Challenge accepted! My name is Harry Kalogirou and along with my dear friend Thanasis Lightbridge we are taking the Ludum Dare October Challenge. This was decided a few days ago, so we got together last Sunday and had a great brainstorm session. We dueled over 3-4 ideas and finaly we settled for FlyCraft.

So FlyCraft it is, and we have one month to deliver it to you. I am not going to tell you more about the game at the moment, but I already told you it is going to be a crafting game about flying. 😉 There is no prior work for the game and all will be done in the 30 days of the challenge. I will be doing the coding and Thanasis will take on the graphics and of course the music and sound effects. The game will be coded using the Sylphis3D game engine and we are going to exclusively target the Blackberry Playbook and the AppWorld store, as it is a platform I fell in love recently and it’s a platfom where you can actually make a buck these days.

Me and Thanasis will be posting here more details and progress reports so stay tuned! For now we got work to do, so catch you later!!!

About the authors:

Thanasis Lightbridge: A creative and exploring nature that creates highly descriptive and unpredictable music. His grand creation the Dol Ammad and Dol Theeta music projects. He is also responsible for the music and sound fx for the game Pop Corny.

Harry Kalogirou: Independent game developer responsible for sorrow fingers and raging addict gamers with his addictive game Pop Corny. 

Wow, this has been a wild ride! Halfway there and we have done a huge amount of work. FlyCraft is now playable and we spend lots of time playing which takes toll on development! The game is starting to shape up and it’s good! (by my totally unbiased opinion)

FlyCraft is a game about crafting flying machines. You take up the role of Herbie, a chubby Ladybug, who is too bored to fly by himself and creates whatever wild contraption you can imagine to fly from one flower to the other. You get to utilize wood boards, steel plates, soda cans, firework rockets, propellers, and other wild items that you can combine in any creative way you can conceive. Will it fly or it will fall like a brick? There is only one way to know: throw it off a cliff 😀

We have just setup a launch page for the game here: http://www.flycraftgame.com/ where you can sign up and get updates. We will also be featuring in the game’s credits the top 5 referrers! So after you sign up don’t forget to send the link to your friends! Who knows maybe you will find yourself featured in a true game!

Tags: blackberry, casual, craft, flight, fly, game, playbook, sandbox

Introducing… “Herbie“! The star of FlyCraft and star of your own wacky flying creations!

Herbie is a groovy male ladybug who, being too bored to fly with his own wings,  prefers to create all kinds of flying devices and machines to take him as far into the woods as possible. Don’t let those big eyes fool you, Herbie is a cunning little crafting hero that hardly ever looses his cool.

A bit more that 5 days left for the deadline expiration… we CAN make it!!!

It is done! 😀 Yes we did it, and we are quite proud of the result! After long nights of programming, music composing, recording sound effects, drawing graphics, playtesting we got FlyCraft where we wanted it. Doing it all in under a month was quite a feat and we sincerely hope you will enjoy the result. Below we have a top secret leaked video of flight prototype #15351, warning this info is eyes only! 😀

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ0AxrfOaH0

The game will be released on AppWorld during this week. We will let you know!

That is right! We managed to do the release yesterday and we even got the dollar (we are actually #1 Top Paid Game at the moment I write! [boast]way over Angry Birds =D[/boast] . You can check out our October Challenge entry here:

FlyCraft – October Challenge Entry

It was a roller coaster ride to develop this game, you know, the crazy ones! Me and Thanasis managed to gain so much experience during this month than hardly any other process I can think of can provide.

The fact that the game we made was so well received by the gamers was the topping of the cake. Such a great feeling, after a month of long nights of work! A few hours after the release, we were receiving this kind of reviews on AppWorld:

“Fun game, gets your creative mind going.” 5 stars

“This is a fun game if you have a few minutes to spare & want something to do. At $1.99 you can’t go wrong….now if you will excuse me I have got to get back to the game. I’m trying hard to get “Herbie” to fly further then 200cm….I keep getting so so close lol BTW that reminds me. This game comes with Scoreloop integration so you can compete with your friends :)” 5 stars

“This is a great game and logs of original fun. Looking forward to more materials to smash on the landing pad. Great original concept!” 5 stars

“Fun game, gets your creative mind going.” 5 stars

The list can go on and on! We are so humbled by these people.

We have updated the game’s website with the launch trailer. We hope you will like it as much as we do.

The plan from now on is to add in the game all the cool features we left out due to the time constraint of the challenge. Some of the things we left out with a cold heart were the instant replay system that will allow you to view your flights again but also to share them with friends, the ability to save multiple crafts and challenge friends to fly your crafts and do better, and lot more stuff that I will not reveal at the moment! 😉

Thanks again everybody it was a great experience we all shared here! Good luck to all the contenders!

Hello guys,

after many-many years the game I created for the October Challenge 2012 finally gets released on iOS and Android. For those that don’t remember, the game was released only for BlackBerry devices back then:

[FlyCraft release post]

You might also want to look into the post-mortem of the game here in Ludum Dare.

[FlyCraft Success Story]

The game was a huge success on the BlackBerry platform, and it was always in my mind to someday bring the game to iOS and Android. Specially now that most BlackBerry users moved to iOS and Android, I was constantly being emailed about a potential release of the game on the new platforms.

So there you go you can now play on iPhones, iPads and Androids. Use this universal link: http://applk.co/flycraft

And let your friends know about it. It’s really appreciated!

Game on!

[Challenger entry]