mardi 27 octobre 2020

NYAF Press Kit

 



NYAF Press Kit



NYAF is an enjoyable and relaxing experience featuring fantastic music and sounds recorded by the developer, his son and a friend. The game contains a full automatic save so you can quit at any time without losing your progress.

"NYAF is also a different hidden object game, where the engaging music together with the fluid control create a fluid experience", says Alain Becam. “I tried to make the game very dynamic”.

The backgrounds and the characters of NYAF are all hand painted and unique, some scanned from 1 by 1 meters canvas, from the artist Sébastien Lesage. The originals on canvas glow in the dark, thus the light green colour.

The pieces of music are from several great musicians, Chris Huelsbeck, Chan Redfield, Chris Collins, LiQWYD, Alexander Nakarada, Jean-Philippe Rameau and have been selected to match the current stage/game.


NYAF is also 4 games in one: NYAF, MMPG, YANYAF and a secret one! Play NYAF to unlock the other games, 2 will get unlocked by progressing in it, for the last one you need to find the secrets.

NYAF
  • Find the hidden characters on hand painted backgrounds. 
  • Select between 8 levels of difficulties.
  • Earn coins that you can use to buy 2 dogs that help you find the hidden characters.



MMPG
  • Battle the opponent in a massive minimalist fighting game. 
  • Unlock units by playing the other games.
  • Your units are placed automatically for you but you can always erase them to put them at another place. 
  • Use brute force to get more units or try to go as far as possible being a strategist. 
  • Once a level has been won, you can unlock it.



YANYAF 
  • Find the small symbols in an infinity of generated backgrounds.
  • No goal, no ending just for those who want a challenge looking for tiny symbols.



Additional Information

About Alain Becam
An independent developer in Heidelberg, Germany, he started programming when he was 11 years old, always mixing game and science-related programming, and never stopped since. After his studies he did 4 years of R&D in Game development, then worked on serious gaming for a short while, before a long pause from full time game development to work in an international institution. He never fully stopped developing games and other tools, from a naval war game (https://tgbb.itch.io/the-archives-of-evil-dr-ba) to a powerful but ugly name generator (https://tgbb.itch.io/alname-generator) with many in between, like a collection of stereoscopic 3D experiments for the now-defunct auto-stereoscopic HTC EVO3D. NYAF is his first leap to Steam.

vendredi 16 octobre 2020

YAF - Privacy Policy

We do not collect any information of any kind ourselves. We only want our customers to enjoy the game and have fun.
There is no login.


YAF is written using Unity. Unity does a minimum collection of the user's hardware information and offers optional advanced analytics, that we do use in YAF and Days of The Tokens (but not in the other games). This game also use Unity Ads.


Please consult Unity's Privacy Policy for more details.
As of the time of writing, the 30th August 2020, it is summarised in "1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)", "I play a game built with Unity software, what should I know?", 1st and 2nd paragraphs:

"Some Unity developers use Unity’s Analytics and Ad services" -> We do
"Some Unity developers may collect your information independent of Unity." -> We don't.

As we use Unity Ads, please consult the full policy for all details.

dimanche 30 août 2020

Days of The Tokens - Privacy Policy

We do not collect any information of any kind ourselves. We only want our customers to enjoy the game and have fun.
There is no login.

Days of The Tokens is written using Unity. Unity does a minimum collection of the user's hardware information and offers optional advanced analytics, that we do use in Days of The Tokens and YAF (but not in the other games). This game also use Unity Ads and Unity IAP.


Please consult Unity's Privacy Policy for more details.
As of the time of writing, the 30th August 2020, it is summarised in "1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)", "I play a game built with Unity software, what should I know?", 1st and 2nd paragraphs:

"Some Unity developers use Unity’s Analytics and Ad services" -> We do
"Some Unity developers may collect your information independent of Unity." -> We don't.

As we use Unity Ads, please consult the full policy for all details.

vendredi 10 juillet 2020

The Giant Ball - Where does that come from?

In 2006, I was working in Sweden at the now defunct University of Gotland, in the Game department, doing development mostly, but also research. Aside my work activities, I also developed games in my spare time, mostly proposed free as applets on the Giant Ball website.

But the first game on this web-site, as you might have guessed, was the Giant Ball. A strange idea on several accounts, a failure in term of revenue (the days I got the most visits, Google decided my ads value was 0), and a success as an experiment.

The idea is both very simple and quite weird. A giant beach ball, 1275km of diameter, somehow arrives on Earth and stay still until pushed. Of course it is no easy task to push such a big thing, so it needs many persons pushing it simultaneously. To push it, the first version was only using the visit: once started, the game would count one push. That was way too simple and strange, so a red button was introduced. Press to charge, release to send hits.
Then another issue, I wanted to do an online multiplayer game, and I was not a flash developer. I was used to C++ and Java, so went with Java. I wrote the server, and went to do the web-game in an applet, in 3D...

Bad idea.

It might have been the only multiplayer game using Java 3D, we will maybe never know.


It worked (it got the red button after the screenshot, I did no try to run it again :) ). But you had to install Java3D, manually. So, while Java was at that time installed pretty much everywhere, and the applets were running straight away, that was not the case for Java with Java3D. You got a message asking you to install it instead, and that did not help the game.

So for a long while, the browser game was in 2D and in 3D, it would use Java3D if installed, or fall back to a 2D version. Actually the ball was kind of more 3D in the 2D version, at it was raytraced in real-time. After some years, the 3D version got dropped.



Naively,I wanted the game to be cooperative, without an official competition. Of course, it started to work only when it started getting some competition 😅.

At the end if got 83 countries, more than 100.000 players, so that's a success. A sad success actually, as it showed that Africa was pretty much fully absent from the internet at that time. Of course my sample was not that large, but all others continents (well except Antartica) were present.

It was supposed to be Ads-supported, as at that time I needed to rent a physical server to run it. Let say that the Giant Ball, and the others games I pushed there, were pretty much my gift for all the visitors, a gift that was not free on my side 😃. As far as I remember I got 3-4 € from the ads, so not enough to receive anything, and it simply disappeared after a while.
About the other games, they are now on Itch.io, the 2 biggest having been enhanced and completed, and might come to Steam. They all work on PC desktop now, and are still written in Java. I am still looking for persons that would like to build a package for Linux for them. On Mac, only the smallest would work, as it uses plain Java AWT and does not do anything fancy, and actually was done in a way that would keep updates to the minimum (only when you do something). But the 2 others uses a pretty fancy game engine I wrote to support several thousand of quite smart units (they are all autonomous and uses attached sensors), and relying on a very well done graphics engine for applets, Pulpcore2D, that stopped being supported when the applets stopped being relevant. Some persons made it standalone, I adapted it a bit, also changed the mp3 streaming part I used, so they are now desktop application. Thanks to that, I also added many things that couldn't be in an applet, and sadly removed the centralized score saving (that needed the server).
Well, all these explanation to come back to the Mac port. Apple in its habits of killing whatever is not their interest decided to stop supporting some graphics API that were central in normal 2D Pojo graphics, so Pulpcore is both slow and flashing on a Mac. Without replacing all the graphics layer by something else (like LWJGL), it is probably impossible to fix...
I still need to work on the Linux port. Funnily I am pretty use to applications on Linux, but not desktop ones 😉, and I run only VM Linux, so I need to go back to it. My only issue is on how to bundle Java with the game.




And what about the Giant Ball? Well, it might do a comeback ;)

lundi 11 mai 2020

THGE - Privacy Policy

We do not collect any information of any kind ourselves. We only want our customers to enjoy the game and have fun.
There is no login or ads.

THGE/THGE Free is written using Unity. Unity does a minimum collection of the user's hardware information and offers optional advanced analytics, that we do not use.
Please consult Unity's Privacy Policy for more details.
As of the time of writing, the 11th Mai 2020, it is summarised in "1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)", "I play a game built with Unity software, what should I know?", 1st paragraph only:

"Some Unity developers use Unity’s Analytics and Ad services" -> We don't
"Some Unity developers may collect your information independent of Unity." -> We also don't.


And more details can be found in "3. Information We Collect (Depending on the Product or Service)", "Information that is passively collected by Unity (often automatically), including:", under the topic "User device information: When you play a game built with Unity Software, Unity may collect some or all of the following information when you use the game:". Their usage is detailed in the next part, "4. How We Use the Information We Collect or Receive".

Aside from the minimum collection from Unity, we do not use any tracking/collection API or code. We also do not have access to the data collected by Unity about your usage of THGE.

dimanche 3 mai 2020

First watchface on Garmin

Well, actually not the first one developed, but the first published.
And it's a good success :): Fading Watchface


vendredi 17 avril 2020

NYAF


The biggest small game I ever did. Started as an idea of a very small game fully procedural, with some parodic elements (fake ads) to advertise non-Freemium apps (Not Yet Another Freemium->NYAF), adhering to the concept of Ethical Game: a commercial app that exposes a clear price, and will not ask the customer to pay anything else to play the full game.

(Piggy Bank by Sébastien Lesage, as all graphics elements in NYAF)

And then I realized that the idea (hidden symbols on a calculated background) would work marvel on my Artist friend Sébastien Lesage's "Génèse et Chaos" canvas that you can physically buy there.
Most of the backgrounds used in Nyaf are scanned physical canvas. The originals are absolutely stunning and some glow in the dark, thus the light green colour (from page 4, with most on page 5).




We discussed placing the characters randomly or not (like Where's Wally?), and ended up using mostly random placement of small characters with one mode with manually placed characters. During our playtests, the random placement gave us plenty of wonderful surprises, one character being mixed with another in the background, one nearly hidden by the surrounding...

But if NYAF is a success you can expect more canvas, more characters, and more non-Random placements.

And more was added, some secrets, then some more content linked to these secrets, and "things" that get unlocked by playing... To finally be much bigger than expected, 100 of C# scripts, several hundreds of sounds and graphics elements... A little big game (with a silly name).

The music is the result of buying Royalty-Free Music, mostly from Groupees. This last started as a normal Game Bundle and evolved into offering all kind of media, including a lot of good music. And I have been really impressed by these Royalty-Free bundles.
And with the help of my wife, I listened to all pieces (~100) to find the best suited to each canvas (and mini-games ;) ). And I am again very happy with the result.

The fonts are all by Gluk ( http://www.glukfonts.pl/ ), and there are many more from him that are great (and free for any use, the non-free ones are superb too).







Mini-games, Aaah. Well, that's a secret. But... I hope you will like them ;)

This game was also the occasion to go back doing videos, and I worked also quite hard on scripting them (aside from the Puppets ones, which are long half-improvised rushes for small cuts later on) and on doing them as well as possible. They have been edited with Vegas Movie Studio Platinium Suite 16, an update from version 12 I had before. I had fun doing them and hope you will like them as well and find them funny. Maybe it will convince some person to buy Nyaf too ;)


Pricing... So back to being an ethical game. The price is decided on what is common on the Play Store, and what I believe is quite a low price for the amount of content you get. Nyaf if the result of ~6 months full-time work, with plenty more in my spare time before, as it is based on another game I did with Unity before. So 4€ it is, on which Google adds different taxes in different countries (countries' rules, not Google fault). For less than a lunch price (in most countries), you can play Nyaf for as long as you want, and get the full game!

Secrets... Hmmm. Let say there are some. If you find any, feel free to contact me or comment here. And feel free to share!

Youtube and other sharing platforms: feel free to record and share as you want! Of course, I am happy if you provide a link to the game :)

Bug and other issues: please contact me, I will work on any reported issue/bug. Depending on my situation it might take some time (remember I am alone on that), but I won't ignore anything.

Paper-Save: Am I crazy??? Well maybe. The truth is that all cloud saves solutions expose you to other companies (i.e. they can track you a little bit more) and none are truly cross-platform. Codes that you can copy/past, keep in a text file, send by email, are truly yours, and fully cross-platforms. I hope NYAF will come to Steam and consoles, in a DX version (better quality music, less compressed textures...), and your saves from Android will still work. BTW iOS versions will depend on somebody porting the game, I cannot do that myself. Linux and Mac versions will come with the PC version :)

Finally, Nyaf is a handcrafted work that I did with dedication, attention and love, and I really hope you have plenty of fun with it. I worked hard on the quality of it, fixing all bugs I found. There are probably some left, aside from some issues (one of the mini-game desperately needs to be fast, so sometimes one unit can be stuck. But pause the game, erase your unit and place them correctly and all will be well again. It is much rarer now as I added a simple but efficient solution :) ), but there shouldn't be any serious bugs left. If you encounter anything serious, lost your progress or anything like that, once again just contact me and I will work on it. I won't let you down.

NYAF - Privacy Policy

We do not collect any information of any kind ourselves. We only want our customers to enjoy the game and have fun.
There is no login or ads.

NYAF is written using Unity. Unity does a minimum collection of the user's hardware information and offers optional advanced analytics, that we do not use.
Please consult Unity's Privacy Policy for more details.
As of the time of writing, the 17th April 2020, it is summarised in "1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)", "I play a game built with Unity software, what should I know?", 1st paragraph only:

"Some Unity developers use Unity’s Analytics and Ad services" -> We don't
"Some Unity developers may collect your information independent of Unity." -> We also don't.


And more details can be found in "3. Information We Collect (Depending on the Product or Service)", "Information that is passively collected by Unity (often automatically), including:", under the topic "User device information: When you play a game built with Unity Software, Unity may collect some or all of the following information when you use the game:". Their usage is detailed in the next part, "4. How We Use the Information We Collect or Receive".

Aside from the minimum collection from Unity, we do not use any tracking/collection API or code. We also do not have access to the data collected by Unity about your usage of NYAF.