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New Game Announcement: BuggOut
Yay! It's official. Lumpy Games has its first iPhone game published and on the App Store! BuggOut is a puzzle game based on the board game Rush Hour. The goal of the game is to get Sparky to the exit of each puzzle. You'll begin the game at the BuggWorld map screen. All of the location...
New Game Announcement: BuggOut
Yay! It’s official. Lumpy Games has its first iPhone game published and on the App Store!
BuggOut is a puzzle game based on the board game Rush Hour. The goal of the game is to get Sparky to the exit of each puzzle.
You’ll begin the game at the BuggWorld map screen. All of the locations are locked except the first - Snail Trail. Green map locations are Easy difficulty, Orange are Medium difficulty, and Red are Hard difficulty. There are a total of 300 puzzles to challenge you.
Each puzzle has an optimal number of moves to get Sparky out. If you solve the puzzle in the fewest number of moves, you’ll get a Diamond Medal on the puzzle results screen. If not, you’ll receive either a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Medal. If you are a completionist and want to get all Diamond Medals, simply click on the puzzle back arrow on the play screen and replay the puzzle. You can do this as many times as you like.
We are very proud of the game and hope everyone has fun playing it. Check it out on iTunes and the iPhone App Store. Also visit the official BuggOut website at www.BuggWorld.com.
In The Beginning, or alternatively, iPhone Developer #97,562
Late in 2008 I sat down with my wife and discussed creating games for the iPhone. We both agreed that due to the fact I was only available part-time to work on game development it made a lot of sense to focus Lumpy on smaller games that would fit on the iPhone. Marlo would help out as an artist and marketing specialist, and if needed we would pull in help from my game dev community contacts.
Two of those contacts worked at Garage Games, whose technology I have intimate knowledge of from past adventures in game development. I first shot a friend of mine at GG, Joe Maruschak, a quick e-mail on the possibility of porting a title I had spent considerable time on a few years ago, but never shipped, to the iPhone using GG’s iTGB. Joe agreed that the port made sense, so I contacted Brett Seyler and quickly had myself a shiny license to iTGB.
While I had considerable Torque-based experience, I had practically no experience with Mac development, much less iPhone development at this point. I decided to purchase a Mac Pro to use not only as my iPhone development machine, but also as a desktop replacement. I was switching to OS X from Windows, and while I still spend considerable time on Windows, I am definitely happy I switched. We purchased a pair of iPhones, and I dug into the process of putting a simple game on the device.
Completing the first iPhone title took a bit of effort. Part-time game development is always a challenge, but it was definitely fun to put the game together. Our game engine of choice iTGB is still a little rough in spots, but overall I’m pretty pleased with it. We learned a lot during the process of finishing the game which will definitely help us to put together the next title more rapidly.
Our first game has been submitted to the App Store and is in review currently. More to come…
Make it Big in Games
- The World Is Changing… How Will You Fit In? May 26, 2009The world is changing faster than we can comprehend. This YouTube video is an inspiring (or maybe scary) presentation that shows how fast things are changing in the world. It is inspiring because it makes your needs of creating a small niche that can sustain your life seem infinitely doable, but scary in the [...]Jeff Tunnell
- Flashbang Guys Getting It Right April 16, 2009Flashbang Studios, creators of the portal Blurst, which is filled with their own games such as Off Road Velociraptor, Blush, and Minotaur in a China Shop are really doing things right. They have now self funded five titles and try to come out with a new game every eight weeks (six per year total). [...]Jeff Tunnell
Garage Games
- Drums Challenge Gives us Rhythm on the GoBrazilian software developers MusiGames give us a taste of rocker stardom with Drums Challenge. Originally focusing solely on serious musical applications, this new spin-off studio of D'Accord Music Software is enjoying the success of their first musical game release on the iPhone.
- Torque 3D Development - Beta 3!This week's blog features a new beta release of Torque 3D. We've added OSX / Mac compatibility and a host of new features. Hit the jump for more!
PushButton Labs
- PushButton Engine Interview on GameDev.net July 2, 2009Ben Garney gave a short interview to GameDev.net about the PushButton Engine at GDC 2009 in March. The interview just went up on their site and can be found by clicking this link. Here is a good quote from the interview: …we knew early on we wanted to do Flash games - it’s a key, growing [...]Tim Aste
- Desktop Backgrounds June 24, 2009I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the PushButton Labs Twitter background image as well as requests for a desktop background, so I took a few minutes to convert it into a multiple resolution desktop background. For kicks, I’ve also gone and tweaked a recent print advertisement for GreatGamesExperiment which also received a lot [...]Tim Aste
CoderHump
- Making Flash The Console For The Web June 25, 2009Dear Adobe, Please make Flash into the ultimate console for the web and mobile devices. Do not listen to the people who want you to make DRM. Centralized DRM for games doesn’t work. Adobe, we developers are a fearful lot and wish not to face the reality that all DRM can be cracked. It is much better [...]Ben
- Adobe, Please Buy HaXe. May 22, 2009If you’re in the Flash space, you’ve probably seen a lot of coverage of HaXe lately. HaXe targets Flash 9 and 10, as well as JavaScript, PHP, NekoVM, and most recently C++. You can write code once and easily retarget it to different platforms, which is very exciting. This has been used to good [...]Ben
- Technical Notes on O3D April 21, 2009Google released O3D, a web plugin for 3d rendering, today. It’s a pretty sweet piece of work. Definitely check it out if you have any interest in 3d rendering, the web, or JavaScript. There are a couple of cool pieces to this puzzle, and I wanted to call them out to other people who might be [...]Ben
- PushButton Labs at Flash Gaming Summit and GDC09 March 28, 2009PushButton Labs went down to San Francisco last week for the Flash Gaming Summit and GDC.Ben
- Tweaking your game with Google Spreadsheets February 1, 2009Our latest game, Grunts: Skirmish, has 200 tweakable parameters. There are 9 player units with three levels of upgrade, and another 9 enemy units. Each unit has between three and ten parameters that can be altered. We tried a few approaches - hand-editing a large XML file (but it was too large and spread out) [...]Ben
- Potpourri - Jul 22, 2009 January 23, 2009A buddy of mine from GarageGames days, Orion Elenzil, posted some notes on how to get started with the free Flex SDK. Take a peek to see just how simple it can be to get started with Flex. for those who may come across this post on their search to learning how to set up a [...]Ben
- Array Ordering in ActionScript 3 January 6, 2009Update: I filed a bug about this issue. This post starts out with a finite state machine, but it ends up talking about how iteration is implementing in ActionScript. There I was - implementing a finite state machine. Each state had transitions, and the transitions are named and, additionally, processed in order. This is useful because [...]Ben
- Blast From The Past: Blitz3D Models in Torque December 19, 2008I found some old screenshots on a backup, and uploaded them to my Flickr account. As I was filing them away, I looked back in my .plans at GarageGames and realized that I had never talked about it publicly. At least, the site search didn’t turn anything up. Well, I think it’s probably safe to do [...]Ben
- PlayStation Home: Serial Killer Edition December 15, 2008PlayStation Home came out not too long ago. Penny Arcade pretty much said what needs to be said about it, but I had to try it myself. Naturally the first thing you do is create your character from a randomized (I hope) default character. To the left is the default character that I got. … Sony appears to [...]Ben
- Tip: Setting Up Flex Builder The Sane Way December 12, 2008There is a right and a wrong way to set up Flex Builder. The wrong way is to get the Flex Builder package from the Adobe site. It’s running on a super old version of Eclipse, and it lacks a lot of useful editors and functionality. I have lost many man-hours of productivity to this [...]Ben
