By Francis Lui in General on July 30 2008
I’ve spent the past month developing a new web game called, Relaxing Rhythms. In this game, you collect the music notes and make sure that they don’t fall past the bottom of the screen. There are three different songs you can choose from, each with a different difficulty setting. The music was created by Kevin MacLeod. Please visit his website at http://www.incompetech.com/ if you’d like to hear more of his music.
I hope you like the game. Enjoy! If you like the game, please share it with your friends.
By Francis Lui in General on June 24 2008
Failure can be a good thing, because that’s how we learn and achieve our successes. It’s been said that to accelerate our successes, we need to accelerate our failures. But failure can sometimes sting quite a bit. How do you recover from failures and setbacks and regain your motivation, possibly even increase your motivation even further?
I admit that I am still very new to the Flash games industry and have only made two Flash games so far, which both seemed to fail badly on the portals, but I have a little technique I have used over and over in another area of my life that has helped me to regain and to even increase my motivation even after I experience a failure or rejection. I believe that this can transfer to game development as well and also to other areas of life whenever you may experience a failure or setback. After using this technique after releasing my Laundry Clowns game, I now have some solutions that will empower me to improve my chances for next time, and it improves my motivation.
When you experience a failure, you might start to feel very bad inside and may even lose motivation to continue. The technique to solve this is to simply write out what went wrong, what went right, and what can you do better for next time. After doing this, you’ll have an honest assessment of what went wrong, the positive aspects of what went right, and some action steps to improve for next time. The result is that you should feel motivated to make your next attempt and feel empowered to change your results. Doing this also allows you to reframe the failure experience into a positive learning experience. It shifts your brain from feeling bad about your failure to seeking solutions to improve your chances for next time.
This technique is sort of like a mini post mortem. Post mortems are usually written after a project is finished, where the professionals figure out the lessons learned from the project and improve for next time. I also find that writing it down really helps me to remember the lessons for next time.
I’ve used this technique for my Laundry Clowns game just now, and as an example, this is what I wrote:
“What went wrong:
- The game idea was flawed, and I wasn’t aware of it until it was tested in the marketplace. I had only spent a very short time brainstorming the idea, mostly because I wanted to just get moving and to avoid the trap of endless perfection for my first game.
- I perhaps spent too much time perfecting the quality of the code, which ended up taking more time.
- Development time took longer because it was my first Flash game, but that’s okay because that’s expected.
- I spent $5 on purchasing a music loop. I probably should have used a free alternative, especially since it was my first game. Although $5 is pretty cheap, it makes more sense to invest more into the game if I have a game idea that is proven to be successful, such as making a sequel where the first game was a hit.
What went right:
- I made my code reusable, which allowed me to reuse a lot of my code for ClickiBlock and greatly reduced development time. Laundry Clowns took five weeks to develop, whereas ClickiBlock took three days.
- I actually completed the game, something that many people only talk about doing but never actually complete a game of their own.
- I was able to learn a lot about Flex, which I used to make the game, and I gained experience using Gimp, which is a free open source program equivalent to Photoshop.
- Though the game is far from perfect, I was able to gain experience and to understand the process of marketing Flash games a bit better.
What can I do better:
- Spend more time on brainstorming a good game idea. Understand and study what’s currently hot in the market.
- Create a prototype and try to get feedback from others to see whether the game idea is good and how it can be improved.
- Instead of creating the art on my own, try looking for some free alternatives that are available to be used for free. My strengths are in programming, so it may be better to use other people’s art or hire artists once the business is profitable. Currently, my art skills are limited to art classes I took in high school, but I should be able to create very basic art and fill in the rest with outside help or sources.”
Feel free to try this idea out and see whether it helps or not. The best case is that you’ll have a new technique that will increase your motivation even in the face of failure. The worst case is that you’ll waste a bit of time from experimenting with the idea if it doesn’t work out.
I would like to add that spending some time visualizing your successes is a very good way to increase your motivation as well. I’ve been spending 20 minutes a day visualizing my successes and what I want in life, which helps to boost my energy and motivation. It also increases your chances of success because your subconscious will then be looking for solutions to bring about the successes that you want. If you have learned about the Law of Attraction, then you know that it’s also the secret to getting out of any vicious cycles, ruts, slumps, or failure streaks. So feel free to try this idea out as well.
By Francis Lui in General on June 12 2008
I’ve added eight new free web arcade games to the website. I thought these games were pretty fun and unique.
1. Music Catch by Reflexive Arcade
In this game, you use your mouse and you have to collect as many blue shapes as you can. The yellow shapes increase the size of your circle, and you also gain more points whenever you collect the blue shapes. You have to avoid the red circles otherwise your circle shrinks and you gain fewer points when you collect the blue shapes.
Overall, it is a pretty simple and fun game that is easy to finish, but the game is great when you want to relax for a few minutes and listen to some nice music.
2. Chaos Faction by Dissolute Productions, sponsored by Armor Games
This game was very neat. It has a cute and funny theme to it. You control your character and battle it out against the challenger. There are weapons and powerups that you can pick up to defeat your enemy.
This game brings back some memories of playing Street Fighter 2 when I was a kid. The goal is very simple: defeat the challenger before you are defeated. But in this game, there is a lot of area that you can jump around, and you have to make sure you don’t get knocked into the pit. It also has a “deathmatch” kind of feel to the game, which reminds me of Doom and Quake except without the first person perspective.
3. Fancy Pants Adventures by Brad Borne, sponsored by Armor Games
I thought this was quite an amazing game for a Flash game. It definitely took quite a bit of effort to make this game.
This game is a side scroller game, just like Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog. You have to watch out for enemies, collect coins, and reach the end of the level. At the end of the first world, you fight a boss, which is an angry penguin.
The graphics are a bit crude, but they get the job done. The game should provide you with 10 to 15 minutes of gameplay depending on how long it takes you to finish the game. There is one world in the game with three levels in it. I thought the boss was quite simple. It shouldn’t take too long to figure out the pattern to beat the boss.
4. BoomsticK by Abduction Studios Inc.
In this game, you control your character in a black screen and shoot the shapes that fly across the screen. The objective is very simple: shoot as many shapes as you can and last as long as possible without running out of ammo. This game requires some dexterity, but it provides some good fun.
When I first played this game, I kept running out of ammo quite a lot and lost over and over. After playing the game for a while, I found that a simple strategy to do well in this game is to shoot the shapes when they line up with each other. That way, when you fire at the shapes, you destroy more shapes for each single shot. By doing this, you spend less ammo while receiving more ammo from the shapes in return. Keep doing this strategy and you should get very far in the game.
5. IndestructoTank by Armor Games
You control an indestructible tank in this game. Instead of avoiding the bombs, you want to get hit by the bombs on purpose and use your tank to collide into the planes and trucks. You want to hit as many planes and trucks as possible before you run out of fuel.
This game requires a little bit of dexterity, but it’s pretty fun. As long as you keep hitting the planes and trucks, you’ll do fine.
6. Sky Patrol by Ezone.com
The plot in this game is very simple: defend Earth from the alien ships. You control a plane and shoot down the alien ships. Each level has a boss, and you have to finish all the levels in order to save the Earth.
I thought this game was very challenging. An interesting part of the game is that your plane is centered in the middle of the screen at all times. It’s unique to the usual style where the screen keeps scrolling down or to the left and you simply dodge and shoot the enemy planes, just like in the old Nintendo game, 1943 (I guess I’m a bit of an old-fashioned gamer, but I liked 1943 a lot!) There are powerups you can collect in Sky Patrol in order to upgrade your weapon, but if you run out of lives, you’ll have to start all over again.
7. Sim Taxi by FreeOnlineGames.com
This game was very interesting. You play a taxi driver and drive a taxi car around the city, picking up passengers and driving them to their destinations. Every time you successfully reach a destination for a passenger, you are rewarded with money, but the longer you take to reach the destination, the less money you receive. Sometimes your passengers won’t like the music you are listening to in the taxi car, so you’ll have to switch radio stations upon request. While driving, you also have to watch out for the police cars, otherwise you’ll have to pay a fee.
I found it quite fun crashing into the police cars on purpose. 
8. IndestructoCopter by Armor Games
This is a shooting game where you need to shoot down the helicopters. The levels increase in difficulty by adding more and more helicopters, and the helicopter you are riding in experiences more and more turbulence. In this game, you have to time your shots carefully. The further the helicopter is, the further ahead of the helicopter you must aim at.
I found the bonus helicopters very tricky to shoot down. But overall, the game wasn’t too hard, perhaps because I played on medium difficulty. The E.M.P.’s were very useful in the game. Whenever you use an E.M.P., every helicopter on the screen is destroyed.
That pretty much concludes the new games I have added so far. More games will be added in the future.
By Francis Lui in General on May 29 2008
Welcome to the blog. This is my first post, but I’m planning on writing about anything related to free web arcade games or anything that might be of interest to share.
It’ll be fun writing in this blog. I haven’t done much blogging in an actual blog though, but I regularly write in a personal journal. It’s a habit that has stuck with me for the past two and a half years. In my journal, I usually write down things that I learn along the way, which helps me to remember it for next time. Whenever I need to figure out my goals and plans for the future or solve a problem, writing in my journal has been a really handy tool. This blog isn’t about personal development though, so I’ll try my best to keep it on topic and make it related to games. However, as a warning, personal development has been an interest of mine for the past couple of years.
This blog will likely be improved and refined over time, but there will be more to come.
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