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This is also where you may read about very important announcements we have to make regarding our games.

There are no important announcements for now.

Our upcoming Alien Invasion has just been through a rather rough period. The Planetary Combat mode and the Intro Movie are to blame. I built the Intro Movie at the beginning of October, but I wasn’t satisfied with the result, and neither were the testers of our game. So I had to drop it. It needs to be recreated from scratch.

As for the Planetary Combat mode, that is/was an even greater problem. First of all, the landscape doesn’t look nice enough and secondly, I am not at all satisfied with how the game progresses. It’s too… bland.

Due to these reasons, I had to pause the development of the game for a little while. I needed something to recharge my batteries / reset my brain. That something came in the form of an upgrade to my PC, which allowed me to play a few of the games that have been gathering on my list in the past few years. I hold the firm belief that any game developer should also be a gamer, so I spent a few weeks reminding myself of how it is to be a gamer and how games are supposed to be (fun and, at least for me, challenging).

Alex also had a little vacation during the past few months. I think he was also a bit over-worked at this project. All in all, it was a welcomed break from the routine.

Fortunately, during this break, I came up with a few solutions for the problems plaguing the Planetary Combat Mode of Alien Invasion, solutions which will be implemented starting now.

Alien Invasion version 0.6 is now officially in work. Expect a DevLog post with version 0.6 in the following weeks.

This is the last video in my series of 3 which present Alien Invasion version 0.6.

Here, I’ll be talking about the Space Combat Mode, which is where the Player takes the fight to the Aliens. This is accomplished using Fighter Ships, and you’ll be able to see how their work and see their Special Abilities in action.

You’ll recognize an arcade-style side-scrolling shooter, where the enemy Flying Saucers come in packs, trying to defend their Mothership. At the end of the video, the big bad boss Saucer will make an appearance.

The video’s duration is 8:15. Before seeing this video, you should see the General Presentation of Alien Invasion and the Planetary Combat Presentation.

Usage Instructions: please wait for the Video Player to load. It should not take long. Then, press the gray “Play” button in the middle of the Video Player.

Note: since I don’t own a top-notch microphone, the quality of the audio recording is not stellar.

The second video in the series of 3 which present Alien Invasion version 0.6, will introduce you to the Planetary Combat Mode, which is where most of the game’s action will take place.

I will present how the defense of a Planet Area goes, starting with the building of the Bunkers, equipping them with Weapons and, later on, with Soldiers. You’ll get to see how the in-game user-interface looks like and how the game keeps the player engaged.

The last part of the video will focus on the Soldiers and the “RPG elements” of the game. You’ll see how Soldiers level-up and how they can be upgraded. I will also be explaining what their skills mean. Last but not least, I’ll demonstrate the usefulness of Cargo Ships.

The video’s duration is 14:20. Before seeing this video, you should see the General Presentation of Alien Invasion. After seeing this video, you should see the Space Combat Presentation.

Usage Instructions: please wait for the Video Player to load. It should not take long. Then, press the gray “Play” button in the middle of the Video Player.

Note: since I don’t own a top-notch microphone, the quality of the audio recording is not stellar.

This is the first video in a series of 3 which will present Alien Invasion version 0.6. In this video, I’ll show you some general aspects about Alien Invasion.

In the first part of the video, I will mostly be talking about the Map, presenting how the Player can travel from one planet to another, talking about Ships and the hybrid turn-based system which is at the base of the Alien Invasion gameplay.

During the second part of the video, the Tech Lab, Shop, Library, Roster and Starport will be presented to you.

The video’s duration is 9:17. After watching this video, you should see the Planetary Combat Presentation and the Space Combat Presentation.

Usage Instructions: please wait for the Video Player to load. It should not take long. Then, press the gray “Play” button in the middle of the Video Player.

Note: since I don’t own a top-notch microphone, the quality of the audio recording is not stellar.

In this video, I will talk about our first released game, Thunderbirdz (developed in 2009 and released in January 2010). It has been almost 2 years since Thunderbirdz was released, so I think it’s time for an objective look over the shoulder.

I will present almost all the features of the game and I will also reveal a few of the mistakes which have contributed to its rather poor commercial showing.

During my narration, you can see almost two games of Thunderbirdz being played. I will also be making a few comments about the lessons I learned from the development of this first Gamaddiction game.

If the video makes you want to… then you can go here and play some Thunderbirdz!

The video’s duration is 20:17.

Usage Instructions: please wait for the Video Player to load. It should not take long. Then, press the gray “Play” button in the middle of the Video Player.

Note: since I don’t own a top-notch microphone, the quality of the audio recording is not stellar.

Development at Alien Invasion has been doing great in the past few months. We’ve included new art and overcame lots of problems. A ton of new features has been implemented and the game engine is almost feature complete.

The game has grown to much more than what I originally had in mind. That also happened with Thunderirdz, although back then I weren’t able to implement a lot of the great ideas that I wanted to. This is not the case with Alien Invasion, because it has a great UI Library behind it (I’m talking about the G3 UI Library, of course) and because with Alien Invasion, I really want to make a power statement.

Originally, the game was supposed to only be a sort of Tower Defense game with an interactive mission selection area, in the form of a planets map. But eventually, the Map became a module with a life of its own. I added the ability for the Player to travel from one Planet to another, using Ships that they can buy from the Shop. And then, I added something even better: counter-strikes by the Alien Invaders. Once I did that, the Map became a sort of Turn-Based Strategy game.

Alien Invasion Adventure Map Mode

The Tower Defense part became the Planetary Combat mode, the Map became the Adventure Map mode and, finally, a third module was added: the Space Combat mode ::- D. But more about that one, in a future posting. Actually, I plan to do even better than show you pictures. I plan to release a few presentation videos showing exactly where’s the game at, but it might take me a while to do that because I’m so caught up in the development work. Stuff changes very fast so even if I record a video today, in one month it would be obsolete. So I’m waiting to nail down the engine completely.

Here’s a nice sign of the progress we’re making with the game. The most recent revisions pulled directly from our Mercurial repository. Beware, the text may contain foul words, programmer jokes and other weirdness ::- D.

Alien Invasion Revisions (CLICK to open the image in a NEW WINDOW)

Every version from the above listing takes between 8 and 24 hours of work. And if you do a little math, you’ll realize I’ve been coding at Alien Invasion for more than 1000 hours. That would be a correct estimation.

And, if you want some (very) deep insight into the “mind” of Alien Invasion, check out this diagram I just pulled from Enterprise Architect. It shows just a part of the notes I’ve been taking while working at the specification (you’ll have to click to see it in all its glory ::- D).

Alien Invasion Specifications (CLICK to open the image in a NEW WINDOW)

That’s it for now. Back to work!

I’ll upload some videos soon.

It’s been quite a while since I gave you any news about our upcoming game, Alien Invasion. I’ve been telling you about The Logicon, the G3 UI Library and the GFG Library, but nothing about what Gamaddiction is really all about! Games!

That’s just because I’ve simply been too into Alien Invasion to write about it! Ever since the middle of February when I started development, I’ve been like a crazy scientist never leaving his laboratory. And before that, Alien Invasion mostly consisted of work at The Logicon, which was supposed to be the game’s component to handle arithmetic computations, but got branched into a completely separate project.

But now, after two months of hard work, Alien Invasion is already at version 0.4! I finished implementing all the math-related stuff, which I wanted to get out of the way as soon as possible. A great deal of art created by Alex has also been imported and right now, I’m busy hunting some memory leaks, profiling & optimizing the game ::- ). Here, have a look!

AI Memory Leak Hunting

That’s the Flash Builder Profiler. It’s a wonderful tool for any professional Flash Player developer. Without it, your game/application might end up with sluggish performance at best, or crash your user’s browser at worst.

Luckily, my search has been quite successful. I found an issue when parsing the game’s XML data which cut the game’s memory usage in half. Remember to never put XML objects in Arrays where you want strings without casting them to String first: what will happen is that you’ll end up with an Array with XML objects in it, and XML objects eat a lot of memory!

Also remember to look very carefully at your game’s art, especially if you draw your shadows dynamically, based on the size of a certain object. Take a look at the following picture and try to spot the problem. Awww, too late, I already circled it for you.

AI Bunker Shadow Bug

The shadow of the Bunker spills over the hill. Not good. But I fixed it, of course ::- ).

And yes, I just showed you the very first picture from our upcoming game ::- D. Enjoy it, it’ll be the last I’ll be posting for a while ::- D. The graphics are still in alpha stage, especially the landscape and the UI, but you can already see that we’ve been using our G3 UI Library in the game.

There are many more things to show, but I’m thinking of uploading some nicely narrated videos, because people now-a-days are lazy readers ::- D. Aren’t you? Ok, ok, I admit it: it would be hard to write & upload pictures of all the features that the game has in it!

Naturally, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. We decided to freeze work at RoboFite due to the tough financial requirements of the project, which are, at least for now, beyond our possibilities.

This is a hard and painful decision, but we will not give up on the project. Gabi “DiAngelo” Balasz has worked too much on the PHP side for me to allow such a thing. RoboFite will return one day, hopefully soon.

It is my hope that our newer game project, Alien Invasion will secure us some much-needed funds, which I could funnel into RoboFite. And, if not funds, at least fame. Gamaddiction needs more exposure and portfolio, so that at least we can bring more designers on our side, interested to work with us at some really great games.

And RoboFite is a great game. It has a huge potential and is filled with innovations and great ideas. Sure, that’s how any game developer talks about his game! ::- ). But really, RoboFite is awesome and I will never give up on it!

For now, the focus switches on Alien Invasion. It is the healthy thing to do! We will stay focused on Alien Invasion and deliver one more quality single player game.

And, besides Alien Invasion, there is, of course, the G3 UI Library which continues to evolve. And there’s one more secret project in the works. But, come tomorrow, it won’t be a secret any more ::- ). Stay tuned!

Now that the G3 UI Library has reached version 0.2, we are proudly announcing the commencement of a new project! The temporary name of the project is Alien Invasion and it was in my plan book ever since March of this year, when I posted (on the 26th) its initial specifications in a private topic on the AxonnSD Forum.

I conceived this game when I started having doubts about Radu, our RoboFite designer (which has left the project eventually). So, let’s see what’s all this about!

Ever since work at the RoboFite Flash Game Client stopped, I realized that the G3 UI Library will be missing a most important step in its development: being used in a real project, as opposed to the sandbox project I was working with. This, combined with my enthusiasm for doing some actual game programming (even if it’s another single-player game) and getting in touch earlier this year with an older designer friend of mine, resulted in the birth of a new game project!

Alex, my designer friend, has already completed a quite large amount of assets for Alien Invasion. He’s been working at this since April, while I continued to keep myself busy with the G3 UI Library.

A big thank you to Alex, because without him, this project wouldn’t have existed. Here’s a little sneak peek into the art of Alien Invasion.

A few assets created by Alex

So, it’s game-time once more!

We’ll post more news about this as we… create them! ::- ).

Barely one month into the development of RoboFite and we already stumbled into our first major issue. This does not bode well.

Simply put, our designer, Radu Matasa, has decided to abandon ship, mostly due to material concerns. RoboFite is indeed a large project, one that will be difficult to complete with a team comprised mostly of volunteers.

We are all worried about the future of the project, especially Gabi “DiAngelo” Balasz who already put in a great deal of effort on the PHP side. We already got several operational interfaces which are eagerly waiting for the Flash Player client to connect to them.

Unfortunately, the development of the G3 UI is also eating a lot of my time, so I was unable to do much for the RoboFite Flash Player Game Client so far.

For now, I wouldn’t say that the project is going great.

We’re obviously looking for another designer to help us with this project, so feel free to get in touch via our Contact Form.

For now we don’t even have sample art, and that’s good in a way, because our next designer will be able to choose his/her own art style, as long as it fits the game Universe, which we’ll be happy to talk about with potential candidates.

It is time to take the wraps off our newest Game Project! I already hinted that we got something new cooking, a few days ago when I announced the G3 UI Library, a Tools Project intended to facilitate the development of our future Games.

Of course, us starting work at a new Game was merely a matter of time: now that Thunderbirdz has been released, we needed a new goal. Just as Thunderbirdz was in its final weeks, that goal started to take shape.

RoboFite is a much more ambitious project. Although it is still based on Adobe Flash, this is an entirely different beast. Together with a PHP & MySQL back-end, RoboFite, as you can probably guess, is going to be an MMO.

I already wrote a fat Game Design / Specifications document and I’m in the process of preparing the development team which, thankfully, this time, will not consist only of myself. Gabi “DiAngelo” Balasz will be my partner. We’ve been working together at the G3 UI Library and his PHP experience automatically recommended him for this project.

As far as the Art Design is concerned, Radu Matasa will be helping us whenever he has time. He’s actually the boyfriend of Anca Poiata, who has been our talented designer for Thunderbirdz.

Now that I revealed RoboFite, I can also tell you that this Game Project is at the root of our newest Tools Project, the G3 UI Library. Reason?

Well, quite simply put, RoboFite is friggin’ complex! Even Thunderbirdz, a simple game, would have benefited enormously from a library like I plan the G3 UI to become. But RoboFite? RoboFite would be impossible to develop without a very capable UI library. And that’s where the G3 UI comes in.

I can’t reveal any information about RoboFite’s Game Design & Story. So far, all I have is this name for you to go to sleep with ::- ).

So, the pieces are coming together! Epic Game Studio and the G3 UI Library will be our Tools Projects which will together help us on the long hard road ahead of us: the release of our first MMO game! RoboFite!

Thunderbirdz, the first game created by Gamaddiction, has now been released! We think of it as a well polished, but simple game, with plenty plenty of challenges and content. The #1 reason behind Thunderbirdz was to make our first mark in the game development industry, to begin small and to release constantly. Already, new projects are in our plans!

Thunderbirdz is the work of me, Axonn Echysttas, as the coder & game designer, together with Anca Poiata, lead designer who unfortunately had to bail out of the project about three months ago and Lucian Olaru and Crina Angelescu who handled testing duties.

After approximately 900 hours of work (of which, difficulty balancing and gameplay testing constitutes almost 30%), Thunderbirdz was finally released! I learned a lot about ActionScript 3 while coding this, my first AS3 game, and I’m happy I chose Adobe’s Flash Player as a means of release, as it offers us an immense audience.

We are now waiting for sponsorship offers on Flash Game License^ and we’re preparing to release the game on major game portals. Quite probably, an ads-free version will also be featured here on our website.

Stay tuned for more news soon!

UPDATE 2010-02-15: Thunderbirdz is now live! You can play Thunderbirdz here!

Things were going quite well for us with Thunderbirdz. Unfortunately, our designer got mixed up in too many projects and cannot devote enough time to the project. Anca is a wonderful artist, without which Thunderbirdz would not have existed. I thank her from the bottom of my heart for all her help bringing this game as far as it came.

The art is not yet complete however. I think it’s about 80% done. We’re looking for somebody willing to help us add the last touches to our game.

Here’s a little teaser of how the game looks so far, so that any artist has an idea of what art style we’re looking for:

Thunderbirdz Screenshot

After three months and five days since the Thunderbirds project was started, we got a final name for it, and a Beta Release too!

The name, fortunately, isn’t much different than the original. We settled on Thunderbirdz, since this would avoid any confusion with the popular series and/or copyright issues.

As for the Beta release, that’s available in the Axonn Software Development Forums (so yes, it’s not a public Beta). But the important thing for our loyal fans and close partners is that they got something to play with!

The Beta features the first episode of the game, titled “Feathery Spring”. I also added a fun “destruction” mod called “Timelapse”, in which you have to destroy as many birds as possible in the given time.

The final version of the game will include two more episodes: “Arctic Adventures” and “Bloody Dunes”. Each episode has 30 levels, for a total of 90 levels. However, our definition of a “level” isn’t quite… standard. There is no level per-se, rather a seamless succession from one area to the other. The “levels” are very short, roughly 1 minute each, so completing a game lasts about 30 minutes. If you survive, that is, hee-hee-hee.

It’s been a long road so far, for me personally, as I had to deal with quite a few challenges in mastering ActionScript 3 and game engine programming. But everything worked out great and I’m quite satisfied with our first game!

Announcing our first game! Thunderbirds is the name, now is the time.

Thunderbirds is, for now, only the codename of our new project. The name may change before release, due to the fact that there is a rather famous TV series with this name. We don’t want to risk any copyright problems, even though this game has absolutely no connection with the said TV show.

Thunderbirds is a game about a cloud which destroys the birds that fly under it using thunders. I think that there is a rather low chance for this name to change, because it’s quite… inescapable ::- D. Thunder. Birds. Thunderbirds!

The game will be built in ActionScript 3 and will run in any browser using Adobe’s Flash Player. We chose this as our first development platform due to the fact that vector art is quite easy to obtain, and, since we’re a group of indie developers, we’re always on a budget.

I already finished the initial specifications of the game and we’re currently working at the first art objects. In the meantime, I’m getting my mitts firmly on ActionScript 3. It’s a leaps-and-bounds improvement over the previous ActionScript 1, which is the last one I used. I completely skipped AS2, since it wasn’t very much different from AS1 (at least at its core).

Estimated date of release for the game is Summer/Autumn of this 2009. This may change depending on budget constraints / project plan changes. Since we’re talking about a game, I’m quite convinced that there will be quite a few plan changes.

Regardless of the final release date, I’m sure we’ll be able to do it eventually and to deliver a quality title. So, that being said, let’s rock!