Some of you probably remember the game I released last year, Gravity Pods. It was successful beyond what I imagined. Almost immediately, I started working on a sequel. But instead started another game and got that out. Shortly after that I went to Flash on the Beach 07, started a new job, there was the whole holiday thing, lost track of the game business, then started a new book and buying a house, then started Art From Code and 25-Lines, and Gravity Pods 2 became a distant memory.
Well things have settled down a bit. The book is done, which is great. For the last few weeks I’ve been kind of drifting, watching TV and movies, doing a lot of reading, experimenting with various things. Last week I was thinking about all the various projects that I’ve started and not finished and decided I needed to pick one and finish it. Gravity Pods 2 had been on the list forever, and could have pretty good payoff if I wrap it up – the adsense revenue alone on the first version was damn tasty, and I had several offers of licensing, which I never took up.
So this past weekend I got to work. I decided to start from scratch. I spent Friday night, Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday (not the whole days, but my free time part of them) developing a framework for the game. I was getting a bit discouraged as it got to the point where I was refactoring it one way, changing a half dozen classes, then changing my mind and refactoring it all back. Class numbers were growing and game functionality didn’t even really exist, per se. Finally, it all gelled. Came together with a nice click. All was in place and features were easy to tack on at will. Once the framework was in place, I built up a good portion of the game Sunday afternoon and evening. The upfront work paid off.
Game play is going to be essentially the same, but with some neat new twists that will allow for plenty of new challenges. And I’m doing several UI simplifications based on feedback from last time. I also hope to work in an editor and maybe even an AIR application. Woot!.
Anyway, I’ll be chipping away at it over the next few evenings, but then I have a full 2 weeks off with nothing major planned. Unless my wife comes up with some other agenda for me (which she is pretty good at doing), I should be able to wrap up the game by the end of the month.
Hey Keith! Good to hear you’re up to no good. The link to the original Gravity Pods game works, but the SWF is throwing errors for me and won’t load.
TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert GravityPods@2162b221 to flash.display.MovieClip.
at MethodInfo-214()
at MethodInfo-208()
It’s throwing that error on enter of each frame.
– TK
Never seen that one. That swf has been untouched for a year or more and nobody’s reported that. What player version? What browser?
I got some people really hooked up on that game, for hours, literarily, resulting in great loss for the company 😉
So I can’t imagine what version 2 will bring. I was thinking, this thing on iphone would get you great dosh. Now I know, based on experience, that objectiveC is a mile away from actionscript and plain boring to work with. That said you could easily find a US company willing to develop it for you and share the profit with them.
I haven’t seen any AIR app making money, but I don’t really know the market.
Hej Keith, I get the same errors as TK. (Firefox 3.0.4, Flashplayer 10.0 r12, Ubuntu 8.10)
Hey Keith,
Have you released the code for Gravity Pods (v 1) or not? I would be very interested to see how you tackled it…
Michael. Gravity Pods code not released. Probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.
Nicolas. I’m definitely planning an iPhone app. 🙂
Hannes. I have no idea what that error could even mean. I wonder if it’s a Linux player issue.
Hi,
deactivate your FF Adblock plugin, then it’s going to work 🙂
cheers
froesi
Can anyone else verify that it’s an adblock issue? That would make sense. I tracked down the likely culprit to a Mochi Ads function.
Being a great fan of Keith experiments and games, I have used many of them internally to validate our b.Tween framework for iPhone and Gravity Pods is still my favourite game among the rest; a clear example that 3D graphics can’t do much when the idea behind a game doesn’t provide any fun! Look forward to Gravity Pods 2!
Yeah, so that error is definitely a combination of the adblock plugin for FireFox + some questionable code for MochiAds. There might be some updated MochiAd code, but I’m not sure how much I’m going to go into fixing version 1 right now. Just disable adblock to play the game.
Sad to say that I had never seen Gravity Pods. So I checked out the link. And now I know that you are truly evil!
Four hours later I was trying to best Level 50 and I was two hours past my bedtime.
Absolutely delightful, entertaining, and challenging. I loved it. I can’t wait to see Gravity Pods 2.
I love to hear that! 🙂