Tag: Word Up Dog

  • Word Up Dog: Then and now

    Word Up Dog‘s coming to mobile this Thursday! Now for the very few of you who actually played the original Flash version (available here), I’m gonna tell you bout the changes I made. The most obvious one was the addition of Sara Gross of Two Bit Art to the team. She turned my janky blobbish characters into super pimpin funkmasters. By comparison anyway.

    The Lightnin (formerly Lamp) Lizard got some serious mojo.

    I resisted change in the UI but added a sweet clock for the bonuses, and generally made everything bigger so it’d be easier to see and read on bitty little phone screens. I changed the default aspect ratio from 4:3 (800×600) to 16:9 (iPhone5), but the game stretches and pads to fit any device.

    The Dog left pastel country fields and donned a phat tuque.

    Gameplay-wise I took out the idea of lamps and limited sight radius so you can see the whole screen all the time now. I added two more levels and a unique element to each one like vines, vending machines, dancing bugs and lava. And I took out adventure mode, which was a single superlong level that changed the deeper you went. It really needed some design work although it was my favorite way to play, and I’ll put it back in if I get enough mobile sales.

    You can see a lot more in the game now.

    The bulk of my time on this was spent totally rewriting the graphics engine in Stage3d/Starling and making a hundred other little performance improvements. Those things you don’t even have to think about when writing a browser game for PCs but suddenly become make-or-break on an iPad 1.

    The mobile version of Word Up Dog is so improved it’s practically a sequel, but I think of it as version 1.5. I’d like to go back and upgrade the original Flash version now… but ironically it runs slower now on some computers because of the Stage3d. The dance continues!

  • Word Up Dog: Bling-bling yo

    There are 7 levels in the new improved mobile Word Up Dog, each with it’s own bling-bling in the form of growing vines, dancing bugs, lava, ice and letter-spewing fire-hydrant shaped gashapon machines.

    Some things like the gashapon make life easier – you can feed it letters to exchange for different letters. Others are challenges to be overcome, like the vines that take as much energy to dig through as regular dirt, but grow back after a few minutes.

    When I wrote the original Word Up Dog two years ago, I was planning to make it a free mobile game with in-app purchases. You’d pay to unlock levels 2-7, and maybe to buy powerups and wildcards. I like demos and want as many people as possible to be able to play my games, but it seems that indie games are getting burned by free-to-play lately. I’ve decided I’m better off charging $1.99 to start and having halfprice sales as often as I can.

  • Word Up Dog: Animatin’

    Animations for our floppy-eared, tuque-sporting little dog were drawn frame-by-frame by Sara Gross of Two Bit Art. She made all the new art for Word Up Dog using Photoshop, then I converted it to vectors using Adobe Illustrator’s trace function. She used clean lines and simple shapes that lend themselves really well to this technique.

    Check out the evolution from sketch to completion of our nameless hero, the little dog who finds himself suddenly stuck underground with only two skills: diggin’, and spellin’.

    We two Sara(h)s, aka “Da Honeys”, had a ton of fun on all the new art. Much 80’s rap was heard and fun was had by all.

  • Word Up Dog: Mo’ Art

    Dog concept sketchesMe and ma homie Sara Gross of Two Bit Art be whippin up a bangin mobile game called Word Up Dog. It’s a spelling game… hilarious amirite?

    I was eager to work with Sara on something; not just because we both have the same awesome name, but because she draws these amazingly derpy-cute characters like Oregon Whale and Stitchy. Her more serious art is super beautiful too of course – check out her webcomic Menagerie. But it was her bizarro Orca Jam 3 tshirt design that sold me.

    Twoby’s got the juice in my books.


    Character concepts for Deeper Dawg and the Dog

    The game starts with some rhymes:

    “This is the story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down. I was chillin in my crib just digging for some grub, when outta nowhere the ground swallowed me up!”

    The main character (the Dog) is no Fresh Prince – he’s probably the opposite, more like a clueless suburban wannabe. But this is a cheesy, family-friendly game. The kind of tidied-up hiphop culture you could tune into on NBC and watch with your kids.

  • Word Up Dog: Localizin’

    I’m porting my Flash spelling game Word Up Dog to mobile… again. Last time I failed to get it running fast enough so I put the release off for a year in the hopes tech would improve. It has! This time I’m using Flash’s Stage3D and the results are way better – this game just cruises across the screen now, smooth like buttah.

    I’ve teamed up with Sara Gross (Two Bit Art) to imbue heaps more mojo into the characters and art. Check out her concept art:

    The dog in his crib

    Mo' Monkey

    And this time rather than relying on Google Translate for my French and German localization, I’m trying out new crowdsourcing services Ackuna and Crowdin. If you’d like to help and speak French or German please jump in there and make some suggestions!