This week is Guy Fawkes night, which is observed in the United Kingdom and commemorates a failed treason attempt in 1605. The House of Lords was supposed to be blown up, but they failed to do so.
Given that many customs – local, national or international – have video games made for the occasion, I was surprised to see that this event seems to only have 4! Can you identify more?
Why aren’t there more? I don’t know. I’m guessing because it’s a local tradition that may or may not have been overtaken by Halloween as the main late autumn event.
What do you think?
Having said all that, I am in no way in favour of overthrowing governments or using any violence for that matter. That is why, we at DOMA focus on games that make you think.
It’s this time of the year! The penultimate pagan ritual before the end of the year and the ideal opportunity for many to dress up like ghosts, ghouls and other critters which would scare even me if they really existed.
For me, it is all about imagination, creativity and playing out what usually would be scary, frightening and uncomfortable. Those are all things which I enjoy immensely and I’ve been working on an idea for a Halloween game for some time. The only problem is that I find it very hard though coming up with a novel idea given how many great games are out there already. On steam, a quick search resulted in 750 games and itch.io another 2060!
I guess this is where craftsmanship comes in and the best way forward seems to be to make a game, learn along the way, get feedback, make another game, learn along the way, get feedback, make another game…
In summary, I’ll keep working on it and I’m aiming to publish the first one next year in time for Halloween. In the meantime, in the DOMA office we’ll be having punch, pizza and cake starting Friday lunchtime. After all, it’s about being playful and letting your inner kid free reign for just one day.
What is your plan for the upcoming Halloween weekend?
After a relaxing holiday in the sun, we are back and working hard to finish our Spanish Verb Conjugation game. Unfortunately, we were side tracked by some admin tasks which took longer than expected.
I guess you can empathize with receiving an unexpected letter; which then results in you spending the next few days on formulating a response! This is then followed by more delays, since there appear to be issues with post getting through. Once you receive a response, you find out that there are more questions than answers and off you go again with responding… and this, in a nutshell, is life sometimes. It’s part of what needs to be done to keep DOMA Games up and running. Now that we’ve overcome the obstacles, nothing can hold us back 🙂
Most importantly, we are back in full swing and will share a more in depth progress update late next week!
There are many reasons to improve your Spanish. And, what better place to start than verbs – the action words of every language?
Verbs are the only word needed to make a sentence. Just think about this for a moment. How often do you tell someone to “Look” or “Stop!” or “Move”?
It may not just be the love of grammar. You may also need to learn Spanish verb conjugation for school or university. Possibly, you were inspired when you holidayed in any of the 21(!) Spanish speaking countries such as Spain or Mexico.
Flag of Spain by RelShot 263 (CC0)Flag of Mexico by Alex Covarrubias (CC0)
As for me, I wanted to be able to speak Spanish from a very young age. I don’t know why. I just knew that I would want to speak Spanish one day. There were many failed attempts and my main hurdle was the complex verb conjugation. I looked for more fun ways than mere repetition, but I didn’t find anything that would cover my need to learn all of the tenses and not just the present tense and one of the past tenses. So we decided to build our own game!
Fast forward a year or two and the game is now ready for testing. Our database contains over 3,600 verbs which rotate as the “Verb of the Day”; for those who want to practice every day without getting bored. If you think long term, that’s nearly 10 years worth of a new verb every day without repetition! And yes, they cover all the 83 irregular conjugations we are aware of.
Does 3,600 verbs sound like too much? Fear not! We have prioritized the most important verbs by how often they are used in every day speech in the “Learn New Verb” section. This way, you’ll stay focused on what you need the most. It also feeds into the “Revise Verbs” section, which helps you stay on track with your revisions. It uses our version of the spaced repetition learning technique, to ensure revision is beneficial – without overdoing it of course.
Our demo version will be free and will contain the most important verbs and tenses so you can get a feel for the game. The full version will contain all of the 3,600 verbs, all of the 10 tenses and all of the persons you’ll ever come across.
If you want to be one of our early access testers, please sign up with the form below and let us know what you think of it. Your feedback is very welcome!
Fun fact: did you know that the Spanish language features more than 12,790 verbs?
UPDATE: The game is live and you can download it here:
Recently, I heard that “Roll a dice and move is dead. Don’t do it.”
This comment started me thinking on whether this is true. Is this board game mechanic indeed a thing of the past?
First and foremost, I agree that very simple games implementing this mechanic as the only mechanic are not very exciting. These games still have a place though in that they are suited to younger players who still relish the excitement of “Snakes and ladders” or “Ludo” or the “Game of the Goose”.
Also, there are plenty of enjoyable games which need a bit more engagement in addition to the dice roll. “Backgammon” comes to mind as a good example for adults or “Enchanted Forest” for the whole family. Or how about “Trivial Pursuit”, which reduces the element of luck by combining it with questions that you either can or cannot answer?
Of course, there are also many games using the “roll and move” mechanic but in a slightly different way. For example in the game “Camel Up” where all the dice rolls are revealed at the same time instead of taking turns.
Now how does this apply to video games?
All of the above holds true for some of the more commonly used video game mechanics such as simple platformers using jumping as the only mechanic. Now imagine a jump coupled with a somersault whilst shooting a boomerang at a target to save your second avatar’s life. Would you be more interested? Yes, me too.
In short, it is not the mechanic that is the issue but the lack of novelty or excitement created by it.
Having gone over this topic for a few days now, I feel like trying to create a “roll a dice and move” style game or a traditional yet interesting side scrolling platformer. It sure will be a challenge to come up with something new and interesting.
Mine Sweeper is now ready, published and all feedback implemented. You can get it for free – and ad free – from the Google Play Store. As always, if you have further improvement suggestions, do get in touch and let us know.
Whilst we were putting the final touches on Mine Sweeper, we were also busy on the first version of our next game. We call it “Spanish Verb Conjugation”, because that is what you can learn with it.
Did you know that the Spanish language contains more than 12,000 verbs? In addition, there are over 80 ways of conjugating irregular verbs. Yes, it is indeed a lot of work to get the conjugation right when you are learning to speak the language. That is why we created this game: to help everyone who wants to learn conjugation fast and with some fun. The premium game includes over 3,000 of the most common verbs and conjugation of all 10 tenses. We will also be releasing a free version, which will include your first 100 verbs and the first 3 tenses.
Currently, we are working on making the game available for early testing. Ideally, we would like to provide the game for free to the first 100 early access users. Having actual users would really help to get early feedback. The game is functionally ready and we’re working on the polish.
So, if you are interested in speeding up your learning curve, sign up to our updates on the Spanish Verb Conjugation game with the below form. We are aiming to send updates at each major milestone which we expect to happen about every two weeks.
It’s been a long time coming but it’s finally arrived. We have released our first game: our own version of Mine Sweeper!
It may not be the most creative start into our games journey, but it’s a start, and we are proud of it. That’s what it’s all about after all: Getting started and gaining experience with the release process. Most importantly: now we have an actual game published.
Our way to learn how to make great games is to use each game we work on as an opportunity to learn something new. We focus on an area that we need to improve upon or try something new: Try a new mechanic, or existing mechanics in new combinations. It will be a long journey – we hope – since that would mean we are continuing to improve our skills and our games are getting better. It would also mean that we continue making games which after all is what we want to do.
What is next you ask?
We are currently working on a game that helps you learn to conjugate verbs in Spanish. I used it while I learnt Spanish and continue to use it today. I have given pleeenty of feedback along the way. After all, conjugation by itself isn’t a lot of fun, but our game should make it so. So hang on tight for more news!
In the meantime: try out our Mine Sweeper game, which can be played in landscape or portrait mode. You can even customise the size of the mine field and the number of hidden mines in contains.
You can find it on Google Play Store. It’s free and ad free. Try it today!
After a steep learning curve, and a lot of effort, we’re close to publishing our first game. It’s now available for open testing. The first 100 people will be eligible to take part in testing the game and provide early access feedback.
We think the game plays well with no known bugs. In addition to being able to customize the dimensions of the field and the number of mines, it now includes visual feedback: a fireworks display when winning and an explosion when losing.
Try it for yourself today by downloading the game for free at Mine Sweeper in the Google Play Store, and let us know what you think.
We have been officially incorporated and are now able to publish our games!
It took more time than initially anticipated to find the right incorporation partner, overcome the mountain of paperwork, go back and do it all over again to finally clear the last hurdle so that we now can officially release games.
What a great day!
Even better news is that whilst the paperwork was being done in the background, we didn’t stop working on our games. That means that our starter game will be released shortly. Whilst it is a game for us to learn the processes and get used to the various platforms, we will still celebrate it when it’s live.
The game thereafter is close to finishing as well and only needs a bit more polishing before we release it into the wild.
We are even thinking about game number three already. It is is still in the early phases of brainstorming and a clear idea will firm up over the next few weeks.
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