Cartoon Indie Game Box Art Posters!

Fellow game devs, here are some of the posters I've made for our own and our friends games. Got a game of your own you'd like me to design a poster, boxart or book cover in this this style? Get in touch! info@puttycad.co.uk Mates rates for indies!!! ;) Ric

Games shown (c) PuttyCAD and 100 Tin Soldiers

www.puttycad.co.uk www.100tinsoldiers.com

Putty CAD officially launches on PopJam

Today at 4pm the PuttyCAD channel officially launches on PopJam.

We'll be posting exclusive content for kids featuring fun drawing activities and puzzles. The Popjam app is a social network for kids with no hidden/private chats and safety approved ads. All content is monitored. check it out on ios and android networks.

Our games on show.

It's been a busy couple of weeks. First up we took Zombie Piranha to the Retro Events Games Expo at Leeds United, Elland Road.

We were positioned next to the VR competition area and the queue was right behind our stall. This gave us a great opportunity to let everyone play our games on our tablets while they were waiting.
Zombie Piranha went down really well as usual and a few people played Clone Zoo too and took details so they could download it from Google Play.

Last night it was the GaMaYo party. (Games Makers Yorkshire) a chance to catch up with fellow game makers for a drink and networking.

I showed off the games to the people from Amazon who were sponsoring the event. They really seemed to like Zombie Piranha and Clone Zoo. We didn't win the competition they were running but it's nice to meet people behind the App stores to get a little feedback.

Zombie Piranha featured on the Expo site

We're excited to announce we will officially be exhibiting Zombie Piranha at the PLAY Expo Leeds!

Check out the site here:

http://playexpoleeds.com/first-round-of-indie-games-confirmed-for-play-expo-leeds/

Please come along to show us your support and try out the game!

Updated Zombie Piranha Poster

A quick update for 2017

Things are moving forward with more book and illustration projects coming together for 2017. I've also been working with Rich who has made great progress with bringing together a new more arcadey version of Zombie Piranha. I will post more updates and progress pics on the Putty CAD Games page here. We're aiming to have a fully playable version for the Leeds Games Expo in April.

I'm proud to once again be a judge and ambassador for Children's Reading Festivals UK. http://www.childrensreadingfestivals.com/ please check out the website for more details and if you have children make sure they check out the Poems and Pictures Poetry initiative created by Christina Gabbitas which is now in it's fifth year! Make sure you tell their teachers too, as the best poems will appear in the next volume of Children's Poems. The topics this year are Seasons and Climate Change.
http://www.poemsandpictures.co.uk/competition/index.html

I will also be attending the Selby children's Reading festival on Saturday 25th March. Please come along if you want a signed copy of my children's book A Knight Before Christmas. Click on the image below to visit the website.

Appy Times are here again!

A while ago myself and Rich Hanson released a series of fun mobile games under the name "Appy Times" we are now updating and re-releasing them as Putty CAD exclusive games. Initial releases will include variations of the popular match 3 game "Clone Zoo"

Under Appy Times we achieved over 50,000 downloads of the most popular games so we are hoping to supercede this with the inclusion of new achievements and social boasting built in.

We uploaded Clone Zoo last year to keep things ticking over and it should go live today with the new features and new branding. Here's the current version...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.puttycad.clonezoo&hl=en

Putty CAD games

I have set up a new Putty CAD google play account where we will be re-submitting the best of the Appy Times games along with some totally new ones!

The first two games announced this week are:

Panda Cars - An retro styled endurance racing game.

and Dinki Eggs - A match 3 puzzle game based on the "Dinki" comics by Ric

They will hopefully be submitted for general release on Google Play towards the end of the week and will be shown at the upcoming GA_MA_YO event in Leeds on Thursday.

SUPER TEN TON NINJA! Out now!

Super Ten Ton Ninja is out now! I provided all the splash screens and map for this one! Free Trial at http://www.addictive247.co.uk/supertenton.htm 
‪#‎gamedev‬ ‪#‎indiedev‬ It's a fun and addictive game (I'm not biased - I already liked it before I was hired to do the screens!) reminds me of the swinging character in the old Amiga game "Fury of the Furries" check it out!

Jerk Chickin - my first Windows 8.1 game

As my daughter will be learning Scratch at school I decided to come up with a simple game idea to use a touch screen which we could try and re-create in scratch.

 A discussion on Ga_Ma_Yo (Game Makers Yorkshire) mentioned Jerk Chicken (whatever that is) and an idea formed in my head.

Jerk Chickin - the game was born.

Basically a single player game where you drag the 'chickin' around the screen using your finger!

I won't give too much away yet but it features Jerk Chickin, Piggies and Mad Choppa the butcher!

Follow my blog and stay tuned for more progress! You'll find all my updates on Twitter too - http://www.twitter.com/cartoonsbyRic

Enjoy!

Games Britannia Live - A great success!

I won't bore you with the details of how we got to Games Britannia Live in Sheffield and all that, but we got there, and it was amazing!

Rich and I attended together on the Saturday and Mark Hardisty (the brilliant organiser of the show) kindly lent us his Nexus 10 for us to show off our game as we only had access to 7" tablets and our smartphones. I also attended the Sunday to give out more demos and also to take my daughter to the Moshi Monsters game level design workshop by Sumo Digital Ltd. It was a great experience for her and I also met a lot of my developer friends over the weekend including the brilliant Byron Atkinson Jones who was running a unity class for developers at the show and Ste Pickford one of my personal heroes of game development.

We set up our table in the indie section along with our friends from 4 Door Lemon, Utopian Sandwich, Retroburn studios and Boneloaf. The venue was excellent and we had a steady stream of people coming past the table and stopping to chat and try out the game.

The game seems to appeal to just about everybody, surprisingly lots of ladies and kids wanted to play Zombie Piranha. Luckily we decided a while ago that any gore in the game would be very cartoony and swapped out a lot of the red blood for green zombie blood.

We got lots of praise for the gameplay and graphics, and people were able to grab a copy of the game by scanning the QR codes we plastered all over everything or by searching just the word 'Piranha' on google play (searching Zombie Piranha brings up thousands of zombie games before finding ours!)

The version we released consists of 5 starter levels and the full easy version of Fin-Durance! This allows people to have a proper limitless experience of the gameplay and try out many of the power-ups before we launch the full version. (Hopefully later this year!)

GRAB IT NOW FOR FREE! -

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appytimes.zp

Zombie Piranha - Chumming soon! (again!)

It's been rather a long while but Zombie Piranha is certainly not Dead in the water or Sleeping with the Fishes!

After taking time updating our most successful match 3 games Clone Zoo HD (14,000 downloads) and Clone Zoo HD  Easter Eggs (26,000 downloads) to add in storylines and update the gfx and gameplay, we now want to focus on getting Zombie Piranha updated and move it towards a proper release, we were planning on running a kickstarter to get the game finished but we are now more hopeful to get a a publisher on board to make sure it doesn't just get lost in the deep dark pool of mobile releases and will go head to head or at least swim alongside the more successful games.

After a fantastic night out at GaMaYo (the social gathering for GAme MAkers in YOrkshire) we now have more encouraging and enthusiastic feedback and are determined to get this finished with more polish than ever before!

Prepare for more fishy puns and screenshots in the coming months!

Clone Zoo HD - coming soon

The clone zoo series of games have been around a while now, the most popular version being the Easter Eggs one! Soon you'll be able to play a brand new HD version of the original Clone Zoo with a storyline and completely new graphics! The game will be released within a couple of weeks on Android smart phones and tablets!

Stay tuned for more info very soon! www.appytimes.co.uk

Jack The Nipper! Games Britannia 2014

As my friends and followers online know I'm a huge fan of old retro video games, especially stuff made in the 80s by Gremlin Graphics of Sheffield.

Jack the nipper cartoony mock-up screen I made for the Games Britannia 2014 schools challenge competition. Please visit Games Britannia Schools Competition 2014

For the past couple of years I've been involved with the Games Britannia game jams which has given me a fantastic opportunity to mingle with my heroes of the 8 bit era of British gaming who inspired me to get into working in gamedev. The thing I loved most about Gremlin Graphics games in particular were the brilliant cartoon characters such as Monty Mole, Zool, Potty Pigeon, Bounder etc. Amongst my favourite games of the time was Jack The Nipper, who was pretty much like the Beano character Sweeny Toddler and got into all kinds of mischief to fill up his "naughtyometer" whilst trying to avoid getting a spanking! (this was the 80s!)

Back in the late 90s, early 2000s when it looked like these games were never going to reappear from the archives I was involved with some groups of Retro Remakers. We we bedroom programmers, musicians and artists who worked together to try to recreate our favourite old games from scratch to run on modern PCs often playing around with the graphics but trying to match the original gameplay that we loved so much.

In 2003  I had a go at making a Jack The Nipper demo, I was using software called The Games Factory by Clickteam, which instead of using programming had an event editor and a drag and drop level builder. Until recently the files were stuck on a hard drive as unfortunately TGF wouldn't open the files in Windows 7. Luckily Multimedia Fusion was recently on sale in the Humble Bundle and I was able to get a copy of that to restore the files and re-compile the demo.

Here's the demo, It's only 1 screen as the movement in Jack The Nipper allows you to walk around the floor, jump up the shelves and grab the pea shooter to fire at the baddies. Although it doesn't sound much, to a non-programmer this was quite a challenge to get working.

I hope you enjoy it! Game Demo Exe file

My old 2003 demo screens.

Space = Start Game

Arrows = Move

Shift = Jump

Ctrl = Fire

1 or 2 = put object in pocket

ESC = QUIT

Original game is copyright Gremlin Graphics, this was made for educational purposes and must not be sold in any form.

Bob goes to Wonderland!

Bob goes to Wonderland! A game by Charlotte Lumb (with a little bit of help from daddy)

My daughter made a game for her school's Christmas Holiday homework project. (see previous post for info!)

She won some chocolate in a class competition for the best presentation format and really enjoyed working on a game project. Hopefully this will be the first of many!

If you want to play the game, it's available here: Game Download

We hope you enjoy the game! :D

Holiday gamedev with daughter

My daughter Charlotte had a Christmas holidays homework assignment, she had to choose from a list of famous authors and inventors and make a presentation about them. They could present the information however they liked. She chose to make a powerpoint slideshow and a little game about the works of Lewis Carroll.

We decided to use Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion 2 to make the game as I have a lot of experience with Clickteams software and with it's built in platform controls and simple interface for storyboarding the levels it's a quick system to learn.

She spent some time drawing characters for the game on paper which we scanned in and reduced. For some bizarre (and rather amusing) reason she chose the main character for the game as Bob, a squirrel who wants to learn about Lewis Carroll's most famous works.

We decided to make a 5 level platform game which shows interesting facts about the works on each screen and you have to jump around shelves in a library collecting pages from the books to go to the next level.

Zombie Piranha Updates

Working on zombie Piranha updates, the game is playable and the power ups are in, now the hard work begins, level designs and a huge graphics overhaul! Our most ambitious mobile game yet. The characters have three layers of damage and the game has different modes such as "Fin-durance" (endless swimming with amazing powerups and retro arcade style gameplay) or you can "Chews a level" to collect star-fish on various difficult set leveles. Also watch out for the "Bone-us" round! :D Chumming soon to mobiles and other platforms! :D www.appytimes.co.uk www.puttycad.co.uk

App Icons for your mobile games and apps.

I'm currently working on some App icons and have decided to run a special promotion to other game devs big or small.

For just £40 GBP I will do a cartoon app icon based on your game or app. If you would like to take me up on the offer please email information about the app including images if possible to info@puttycad.co.uk

To keep costs down and make the process as simple and quick as possible please pay using this site via paypal. Priority will be given on a first ordered first served basis.

Step 1 - I will take the information you provide and sketch up a few ideas for you to look at. You can then choose the one you like best and/or request any changes.

Step 2 - The chosen sketch will be worked up based on your requests to give a clearer idea of the final image and sent to you for approval.

Step 3 - A full colour image will be created at 512x512 pixels, this will then be output as icons at all the required sizes for Android and iOS applications. This will be zipped up and emailed to you.

If you have any queries please contact me on the email address above.

Many thanks

Ric

IPhone Game: Off The Hook released into the wild!

Wormy and his friends were hanging out at the beach watching fireworks when a fisherman snatched them up and took them fishing. They're hoping you'll help set them free!
Choose to play in the Quick Dip Arcade and face easy, medium, and hard level challenges, or take on The Deep Sea Adventure and guide Wormy through an increasingly complex 50 levels of game-play.
Simple play mechanic where you tap the screen and guide Wormies safely to the top, dodging a variety of fish along the way.

A simple game that anybody can play with increasing difficulty and variation. Hope you enjoy it! ;)

Link: OFF THE HOOK

Android App Test using Mobile Conduit's free app builder

Today I made an Android app which takes content from this website http://www.puttycad.co.uk and shows latest updates etc.

I used an online app generator called Mobile Conduit. Fairly easy to use, although still in Beta, so some functions and marketing tools etc. aren't totally implemented yet.   Did I mention the service is FREE! For that alone I thought it was worth playing around with and was pleased with the results.

the Android apps have to go through and approval process to go on the Market but hopefully that shouldn't be a problem. Until I find out if it's up, here's a link to the test web version and a pic of it on my Android phone using the Conduit Preview App. The iPhone App process requires you to have a Mac and an iTunes developer account before you can submit the app for approval.

http://mob.conduit.com/puttycad