Tiny Tower vs The Volcano, Casual Game on Kongregate

After my ebook project, two weeks ago, I created an overhaul of a casual Flash game I wrote for the Ludum Dare #23 competition. It’s available on Kongregate for all the play and comment on. Read on for my experience and lessons learned.

Way back in April,

I joined the Ludum Dare 48 hours game competition. The idea of the competition is to create a game, all by yourself, from scratch in 48 hours. Going in, I knew I wasn’t doing this to win, but mostly for the experience.

In hind-side, I’m pretty happy with how the weekend went. The main reason that I was able to complete this game was that I only kept one gameplay element. Ant throughout those 48 hours, I kept reminding myself not to add anything else. It worked and it was a fun weekend.

Kongregate

I choose to put the game on Kongregate, because I find it the best casual game site out there. The community is, in general, very supportive with constructive criticism. And the people behind the site seem to genuinely care about their developers.

That, and there’s some incredible talent over there.

Flash Game

Although it usually isn’t my first choice, I did go for a Flash game. Simply because, at this point in time, it’s the default for casual games. Choosing any other platform but Flash to write your casual game in, is severely limiting yourself and the potential reach of your game.

There are also a wealth of free ActionScript game libraries available. I choose Flixel, which was a good choice, but I did find the documentation was a little lacking.

It’s clear HTML5/JavaScript is the future for casual games, but I’m not sure if it’s already “there”, just yet.

Future

The game has been on Kongregate for about a week, over which it was played almost 800 times and received a 2.34 rating (which is pretty much the definition of an average game).

I’m pretty happy with that, given that I did almost no promotion and the gameplay is rather limited.

The commentary was also acceptable and the criticism as expected.

So I’ve been thinking about either enhancing this game, or creating a 2.0 version.

I love tower defense games and feel that this would be a good direction to enhance the gameplay in. But we’ll see, those ideas will need some extra time to properly form.

Conclusion

Go play the game and let me know what you think.