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 at Games Britannia Live weekend festival 28th-29th June

If you're in Sheffield this weekend you'll be able to view the latest Zombie Piranha demo in the flesh!

You'll find us in the indie section of Games Britannia Live at the Millennium gallery.

See the official website for details... http://live.gamesbritannia.com

for updates on twitter look for the hashtag #zombiepiranha

15000 download challenge for CLONE ZOO HD, we currently need only around 80 downloads in order to reach 15,000, help us get there in time for Games Britannia Live on Saturday. FREE download available for Android smartphones and tablets on Google Play - Clone Zoo HD - FREE download

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!

Special Easter Treats for all! FREE comics and games! :D

All my comics are FREE on Amazon for two days only this Easter. Today and tomorrow you can pick up ALL the Dinki comics and the Inky & Fred collection,completely FREE OF CHARGE! The comics are available on Kindle, but if you don't have a Kindle device you can download the FREE offical Kindle reader APP for Android, Ios, PC or Mac. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ric-Lumb/e/B00IWLNT52/

Clone Zoo Easter Eggs HD The clone Zoo Easter Eggs game has been given a makeover to HD along with other enhancements such as a story. If you already have the game you can update it or if you're new to the game grab your FREE copy now! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appytimes.gpczee

Have a happy Easter and enjoy these Freebies while you eat your chocolate! :D

Clone Zoo HD is now on the Google Play App store.

With newly updated and more detailed cartoony graphics, smoother gameplay and an added story!

Download for FREE from the Google Play store here

I hope you enjoy the updates! Please remember to share the link with friends and rate the game if you like it!

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.

Book covers from 'The Land Of Ononokin' and 'Nanoagents'

I was recently commissioned to do some art for book covers. A good place to see them out is on the author John P Logsdon's very own website!

http://www.johnplogsdon.com/

John is a hugely creative writer and his stories will keep you hooked. The Nanoagents books although aimed at a younger audience are a great read and introduce some really exciting characters and situations.

I've worked on various projects before with John and it's always fun to see what he has up his sleeves!  Please check out the stories and support his work! I'm sure these books will become firm favourites to many people!

NEW YEAR SPECIAL OFFER! Get All 12 digital Dinki comics for one super low price! Try Issue #1 for FREE!

Putty CAD: Dinki: Dinki was created by Ric as a single panel doodle every single day in 2013, the resulting images were collected into comics and a...

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

Dinki comics #11 & #12 are now uploaded!

The final two Dinki daily doodle comics are now up for my Kickstarter backers! I hope you enjoyed taking part! 8(:)p http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/puttycad/dinki/posts/715087

It feels like the end of an era, now that the final two comics are up! I'm not sure where Dinki will go next, but there is a little game planned and I hope to start writing some childrens books using the characters created during the daily doodles. I can't thank the kickstarter backers enough for supporting me to get this personal project out there! It's nice to look back to the first issues and see how the story has progressed and the characters have developed. I hope everybody enjoyed seeing the doodles and I brightened up a few peoples days with the stories!

Here's to 2014! Let's see what happens next!

;) Ric