Planning and prototyping

It is hard to know without prototyping how game concept would work. So during the past week I have built several prototypes to find out if I have something useful in my mind.

This process takes some time, but at least for me it is important to get some kind of a visualization how things work on the screen. Static modeling with paper models, sketch drawing, or even using Lego bricks may also help to visualize game mechanics or rules, but I need to have something more dynamic to see the full picture. At this point, few ideas seem to be better than others, so they probably are worth further development.

Although we are planning to move gradually out from flash games, it seems that we will still create at least one new game for that domain. The reason for this is that we know the tool (Stencyl) quite well and we are also familiar publishing flash games through Newgrounds and Kongregate. Publishing games to mobile and/or HTML5 is mostly unknown territory to us, so why not try to stay within our comfort zone for a while? :)

Anyways, I think we have to take a leap to unknown at some point and start to explore other platforms in near future. At the moment HTML5 sounds most promising for us: There are available several game creation softwares that can export your game in HTML5, and exported games will run on several platforms (mobile and desktop). For example, according to the FGL's developer earning stats HTML5 is fastest growing segment for FGL. So there are also commercial aspects supporting that.

We had plans to make new versions of couple of our previously released flash games, and this process was started bit over an week ago. Unexpectedly, that was a good decision: Turbomole Trial Run flash game has got surprisingly large number of players during the first week, especially on 7k7k.com. At the moment, the total number of views is bit over 12000 and it is still growing steadily. But let's see how long this lasts. We had initially some discussion on creating new levels to the Turbomole, but we have decided nothing yet. Another option would be create a sequel with much more levels, improved graphics and so on. But that would be a bigger project then.

-Jussi

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