay, and I'm sure whatever his reasons would have been for him ending our hypothetical relationship would have been mutual, and we would have stayed the best of friends. That is, if dump meant dump and not dump. Erm.

So I checked the stats on S3QUENC3R and couldn't believe my eyes: after averaging around 20 uniques a day since the release, I got over 550 unique visitors today!

And not a single comment, Digg, or posted score.

*sigh*

Well, I would call this experiment in generating traffic for a simple game a success, though I do find it interesting that there wasn't a single user in the hundereds that visited who would do any of the aforementioned second steps.

Theories?

Gnomification Friday, April 20, 2007

I've been gnomified (is that a word? um... I supposed it could be, what with the pleasant experience that I recently... experienced), and feel terribly good about it. All of you humble (and not-so-humble and furry gnomish types) web-surfers should find your way to the remarkable treasure trove of web-knowledge known as A Random Gnome's Random Lair and feast your eyes on the decidedly gnomish write-up of my game, S3QUENC3R!

And please give a lonely bull a hand by telling the world how much you "digg" my game!

S3QUENC3R Wednesday, April 18, 2007

I think I have worked out some of the kinks with S3QUENC3R, so here it goes a third time. I think people were having trouble running the game the first time, so if you would be so kind as to click here, you can load up the game and see if you still have a problem. I've had a hard time diagnosing the problem on my side, so please leave comments if you do encounter problems.

I've noticed that sometimes the game just hangs and doesn't start. If that happens, just refresh the browser. That should fix it. In the meantime, I will see what I can do about it.

But I'm excited for people to try out the game. Let me know if it's too hard, and post your high scores!