Jack Allin at adventuregamers.com has gotten his hands on Machinarium, the latest casual Flash game from Czech-based Amanita Design. The game is due out this Fall, but you can watch some gameplay footage below:
Ajay Karat turned me onto a new Flash-based game the other day – Little Wheel. It’s from One Click Dog, a Slovakian-based company, and they stylish game play includes some well-animated cut-scenes. This walkthrough of the game includes spoilers….
I don’t have an iPhone, and I’m actually considering the Palm Pre to replace my dying Blackberry – but even those of us without the ubiquitous gadget know how big this damn App Store has become. Noone is more aware of this than Allan Dye, whose work you’ve seen here a number of times. He lent his design and animation skills to a new game from Bolt Creative called Pocket God, and the thing just took off. It’s held the #1 “paid apps” spot on iTunes, and it currently hovers around the 4th spot. It’s obviously not a Flash app, as Apple is loath to include Flash on their device, but all the animation was created with Adobe’s software. Dye exports his animation as PNG files and then edits an XML doc that calls up these PNGs. Pocket God programmer Dave Castelnuovo has developed a system that automagically creates XML data to control the PNG files. Allan and Dave co-wrote this sequence of fan-suggestion vignettes, which Allan animated.
iPhone app mania has apparently claimed a number of Flash animators. Jeremiah Johnson launched Ninja Buddy and my pal Sean McKenzie is part of the team behind the newly launched Wedgie Toss 2 (launches iTunes store).
Are you working on an iPhone game?
Remember the Activision games for the Atari 2600? I played those to death. Freeway was one of the first, releasing in 1981. Pitfall! came a year later, and now Activision is one of the biggest video game publishers in the world.
And last year, GameTap, the broadband gaming network, hired Six Point Harness to make a series of animated shorts featuring the characters from several of these original game properties. They’re essentially marketing tools to drive more subscriptions to the online service, but you can also play some classic online games for free including Defender and Joust. They were directed by Chris Martin, Fawn Veerasunthorn and Mac Whiting and fell under the Re\Visioned brand, which also saw some 2007 Lara Croft shorts.
Watch all six at YouTube, and here’s two of my favorites:
Freeway (play online – $4.95 per month for over 300 games)
Pitfall! (play online)
We’ve featured the stylish CG cut scenes from Ubisoft’s Rayman Raving Rabbids video game over on Lineboil a bunch, but I just confirmed that the cut scenes in the TV Party game are produced with Flash in France. Pretty cool stuff, I might add:
