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Post Mortem – Ray Ardent: Science Ninja

Ray Ardent: Science Ninja is a high speed platformer made in Flash and released through the Flash portal scene. As a developer, it represents a lot of firsts: It’s the first game I have made as an artist and/or programmer and it’s also the first Flash game I have ever made.

Ray Ardent: Science Ninja Trailer

What Went Right:

1. Audio

The man responsible for the great music and sound fx is John Tennant. John and I worked together on Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, where he was the audio lead. John is a great friend and he was the first person I talked to about the game.


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A look back at 2010 – development, games, movies, comics and other nerdings

In a few short days, I’ll be celebrating 1 year of self-employment and life as an indie developer. The past year has definitely had it’s share of ups and downs and it went by incredibly fast. Time to look back on the past year, at my productions and inspirations.

Moving across the country and setting up in Vancouver has been an amazing experience.

I love Vancouver

The Olympics were great and the city feels more alive than it ever has. Cities, and their energy/spirit have always fascinated me and seeing how Vancouver changed for the Olympics was amazing. Perhaps my favorite part of the Olympics was seeing a city full of bitter, government-hating, anti-Olympic Vancouverites transform into a bunch of smiling, high-fiving party animals when the Olympics began.

Working from home has been simply amazing. My grey hairs are actually going away, the chronic back pain that plagued me for over two years is gone and I’ve shed 25 lbs through combination of chasing a 3 year old around, reduced stress, reduced overtime meals as well as Wii Fit and EA Active.
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I’m Alive (or, what happened to the last 2 weeks)

The last two weeks have been a crazy adventure of cross-Canada flying, all day meetings and then a cold/flu issuing a massive beatdown.

Two weeks ago, I flew out to Prince Edward Island for a consulting client who is working on a cool educational game project. The trip was fantastic, but 10 hours of flying and layovers each way took their toll and when I landed in Vancouver, I was slammed in the face with a nasty cold.

I had been fighting the cold for a few weeks, but I didn’t want to get sick before my trip. I honestly think I kept the cold off with nothing more than willpower.

The cold floored me for a week and during that week, all I really had the energy to do was put the final touches on Ray Ardent. Things like putting the sponsors leaderboards in the game, putting together an interactive store for NRD shirts and a few other tweaks into the game.

I’m back on my feet again, Ray Ardent is literally going live any day now and after a couple of months of consulting, getting t-shirts done and wrapping up Ray Ardent, I’m finally getting my hands dirty and am working on the prototype for my next game. If the prototype shows any promise at all, expect an announcement and trailer right here.

Oh – and this simply rules:

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The Temptation of Unity

I started my first year as an independent developer with a big focus on Flash. Flash was easy to use, had a solid community and the portals were a great way to get your game out there.

Over the past few months, the alluring song of Unity3d has been tempting me and every day, the temptation grows.

Developing in Unity always been sexy for it’s ease of use, incredible in-browser performance and ease of releasing on multiple platforms. At OrcaJam a few weeks ago, Alec Holowka showed me just a few of the incredible things Unity can do and presented a strong case for switching.

I always knew that development in Unity was fast, but it’s REALLY fast, getting a simple prototype up and running is a matter of a few hours, as opposed to a few days in Flash. That’s a HUGE difference and one that’s hard to ignore.

In addition to the time savings, Unity makes it dead easy to deploy on browser, PC/Mac Download, iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Android support is coming soon.

I’ve had more than a few friends ask me if they can play Ray Ardent on iPhone, but it’s not that simple. Even though Flash export to iOS, the performance is very disappointing. A high performance game like Ray Ardent with collision, parallax scrolling and enemy AI slows down to a crawl when exported through the Flash exporter for iPhone.

It’s possible that Adobe will improve this, but it’s likely Ray won’t be making an appearance on iPhone for a long time.

With all of this going for it, why the hell haven’t I made the switch?

It’s really simple – Flash has a massive reach. In modern computers, Flash’s install base is over 90%. It’s quite simply the best way in the world to reach people. There are over 30,000 Flash game portals in the world, reaching tens of millions of players.

That’s hard to beat.

In Unity’s favor, is BigPoint. BigPoint is a game company that has had a lot of success with their Unity game portal in Europe and they are moving into North America. They also have a great micro-transaction that anyone can implement.

For the time being, I’m holding the course on Flash, but Unity will always be out there – tempting me…

Edit: After posting, I read this interview with the Unity team that has some very interesting stats:
– Unity web-player has an install base of 35 million and is growing by about 2 million every month.
– Unity web-player bounce-rate is only 30%. This means that 7/10 people prompted to install the Unity plug-in do so. I thought it would have been lower.

Both of these are great bits of news for Unity – and only increase my temptation.