• runners:1
• area covered: 6 sq.km.
• donors: 9
• viewers: 8
• pledges placed: 14, totalling €120
• pledges collected: €90
• donations received: €367 *
• development time: ~40 hours over 2 months
• developers/designers/web designers: 2
• cost of cloud computing: €3.88 **

* Yes, that is more than the total collected pledges. Beware having a button that shortcuts the entire game!

** Welcome to Google AppEngine’s new pricing structure.

[2011-11-19]

The Galway Science & Technology Festival hosts its very own Ape Run on Sunday 27th November. Check them out as they gobble up the donations for the Brothers of Charity.

Proooooooouuuuudly powered by apeworks.

[2011-08-18]

Despite having spent months designing and building the Great Ape Run software and website on the assumption that some other suckers would have to do the running, I’ve somehow been landed with running too. Harsh.

Not to worry, it’s all for the kids. Wish me luck!

[2011-07-30]

The newly minted ApeRunner team (a not wholly owned subsidiary of apeworks) will deploy its first web app into the wild on August 19^th 2011 to raise money for The Children’s Medical & Research Foundation. Follow @ApeRunner on twitter for more.

2009

[2009-07-06]

Following a four-month sulk about our idea having been implemented already, the apes are back with another mind-blowing game project. Break-tris will have the effects Breakout and Tetris had on the game industry, but will have them at the same time!

[2009-03-08]

Following the recent excitement about the latest apeworks brainchild, it’s turned out that the 2D game we were writing has already been written. Pretty much every detail of this game, down to the name itself (!), matches what we were aiming for. Freaky, eh? A reasonable thinker can conclude that, not only is the internet full, but that every innovation mankind is capable of has been achieved (based on a sample population of this one event). We need to do some serious thinking about what direction this project takes next. See what we were trying to do here.

[2009-02-18]

We at apeworks are up to something. Our latest brainchild is an exploration into the world of 2D games. While the industry has been rocked by photorealistic titles like Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 and Danger Balls, there have been fascinating developments in casual games, and we’re not above cashing in. Rock on over to sourceforge.net and see what we’re at.

2008

[2008-12-30]

Devout apefans will find this hard to believe, but Danger Balls is not perfect. No, no, it’s true. In fact, I think I may have the dubious accolade of having made every mistake possible in the creation of a game. For the benefit of other aspiring developers and hobbyists, I will now list these transgressions, in no particular order.

How not to write a computer game

1. Write everything from scratch. Granted, it can be fun, insightful and downright educational, but writing your graphics engine from scratch is the slowest way to make a game. Nearly everything you want has probably already been written; don’t be afraid to stand on the shoulders of giants.
2. Build the engine first, add content later. This sounds obvious now that I say it to myself, but a game has to have a point, however abstract or whimsical, and it has to have it before you write a line of code. I spent years developing Danger Balls as “some kind of tank game” before ever adding any balls.
3. Close your source. Not having written any open-source software, I can’t yet sing its praises, but I can tell you that the knowledge that no one will see your code allows you to do dirty, shameful things to it. Open it up for the world to see and, even if no one’s interested, you’ll be forced to take a certain pride in it.
4. Take seven years. Enough said.
5. Don’t update your website. The warning sign here was when the owner of another website with a similar name remarked that he wasn’t able to tell what it was we were doing. One major overhaul of the site later, I hope it’s a little clearer. If not: we make computer games.
6. When you do update your website, hand-write the HTML. Even after the overhaul, it took me a few months to realise that what I was doing on the site was blogging. Once I had installed Wordpress, this became a lot less of a chore. Use the right tool for each job.
7. Hand-write XML. I recently decided that I was too old to be hand-writing XML. It you have to write XML, treat yourself to an editor.
8. “Those are just proof-of-concept models; they won’t be in the game”. I actually believed this when I said it, but it’s all too easy to leave test data in the game. Beware the dreaded “good enough”. Either bin your test content, or develop your engine against release-quality content.
9. Keep it to yourself. Until I announced a release date for Danger Balls, the only indication of any progress was a “coming soon” notice on the public site. Behind the scenes, some decent work was being done, but all on the private wiki and issue tracker, with nothing being blogged for the benefit of the public.
10. Don’t have a deadline. The only reason Danger Balls is available now is thanks to a drunken promise I made last year to finish it within three months.

[2008-09-30]

Danger Balls will soon be getting an audio-visual make-over thanks to contributions from some highly talented artistes. Alien Items will be sassing up the soundtrack with some atmospheric compositions, while O.K. Erok will be crafting some designer tanks for us. Yum yum!