games

The games that I did not write for myself were developed while I was employed by

Ash Gaming Ltd.

ASH GAMING are a games company specialising in AWP (Amusement With Prizes) games. Generally these take the form of fruit machines which seek to reproduce the genuine fruit machine experience of the casino machines found in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

I started here in August 2005 at the bottom of a vertical learning curve involving Microsoft Visual Studio, C++, XML parsing in C++, DLL creation and "industrial strength" Object Oriented design. We deployed [xxx] games live across [xxx] casinos between [xxx] and [xxx] and are working on another [xxx].

Playjam

PLAYJAM are a games company specialising in iTV games. They have their own channels in the UK on SKY, Telewest and NTL and produce content for games channels worldwide. Playjam is a wholly owned subsidiary of OpenTV.

I worked here from the 6th October 2003 until April 2005, and I had a thoroughly good time building all these wacky Playjam games. Many of them have been so successful that they have been reskinned for France, America, ITVi, Fox Kids' Channel and others worldwide.

Flying Circus

A very adventurous concept that I didn't have time to finish before heading off to pastures new at Mindhouse. Your task is to complete all the levels by flying your triplane through a ring of fire carrying a wing-walker. On the way you will encounter hazards such as giant fireworks, barrage balloons, flocks of birds, helpful and unhelpful thermals, thunderstorms, human cannonballs and a rogue rival plane which will try to steal your wing-walker back once you have successfully docked and stolen her for yourself. All without running out of fuel or lives, and within a time limit for each level!

Fruit Splat!

A rebuild of Teen Wolf Tantrum with new graphics and sounds and the intro movie taken out. It retains the very fast gameplay and the PIN ENTRY system whereby you can re-enter the game where you left off without losing your score. This was built for TPS France and the ITVi service in the UK. This has now been reskinned again for Fox Kids as Teenage Mutant Turtles Sewer Smash (click image for the splash screen).

Jamble

This game is addictive, very fast to play and lots of fun. Players pick 2 tiles to swap and if a line fo 3 or more is made the tiles go POP and are replaced by new tiles dropping in from from above. If there are no possible moves the JOKER tile is started. This animates through all the characters and stops when clicked upon; all the characters of that type go POP, the grid refills and play continues. Meanwhile the timer bar is descending and speeds up towards the end. Every tile popped earns points and more time. There are 20 levels to complete and an extra character is thrown into the mix after level 8. This has been deployed on SKY UK, TPS France and reskinned for ITVi as Movie Mania, featuring movie genre characters.

Kennel Pups Chain Gang

This is a map-based arcade-style game. Your task is to lead the puppies from the compound while avoiding the guards and poisoned biscuits in your path. There are 20 levels of varying difficulty and as you advance through the game more pups may be led to safety at one time in a chain formation. Released on Playjam in the UK and TPS in France.
This has also now been reskinned for Fox Kids as Bone Breakout - click the image for the new splash screen.

Teen Wolf Tantrum

Teen Wolf Tantrum is an arcade-style game in which advancing columns of toys must be cleared by wanging your baseball bat at groups of two or more toys. Columns must be cleared completely because if they reach your bed it is Game Over. Now and then a Vampire Mouse will launch itself at you and rob you of points if you don't duck or jump out of the way. 30 levels of increasing numbers of toys keep you busy.
Two innovations in this game are an animated introduction movie and the CODE ENTRY PLAY feature: After level 5 players are given a 9-letter code which will allow them to re-enter the game where they left off, with their original score intact. Teen Wolf Tantrum launched on SKY in September 2004 and is now available in France on TPS and in the USA.

Strange Hill

Groundbreaker!
This is the closest thing to a Gameboy title on SKY. There are 35 rooms and corridors to explore, 17 items to pick up and use in 13 games. Guide your character around a deserted school building at night appeasing the ghosts who have set her some devilish tasks to perform and puzzles to solve before she can escape. Clues and hints are scattered around on haunted blackboards and computer screens (if you can find them) and meanwhile the timer is ticking away. There's a wide variety of interaction and gameplay available and in the 40 minutes allowed there are many paths to completing the game. Go your own way through the game and see if you can survive!
Strange Hill was released in August 2004.

Happy Word Time

A fast-paced and funny word game similar in concept to Countdown but styled like a cross between Banzai! and a Chinese wind-up tin toy.
The accent is on humour, characterisation and animation, featuring skateboarding budgies, pop-up hamsters and marauding mecha-cats.
There are three episodes a week. Each episode consists of three sets of 9 letters - players bet on how many letters they can use to make a word. They then have 30 seconds to make that word. There are also 3 anagram rounds where players must unscramble a 9-letter word to get a 500 point bonus. If you take too long to decide on a move perhaps you'll get to see the cutesy dancing mice!
This game went live in April 2004 and has enjoyed a good response from our audience.

When Fruit Turns Bad

This was a really interesting challenge as it was the first proper arcade-style game I've done for TV. I used a map-based approach and built in 20 levels, 5 themed worlds and 12 self-aware character objects.
It's a top-down arcade game in which the main character runs around the screen eating fruit tiles and creating tunnels. Baddies chase you down the tunnels and try to push watermelons onto you from above. You can do the same to them but do it once too often and the Fruit-Bat will come after you.
I defined 5 types of AI which various Monsters use to chase players round the screen as they eat the fruit to score points and get to the next level.
The game runs surprisingly fast even on the slower STB's and is as entertaining as any purpose-built arcade machine; there are 11 basic characters plus the occasional fruitbat to contend with as well as power-ups, special weapons and a Dodge The Falling Fruit sub-game.
This game went live early in March 2004 and has now been released in the USA, and in France on TPS.

Box Clever

My first project for PlayJam, a cutesy little quiz with 4 levels and lots of animation. A handy way to learn the new API and template, and get back into OpenTV coding after a nice long summer break!
This went live in mid-November 2003 and has since proved popular with themed episodes being released on a regular basis. It has also been re-branded for the new ITVi service.

Ash Luecker Ltd.

Ash Luecker are a specialist games creation agency
working on the Web, Interactive Television and Mobile platforms.

Springboard

Using ashluecker's online XML Wizard, content creators can output the XML needed by the application to generate a fully-featured quiz complete with questions and answers, several styles of timer, scorebox, player feedback and skinnable look-and-feel. They only need change a single parameter in the supplied MAKEFILE to output a .mux or .flw file suitable for transmission on SKY.

CBeebies Paintbox Game

A painting game for pre-school. Employing palette-swapping techniques each colourable area's outline flashes in turn. In level one the player presses the fasttext keys to colour in each area in the respective colours. Level two increases the number of colours and areas while level three is a freehand drawing area. As each picture is finished it is displayed in a center-scene frame.
The MAKEFILE for this application was specifically tailored to provide the BBC with an easy update path for new content.

Snakes 'n' Ladders Gambling

Gambling version of Snakes and Ladders, in which the more goes it takes to get to the top of the board, the less you win. Built as a demo for AVAGO ©

Ash Luecker - tools in support of games

Pyramid Builder Sim

This is a C++ application for Windows built in support of the Pyramid Building Game on the BBC/History site. It prototypes and simulates the gameplay code in the Flash game and was given to the BBC to so that they could play the game before it was even built and ensure that the correct parameters were driving the game and behaving as required. I ported the final code directly into Flash (ECMA Script) so that the finished product behaved in exactly the same way as the prototype.
The BBC's comment was that they had never experienced such a rapid and easy development path in the creation of any of their online resources.
You can download it here if you'd like to have a go at "building a pyramid" yourself! There's no help available but have a go and I'm sure you'll soon get the hang of it :) It should run on win98, win2K & XP without problems.

5-reel Fruit Machine Sim

This Java application was developed in support of Gala Games' Casino Fruit Machines. It simulates a 5-reel fruit machine allowing the operator to configure the reels and adjust the paytables in order to achieve the required level of payout. The reels can be spun any number of times, with 1,000,000 spins (about 6 seconds) reproducing a good set of average results.
The classes in this app will be developed into a server-side fruit machine engine delivering XML over http to the client. You can have a go on it by downloading it from here, unzipping the contents to a folder and running ReelCheckGui. It will run from a command line but of course you will need to have jre installed and add the folder to your classpath.

Ash Luecker - Gala Games on iTV

Thanks to some excellent graphical concepts and the hardware capabilities of the Set-Top Box all these Gala Games© provide rapid and varied animation effects making the interfaces entertaining and attractive; a great user experience.

Flamin' 8 Eights

An Interactive TV (Liberate) version of Hi-Lo, a fixed-odds betting game where players bet on whether the next roll of the dice will be higher or lower. Results and account balances are generated and maintained by server-side "croupier" and account management software. There are error-handling routines for lost connections during a game and players may return to uncompleted games at any time with no loss of game data or current account details.

Whoulette

This has some of the fastest animation of any Liberate game, or my name's not Emily ;-) You'll believe a Pace Box can rock when you see this game; it runs way faster than this animated gif. This is a fixed-odds betting game derived from roulette for the iTV (Liberate) platform where, in place of numbers, the player bets on faces and their attributes - gender, hair colour and even whether they have a beard or glasses. It's great fun to play for points or cash.

With all these games the "croupier" runs server-side and is accessed by the client over SSL for account details, result sets and other management routines. They were developed in 2002 for GALA Interactive ©.

Paper, Scissors, Stone

Or scissors rock paper, or whatever. A unique iTV (Liberate) take on an old favourite with single-game and accumulator (2, 4 and 5 wins in a row) fixed-odds bets. It's a really snappy quick-fix of a game, only 10p a go ;-).

Ash Luecker - BBC

Hunt The Ancestor

An 86-page multi-path interactive learning game dealing with some of the issues surrounding an archaeological dig.

The player learns about basic archaelogical techniques and pitfalls and uses them to complete a virtual dig. They are encouraged to experiment with aerial and geophysical surveys, the use of old maps and records, the choice of appropriate digging tools and techniques and the management of the all-important budget. If the right techniques are used the result is the discovery of human and other remains and technical reports on their scientific significance.

The original Flash version can be found here amongst the fine collection that is the BBC History games site.

Two Way TV

Two Way TV is the home of interactive TV technology. They work with the biggest broadcasters
in the industry and can provide anything up to a complete design-build-operate package.

Two Way Today

The main client-side interface to Two Way TV's services on On Digital. This application uses live data to build an up-to-the-minute interface giving access to all currently scheduled games. Pay-Per-Play registration and validation transactions are handled when necessary.

Other pages available from this interface give access to future schedules, past winners, phone-in competition details and help screens.

TwoWayTV - Liberate games for DCable

Minefield

A 4 player quiz game of 6 rounds played against the clock. The order of play is designed to look random but great care was taken to ensure compliance with prize play rules. The content is episodic ie. unique content can be scheduled to air at specific times.

There are two different types of round to vary the action and the animation is engaging and funny; the timer is represented by footsteps approaching an increasingly nervous bomb character which eventually explodes. This character also shows an interest in the answers! Content is provided on demand using TwoWayTV's central computer system. The whole thing's very lively and is now being broadcast to 5 countries on various platforms.

Deal With It!

A 1 player card game of 2 rounds played against the clock again in compliance with prize play rules which discriminate between chance and skill. Deal With It! can generate its own random content if it's not for a prize game. Thus it can vary its content with no attention from the provider.

In each round you get 27 cards from which to make 12 poker hands across, down and diagonally. During marking each hand is named, the individual score shown against the row and the total updated.
This is an addictive game: There's a high level of interaction and animation, and while the basic concept is simple building a good set of hands takes skill. This game has been released on NTL, Telewest, Austar (Australia), CanalSat, Israel Satellite and Maystar (Malaysia).

Matchball

The world's first Interactive Television gambling application, based around the current week's football pools. This uses an SSL connection to Java servlets which supply live and archived data and enable transactions. Transaction management is performed by the client.

Up to four sets of eleven numbers may be picked for any one entry. Numbers and completed lines may be edited, deleted or recalled from memory. Each number relates to an actual fixture which is displayed in real-time as each number is picked.

Entry is completed by creating or retrieving your household details, filling in credit card details and so on and pressing "send". Data is harvested nightly from the broadcaster's computer system.
The marketing of this game has been rather downbeat despite which it attracts regular hits.

Lucky Clover

This turned out to be a marketing nightmare for some reason. Similar to Matchball, it was based on the Irish lottery and had some great features.

Any number of entries per week were permitted. All validated entries for each household are stored in a cookie for up to 20 weeks. The easily navigable results interface shows your entries for any of those weeks plus the result of the draw, and indicates any wins you may have had in that time.
This was an attractive and slick interface with none of the lumpen plod of its predecessor.

Other Games

Ships 'n' Subs

This was originally written as a degree coursework. It's a straightforward arcade game in which you depth-charge the subs before they can get you with a mine. There are two modes of gameplay. In the first your ship releases depth charges in a regular pattern as you sweep back and forth. Mode 2 gives you complete control over where the depth charges are dropped. There are occasional floating mines to avoid as well as the regular sort which can make things hectic. You have airburst and deep-burst weapons which can clear the field until more subs come along, but use them sparingly!
This is an infinite-level game; the more subs you destroy the more depth charges you have available, but more subs will come looking for you. With sound effects!

Scrollerball

This is a tried and tested arcade game but with a difference: Instead of just Breakout! you have a widescreen playing area. At the extremeties of the "table" the paddle nudges the display sideways so that you can get to the bricks at the far ends.
This has all the regular bonuses and power-ups; virtually unlimited levels; raytraced graphics; backspin and topspin; great sound effects. In advanced play you get side paddles as well, but the side boundaries are removed and the ball can nudge the display sideays as well. It sounds mad but it works and is great fun to play.

Preamble