By Tommy Leung on 06/23/2008 in Games
I had finished programming this game a while ago and now Cartoon Network has finally put it online! Cul-De-Sac Smash 2: Wheels of Fury is a sequel to the original game based on the Ed, Edd n Eddy cartoon series on Cartoon Network. TinyMantis did the programming on the original before I started working there and we got the programming gig for the sequel so I ended up handling the project–the nice folks at Templar Studios did the art (their website has not been updated since forever).
The Special Attacks are actually really awesome. My favorite is Johnny’s Plank Attack. Theoretically this newer version should run faster than the original since I made some optimizations but, I’m going to doubt anyone will notice. I’ll end this by letting you in on a secret. When you get to the Garage screen, press the ESC key and a Cheat Codes menu will come up. Type in “Jackpot” for free money–you can use it as much as you want. Enjoy the game!
Edit: While I’m pimping games I’ve recently been a part of that have been published, check out Lil’ Bush: Iraq Hero at Comedy Central–programmed by yours truly.
By Tommy Leung on 06/19/2008 in Marketing
I’ve worked on several Facebook Applications since the beginning of the year and although none of them have been massively successful hits, I’ve learned a couple of things about developing Facebook Applications. Hopefully, I can share some of what I’ve learned and experienced. I’m not going to talk much about the technical development process but instead, more of the marketing and business aspects. I’m also going to try to not make broad assumptive conclusions based on my experiences but instead, share my experiences and give conclusions that I’m pretty confident in. Some of us are making applications because we want to share our great ideas with the world but, all of us would like to monetize our ideas–don’t lie, you know you do. :)
Facebook launched their application platform in the middle of 2007 and it has done very well since. Thousands of people have made applications for it and some businesses have sprouted from it. I was generally cautious of the Facebook Platform and did not look into it until mid-January of 2008. As of today, I have four active Facebook Applications that were developed solely by me and one other that I worked on. My applications aren’t drawing any significant number of daily active users–I don’t even have an application that has 1000 installs yet. The total combined user base of all my applications probably falls in around 1500 – 2000 installs. It isn’t impressive but, keep reading.
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By Tommy Leung on 06/14/2008 in Games
Not long ago, I was a starry-eyed kid who wanted to make video games for a living. I grew up with Mario and had every Nintendo home console from the Super NES forward. I was even one of those entrepreneurial types who made fan sites. It started simply with AOL’s free web space and then grew slowly to other free web space sites until finally a domain of its own. That site was known as The N Chamber–guess what the N stood for–and at one point Google had listed us first for the search phrase: “Nintendo dolphin.” Those were certainly good times but unfortunately our web presence was connected with eFront and their scandal brought everything to a fiery collapse.
At this point I was maybe 14 or 15 years old developing websites and offering my “opinion” on the industry news and with game reviews. To think that anyone seriously listened to what I had to say is laughable to me today. But, I was a fan and I loved the industry–if nothing else, I learned a lot about web development and the game industry. After the eFront meltdown, I was still active in the game fan site arena and worked on a few more websites before I finally called it quits. I tried to resurrect The N Chamber on numerous occasions but, it was not the same for a variety reasons including Google no longer listing us in a favorable search position and realizing it was futile trying to compete with the likes of IGN or Gamespot–blogs were not a big thing yet. Nonetheless, I worked on multi-platform gaming websites–GamerPlay/WiredPlay–and although they didn’t get very far, I learned a lot of PHP and MySQL programming as I was bent on creating my own content management system.
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