Revision 11. It didn't do much more than you can see here.

Here's the oldest build saved into our SVN repository, from November 2008, representing the first few weeks of getting my head around Flex and tiling. There was no animation or smooth scrolling yet, the little guy just jumped around on screen as you clicked on a target space.

Revision 18. It Moves!

By December 2008 I had cracked animating the unit (hilariously, instead of a walking animation he sticks his sword up and down as he moves), and locking the view to him and smoothly scrolling along as he moved.

Revision 27. Glorious background tiles.

I didn't need those nasty guideline squares anymore so you can see Dan Cook's excellent background tiles in all their glorious detail here.

Revision 35. I'm not sure I can charge for this yet.

By March 2009 we really started to impress, as I added a SECOND UNIT to the prototype! I also finally cracked the 'only scroll when you aren't near the map corners, damnit' algorithm (a real head-scratcher), so the nasty black space was banished.

Revision 40. An enemy! Can I attack him? Ans: no

April 2009 and we've thrown in AN ENEMY plus a nasty-looking forest tile – you aren't allowed walk into either so this is where pathfinding was first added.

Revision 47. Your eyes are not deceiving you, that is a minimap alright.

Plus, a minimap! You could even click on it to jump the main view to that part of the map, which was pretty handy on this test map that extended beyond what you could see at once BY THREE TILES!

Revision 57. Added in a GUI, of sorts. Also AI.

By June 2009 the enemies have a mind of their own. All they do is move one square randomly on their turn, but luckily you can still call that AI. Bam, feature ticked!

Revision 60. Sexy, sexy background tiles. Unf.

I also had a play around with the quite large number of different tile types, and built a section of map using them. There's still loads more varieties to play with but this gives you an idea of the high quality backgrounds you can make.

Revision 69. Color explosion.

August 2009 sees a lot of vital improvements after spending some time designing our basic battle system. Zones of control are in (once you move next to an enemy you can't move further), and units now have stats & weapons & armour. Sure it's practically a full hard-core RPG at this stage.

Revision 76. Combat is in… at last.

There was one key thing missing however – getting to finally attack those enemies! You can't really see it well in a screenshot, but damage floats upwards from the unit being attacked and disappears.

Revision 87. Health bars, though not the ones with nuts in them.

Health bars were a natural addition to this. Look closely and you can also see that death knight is counterattacking, wowee.

Revision 89. Long needed usability improvements.

September 2009 and there's a few more things going on under the hood that make playing it slightly more bearable, such as being able to click on an enemy to both move there AND attack him, including remembering which path you wanted to take to get to him. Those green dots would make a lot more sense if they were a snaking arrow, like they eventually will be.

Revision 99. If you say it's super fancy it's automatically better.

By November 2009 it was time to implement a better unit description card, one that shows up in the bottom right when you hover over a unit, so you can see their stats and equipment and (later) skills. Some super fancy icons were found to make this look better.

Revision 99 pt II. The test units are really stacked against you.

This is pretty much where it's at now. The next couple of months should bring this to a fully playable prototype of a single battle of the game, which will be a fantastic milestone to reach!

A note on graphics. Everything nice you see here (so you can leave out the nasty grey GUI stuff) is thanks to free graphics from the following sources:

• Background tiles from Dan Cook's fantastic range of free graphics for games. (There's more to pick from too, check out the full range)
• Unit graphics (including animation) from the open source game Battle For Wesnoth. (An excellent turn-based tactics game which you should definitely try out)
• Icons for armour & weapons from DeviantArt member Ails.

To all of you: please accept this hug as thanks!

What were we trying to achieve?

As mentioned in Part I, what we wanted to build was slightly different from the usual. Rather than grabbing an RSS feed from somewhere like Kongregate and re-publishing everything they publish, we wanted to hand-pick our favourite games and just publish them. Quality over quantity; unless you're talking about cupcakes.

Naturally we still wanted all the normal things that game portals do (categories, RSS feeds of games, ratings, comments etc). Both of us being programmers, we considered writing our own game portal software for, oh I don't know, maybe 6 seconds? We ultimately decided against this because it would take too long and maintaining the code would be a bit of a nightmare (seriously, you have never seen my code).

We took a look at the portal software that was already out there. The two main players were Arcadem Pro and PHPAS. They both had some neat features alright, but overall the solutions seemed too messy. They did way more than we could ever want or need, and it really just seemed like way too much effort to apply our own design to either theme. In our search for simplicity and flexibility, it turned out we had been looking at the solution every time we visited this blog.

WordPress: The Unlikely Hero

WordPress is a blogging platform that I'm sure many of you are already familiar with. It powers millions of blogs all over the Internet, but we were able to take many of the features it offers and use them to build our portal.

So, what makes it great for a game portal?!

Our basic need was simply to publish games that we had hand-picked from various sources, and include a few details about the game and our own mini-review. We thought about it for a little while and realised that the process of publishing games for the portal was very similar to how we published out blog posts. The features that WordPress offered also made many aspects of managing the portal a lot simpler.

1. RSS Feeds: WordPress automatically creates RSS feeds of content published through it, so we had a ready-made feed where people could subscribe to see game releases right in their feed reader.
2. Pretty URLs: They're nice to look at and it's easy for users to remember them. Google is pretty fond of them too. All these factors make games on the portal a whole lot easier to find.
3. Scheduled Posts: This one's a beauty. You could spend one night queueing up your planned releases for the next couple of months and then fly out to the Bahamas while WordPress sits at home in the rain, busily publishing out your games just like you told it to.
4. Comments: WordPress makes it very easy for your users have their say about each game that you post.
5. Categories & Tags: It's super simple to add games to specific categories or tag them with specific keywords straight out of the box.

A little help from our friends

Of course, WordPress didn't bow to our every command straight out of the box. We wanted our users to be able to rate the games that we published, and, being the Twitter nerds that we are, we wanted to announce the launch of each game via Twitter on our dedicated Gambrinous Games feed. Luckily, all of these issues were easily rectified by the vast WordPress developer community. We added the following plugins to help us along the way:

• Twitter Tools: A nice a simple plug-in that will automagically add new posts to Twitter.
• WP-PostRatings: Add ratings to each post in WordPress. It also has a nice feature to allow you to customise what information gets displayed around the star ratings.
• Akismet: This comes with WordPress and is a must for any blog that accepts comments. It will filter out all those nasty Viagra ads.

Already at this point, we had the bones of our game portal. There was one more feature in WordPress that came in handy, and that was Custom Fields. There was certain information that wasn't easily conveyed through WordPress' default functionality or through plug-ins. Certain things like setting the width and height of the flash game or setting thumbnails and screen-shots of each game we publish.

To get around this, we added a few custom fields to our blog posts for each piece of information that we needed, then added it to our WordPress theme where required. It really was remarkably painless.

The Science Bit

We brought everything together in a WordPress theme. We took the default Kubrick theme and modified it to fit our needs. The excellent WordPress Codex served as our guide throughout this process, required reading if you're going to be making your own templates. The first thing you need to understand is the anatomy of a WordPress theme. All themes are stored in individual folders named after the theme. If you created a theme called "My Super Game Portal", it would be found here:

/wp-content/themes/my-super-game-portal/

Another handy feature of WordPress themes is the functions.php file. Simply create a file called functions.php in your theme folder and add any custom functions to it. Everything you put in there will be available to your theme automagically. We have custom functions for pulling our top rated games and our newest games out of the database.

The final technical detail you really need to know before being able to customise your own WordPress theme is how to use those custom fields I mentioned earlier. One way we use the custom fields is to set the width and height of each game that we publish.

To use these fields in our template, we simply use the following code on the game page (single.php):

<?php
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_width', true);
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_height', true);
?>

That should be enough to get you started. For more information, you should check out the Theme Development article within the WordPress Codex.

Finally and in Conclusion

So, that's how we did it. It was quick and simple, and all made possible by our new friend WordPress. What are you doing still reading? Go and use WordPress to build that game portal you've been talking about for the last 2 months!

This article originally appeared on MochiLand.com. A special thanks to Ada Chen and all the great guys over on MochiLand.

Er, not that game Portal

We've been busy beavers over here on Planet Gambrinous the past couple of months, and we're finally ready to announce the fruit of our labour! Our very own brand spanking new flash game portal, imaginatively titled: Gambrinous Games. Well, as some of our more attentive readers might attest, it's not that brand spanking new. It has been hanging around for a little while now, and has already gone through one iteration already, and we're working on a new design as we speak — but it's our little experiment and we finally feel ready to formally announce it.

So, what exactly is this Gambrinous Games of which you speak?

I'm very glad you asked. Gambrinous Games is our take on the traditional Game Portal. There are many like it, but this one is ours. We're actually hoping that this is a little different to many of the portals you see out there these days, and here's why we think ours is worth a little more of your time.

Quality over quantity

There are many game portals out there that simply grab the RSS feed off the larger portals and publish every single item on the list with no regard for contents or quality. You have to ask yourself the question, why would anyone visit your game portal over Kongregate or Armor Games if you are simply republishing the exact same content? On Gambrinous Games, we're hand picking games that we really enjoy and sharing them with (hopefully, eventually) many like minded individuals. You won't see any mindless republishing over here.

I want that one

Once we've picked our favourite games, we don't jush throw the game up on the site and leave you guessing why we put it up there. We take the time to write a mini-review of the site and tell you what's actually good about the game that you're about to play. I think it's a nice personal touch to show that we've actually played the game, thought about it and enjoyed it enough to tell you about it. We also rate the game out of five stars, y'know, just to really really prove that we like it!

Get that link juice flowin'

Every game we publish comes with a developer link free inside! You won't have to dig right down to the bottom of the box for this one either, because it's right there beside the game. It's always nice to send a little bit of love back to the developers who have toiled hard to make each game, and hey, if you click on the in game ads, we might even get to send some cold hard cash lovin' too.

But why bother? Kongregate is just fine and dandy!

Sure, it's a competitive world out there. There are many excellent portals such as Kongregate, NewGrounds and Armor Games, and we're not expecting some kind of over-night meteoric success. We're mainly doing this, quite simply, because we frickin' love games. And like the desperate and needy nerds we are, we want you to revel in what we think are the best games out there and love them too.

A grand don't come for free

We do hope that eventually, one day, our little game portal will be able to pay for itself. We have two main revenue streams: the publisher's share from in-game ads and also the various ad banners and text that you see around the site. Sure, we're never going to be billionaires from it, but if we can generate any kind of income from this, we can re-invest it into making even better games. And hey, better games is good news for us all!

Home, sweet home

Gambrinous Games will also eventually become the platform for us to launch our own games. It's nice to have a place to call home, and home it will be for our games when we publish them.

So, head on over and check out Gambrinous Games in the flesh. There aren't a whole lot of games over there at the moment, but we will be adding at least one game a week over the coming months. Follow our Gambrinous Games account on Twitter to be notified whenever we add a new game!

Keep an eye out for Part II in the series which will take a technical look at just how exactly we built our game portal and what tools we used in the process. If you're even thinking about launching your own portal, you'd be a schmuck to miss it!

The concept is quite simple. You post a project on the site with a brief and a set budget, and based on that information, designers will contribute designs which you can rate and provide feedback on. Ultimately, you pick one clear winner and they are awarded the full budget. It is possible to add second and third place prizes, but we decided against this.

The Budget

Having researched projects on crowdSPRING, we decided that $300 was enough of a reward to tempt designers of high enough quality to submit designs to our project. When starting a project, you pay the full budget up-front, plus a 15% commission. The site ultimately acts as an escrow service between you and the winning designer.

This has one major benefit for anyone hoping to submit designs to a project. They know that you have already paid the cash for the project, so they don't have to worry about not getting paid at the end of the day; the cash is safe.

The Brief

We wrote the brief, which proved to be quite open in the end. This was mainly because we were open to any creative idea, and didn't have any set ideas ourselves as to how the logo should look. I was slightly concerned that this may pose a problem for designers for a couple of reasons:

1. Since we were unsure of what we wanted, designers might be reluctant to submit designs without any idea of whether they would be on the right path or not
2. The word Gambrinous is quite ambiguous, so it really wouldn't have pushed the creative process along.

Here is the brief:

Gambrinous is a game development company and we are looking for a logo design. The logo will be used as the basis for the branding of our website, but will also appear stand-alone in splash screens for games that we develop.

We really don't have anything specific in mind, I know this can be both a blessing and a curse, but being a game development company, we would generally like something that's a bit edgy and cool. It would ideally include a clever illustration or incorporate a symbol of some sort into the name. We would even be open to a symbol representing the whole name (like the Half Life 2 logo for example).

If you want to submit some early unfinished concepts we can give you some pointers or let you know if you heading in the right direction.

The Final Result

As it turned out, I had no reason to be concerned. We recieved 91 entries to the project, roughly 10 of which were considered for the final logo. Both myself and Colm were pleased with the quality of the work submitted and we definitely had a tough time deciding on the winner.

Here are the four designs that made it to the final round:

After sitting on these designs for a few days and asking friends and colleagues for their opinions on the logos, we eventually settled for the logo in the top left of the image above. The winning design is a well balanced logo, that looks a little different. The interlocking G design is also something that works well in the logo itself and also stand-alone as a distinctive design icon.

You can view the fully completed project and all the entries on the crowdSpring website.

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius

Despite being a Super Genius he never seemed to think his plans quite through. Here's hoping our bomb hits the target even if we sail on over the cliff edge!

1. The Game

We're going to make a turn-based tactics game, focused on multiplayer and with persistant units to allow more long-term growth and strategy.

• Turn-based tactics: battles will take place on a tiled map (top down or isometric) between a smallish amount of units on each side (under 10 in general). No building of new units during the battle – it's a straight up fight between the two sides until one runs away or is wiped out.
• Multiplayer: the best opponents are other people, no question. We'll help make things balanced by matching up games against similar level squads, and to keep things interesting during a battle even when one team gains an advantage a canny, sneaky opponent (or, importantly, a lucky one) should be able to turn things around.
• Persistance: this is the most important one – what makes it more than a casual game you might poke around with once and then forget. You build a new squad by spending a set amount of money on basic units and equipment from a roster, and you earn experience for those units and more money by battling it out versus other squads. This way units can gain skills or better stats, and you can buy them better equipment or hire more units as you see fit. To prevent an infinite feedback loop where squads just get better and better and better, units can also die on the battlefield or pick up permanent injuries that may eventually convince you to give them the boot.

Now if you think this might be a bit much for a team of 2 part-time developers with no previous game development under their belts and a distinct lack of (oh so important) art talent, well we happen to agree! Luckily here's Mr. Plan to the rescue!

2. The Mini-Project

We're going to build a smaller, simpler game over the next 3 months which will lead on nicely to our final goal while letting us learn the ropes. Thanks, Mr. Plan!

It's going to be a flash game that lets you play out the single player version of the above. You build a squad of units from a small roster, equip them with some wooden sticks and whatnot and then lead them to success and riches by playing missions vs the computer! It will be packaged as a casual flash game which we will place on game portals and our own site. It will be entirely free to play but we will be able to make money on it through in-game ads, sponsorship and licensing it to game portals.

In the future we can use this as the starting point for our flash-based battle client for the main game, and with only a little tweaking as a tutorial / single player campaign.

3. ???

4. Profit

Fortunately we won't be resorting to stealing undies – there are plenty of options for making each step of the plan profitable. I'll step through all of these in my next post!

2001: A Gambrinous Odyssey

Two programmers with no game development experience, no designer, no pile of funding, no fancy offices, and only what free time we find outside our full time jobs.

We are going to make a game company and talk all about it here. Let's just step through a few of the things you can expect:

Technical stuff

Hard core nerdy stuff about the languages/platforms/tools we will be using. Number one on that list is Flex (Adobe's 'programmer-friendly' framework that compiles into flash .swfs) but soon enough we'll be knee-deep in Django (and hence Python). Seeing as we've never used either we will have a plentiful supply of painful, hilarious mistakes to write about.

Game makin' stuff

Possibly even more nerdy, somehow. We'll be talking about how to develop games, from laying out tiles for isometric maps to programming AI to deciding when and how the player gets his greedy hands on the magical Huge Two-Handed Sword of Overcompensation +4.

Business stuff

We're approaching this as a business venture, not just a hobby! The games we develop are going to make actual money through ads, sponsorship/licensing, or subscriptions. We're going to talk all about the process here and share our results, including revenue numbers. We'll also be talking about stuff like sourcing artists for design and music and how that works out for us.

Next time I post I'll talk about the game we're going to be making and our long term plans. Meanwhile Peter is going to talk about how we used crowdsourcing to get an amazing logo for a knockdown price.