We need your help to get our (Mintpaw, Rusted and I) game Graveyard Shift through steam greenlight!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=310525724

Over the past weekend (11th through 13th) Mintpaw and I worked on a game called Remnants, it was quite a tough weekend with both nights only getting a couple hours sleep, but that's how a proper jam is meant to go. The days that followed were recovery, back to normal development schedule working on the other game projects now.

On the discussion of Remants, Mintpaw and I are thinking about expanding the game into a bigger project. We feel like we have a a good thing going, especially for 52 hours.

However during the jam and there after we had some big discussions about how powerups and cool downs should work, in almost all cases it would just be: 'lets just sit in this empty room of a dungeon until the mana is full, kill all the enemies in the next room and rinse repeat...'

How do you fix this? At first we had an 'ultima' attack that would kill everything in the room...and obviously that didnt fly...for a few hours between doing the jam we knocked ideas back and forth until we came up with reasonable attacks (spells) that we felt were enough to keep pushing and not really worry about waiting for the spell down room waiting solution. The biggest end spell for the Wizard is a 'protection' spell however it only lasts for 20 seconds so you have to use it and not wait around with it, however to use it you'll probably need to wait around or find a mana potion. This was quite a quick cut and dry solution to fixing the waiting after you use a spell as you have to use it before it runs out, however it influences waiting around, so that you can use it...

2-Player was a quite addition, that we decided on early. I knew it would be tough to add in the 2-player element and other things got cut from the game because of it, such as additional enemies and and decoration for the ground, which in a review was complained about...we didnt get to side wall tiles both on a programming auto-tile (in a random dugeon generaor solution)...it was only 52-hours, we couldnt do everything, it happens but its frusterating we could have made it 10 times better if we just had more time.
Back to 2-player stuff, even though we didn't get time for everything, 2-player adds so much to the game, you live through the experience together, in our short playtesting sessions we were communicating with each other, mainly yelling and directing. As the wisp (player 2) you dont get control of the camera, unless you're the only one left...so you'd be telling off player 1 (the wizard) to move back off or head in a certain direction.

How the camera is in the game atm works fine, the last spell for the wisp is teleport so the wisp can run off a little and dictate the direction if they wanted to, however this costs mana (a fair amount too) so in the end it probably isnt worth it, however the other way to use it is for the wisp to hide a bit and if things get tough for the wizard you can save him, which is quite useful.

Back to the camera, how good would it be if it split off? or the camera zoomed out when each player went their sperate way, this could be used for good and bad as you'd be able to see rooms without going in them, if you were to split the camera you'd get less vision of each room you'd see. So there's some big negatives, but if one of the players needed to go back and grab some health both of the players need to go. However the wizard dictates the camera, so the wisp doesnt get a choice unless you verbaly communicated 'hey, lets go back i need health' this problem doesnt exist in 1-player (or only one player at a point being alive).

There are a few things other things that can be talked about, but thats enough to chew on for now I guess.

Hope you enjoy/ed the game!

here's a screenshot of menu:

just a little run down of my thoughts on the aftermath of tumble towers 2 development cycle,

about mid year of 2011 mintpaw and I released Tumble Towers, we thought it was cool at the time and thought we could so much more with it...
so we decided to make a game that the genre was already starting to influx: physics based puzzlers, with a more specific remover element.
We wanted to make the game quite extensive have a in-game editor that anyone could use, have a bazillion shapes and ratios, block types and an in-game community section where people could share their levels.

Sure we did all of that, it did take us a year and a half, learnt lots of things along the way, and discovered we could hold together through a long mucky development cycle that was hindered by university, college and other projects. But we got past that but still hold regret of even making a sequel, because had already invested so much time we couldn't let go of the project.

It then came time to eventually sell it to potential sponsors and because of a few things: its was a sequel, largish file size and the dimensions of the game we didn't get too many bites, and ultimately decided to have a go with ads.
which again was probably a mistake we could have taken a low amount and a lot of restrictions, but ultimately it was decided we didn't.

although tumble towers 2 wasn't what i hoped it turn out to be, i think its a great game and learnt a lot from it.
mistakes are a good learning experience even if you regret having them.

we recently started work on a new game, which hopefully will take much less time and hope to be some what a little ambitious maybe too much at times for just 2 young guys. but we'll see what happens i guess here's some art!

I've seen a lot of posts and articles about the flash game market not being as lucrative as it once was, saying it was flooded and after all of that its now harder to get the same amount of money as what you used to for the same content.
This news makes me sceptical to release my games, and most likely anyone still making flash games as a possible market/job (even part time or just a hobby).

One of my unit co-ordinators that organises the games art course at my University says 'flash is dead its time to move on', so the Web Games and Design unit is now JavaScript intertwined with HTML5. Skipping all of the flash stuff (such as as3) as he says 'its completely dead, don't touch it any more'. This is quite frustrating as a flash dev, I understand the need to move to more secure grounded method for webgames and following and upwards trend and sure JavaScript is interesting and probably more useful in the long run.
However flash has a lot of other very useful things such as vector art? animations? the seemingly flow of new updates that will allow more and more HTML 5 output that is definitely to come? why can't we use that as a tool?

Back to the business side of things and the viewing perspective, have you noticed the once glorious newgrounds seemingly a thriving community now shirking into a very cult like group (exaggerating a little).
The amount of views that have once seen in the hundreds of thousands to millions of views on the frontpage to now just 10's of thousands of views.

What happened to the community, the casual viewers? have they gone to different websites? is it because everyone owns an iPhone and prefer to play byte sized games on there? or is it because schools and work places have crunched down on blocking flash game websites and video sites?

There so far seems to be only a downwards trend to flash games and websites such as Newgrounds, is it really time to move on completely from flash to HTML 5 games or other mediums? However im sure Newgrounds will support html 5 and other stuff soon enough, with Windows 8 and the new Internet Explorer having no plug-ins as examples.
I guess we'll wait and see, I wonder how the kids will break into the industry over the next decade? creating those awesome dress up games.

Down the rabbit hole and on the other side is this thing that came to be more than a year later, MintPaw and I have been going crazy on this big game that we probably shouldn't have created, at times it felt like a kill joy. I look at it sometimes and cant tell the difference if its good or not. But we've almost past it.
We've learnt so many things, such as Playtomic is horrible and its now probably going to die.

However that was one of our many troubles, the biggest one was realising how big of an effort we had to put in, it was only 2 people. We tried our best and the product ended up coming out so far to satisfaction. We are currently in BETA and we want you to test it out, build levels, find bugs and what not. So we can finally properly release it soon.

The beta is on http://www.Team-Omni.com/beta/
Anyone can join, you just need a password so we can monitor who made a level or if you found a bug we know who did. etc.
To get a password let me know here, PM, request one in-game, call (me maybe), e-mail or smoke signal me. up to you.

Cheers. Mad Hatter.

Hello there human viewer,

So the good news is I've finally released Mini-Game Collab 2 which I organised over 2 years ago, but getting the medals didnt work out which caused delays and it stayed in my archives until today. So im happy to finally release something before the new year.

In other news, MintPaw and I have been hard at work on Tumble Towers 2. Tumble Towers was never released on newgrounds due to contractual restrictions so you can play it on bored.com.
We recently started a website, and will continue to incrementally expand on it as we need to, so go check out team-omni.com it will have all the news, updates and previews to Tumble Towers 2 and other future games.

For anyone interested here's a little preview of a quick level i made up in the editor:

<(^_^)< ^(^_^)^ >(^_^)> v(^_^)v <(^_^)> >(^_^)< <(^_^)>

Once upon a time there was a big bad wolf he tried so hard to blow the pigs houses down but once you start aging you just don't have the breath anymore so the wolf got a job at a local fast food restaurant and worked for many years until he could afford a canon to once again blow down the pigs houses
That is the basis of our entry for the Game Jam #6 entitled: The Big Bad Wolf

It was great to work with MintPaw again, although at times quite frustrating, it was a great opportunity to work with Photoshop and digitally paint some pigs, sheep, wolves, canons and so forth...

On another note I actually got to play my game, it took me awhile to get through the levels...even though most of them where horridly designed...and is still a bit glitchy...

I do think a sequel of all the ideas we wanted to initially put into the game would be fantastic...but it may take a bit of convincing on the programmers part....so hopefully you can watch out for a much better game called The Big Bad Wolf 2: The Pigs Strike Back

If you are interested I do have quite a few games nearing the end of production, some in the middle of production or just plainly-sitting-there-not-doing-much-a t-all-production...some have taken WAY too long....so I put together a shoddy little montage of the games that I have got in the Working On Folder and not in the Canceled Folder, which is a much better place to be.
So erm see you soon hopefully?! and post if you want to know a little bit about one of the games, in the montage.
Thank You for your time, please do grab a complementary mints* on the way out...if they are finished then you're out of luck

*one per customer

Game Jam 3 has finished and we are all drained of energy and most us will most likely not touch flash for weeks on end after this....no because we dont want to but because we'll be hospital recovering

Our Team Coffee Addict, created the game entitled: Fucking Bugs Play it Now!

Fun Fact:
We technically made this game in 22hrs after changing the idea, we then creat a completely new engine and we also tried to implement as much as we had from the previous engine into what we have now.
We will however keep working on and expanding because we did run out of time and didnt add everything we want to, such as shooting lions and the proper text and music ect....which isnt exactly present in the game right now :(

we do however hope you enjoy what we do have on offer!

Hi There Newgrounds Viewer!

Sasuke2910 and I recently released Mr Agnry Faic 4 to a very well recieved feedback and a Daily 5th prize which we are delighted by so thank you!
you can also go earn some 0 point medals, which is great fun, hopefully they'll be fully approved soon!

I will be moving soon to uni where i will learn to draw, animate and all that kind of crap next month so i have to say goodbye to my seemless internet, and go down to a restricted slow one so i guess that may mean less game making for me but maybe some drawing on the art portal, who knows.

But on the positive side im making a block tiki type game with sasuke2910 which will be a blast, early concept image below, it pretty much beta version 0.000000000001 we started only 2 days ago with some concepts and designs.

also i will be alone on my birthday :'( in some strange dark place, please come visit me!