Can you count to ten? Big Top 10 is now available on Verizon! http://bit.ly/7Ncaji

What Do Puzzlings, Guitar Hero 5 And Assassin's Creed II 3D Have in Common??

.....They're all on Verizon's Best Games of 2009 List!!!!!

Puzzlings is #2 of the Best Games of 2009 on the Verizon Media Store! Just behind Guitar Hero 5 and ahead of Assassin's Creed II 3D! Woo Hoo!!!!

Check out Puzzlings and Kill All Bugs! on the Verizon Media Store!

T'was a Bight Before Christmas...

We had a great year at Bight, and it's all thanks to you! Thank you all for your support and we look forward to 2010! We thought we'd let you have a peek at our Christmas Dinner and Yankee gift swap! A good time was had by all!

Puzzlings made it in Verizon's Top Selling Games!

Puzzlings made it in Verizon's Top Selling Games! Play it on your Verizon phone and coming soon on AT&T.

Check it out!

4.5/5 "Outstanding" for Big Top 10!

PocketFullofApps.com has given Big Top 10 a great review! Here's a small slice!

"The fact that this game boast a number of features plus an addicting gameplay mechanic that’s hard to put down is enough to make you wanna grab this for only $0.99 cents."

Read the full article here

Fleeced Gameplay Trailer

The new gameplay trailer for Bight Games' highly anticipated game, Fleeced! Shear Terror is finally here! Fleeced! Shear Terror is coming soon to the App Store!

8/10 for Kill All Bugs on Verizon!

Kill all Bugs! is an adaptation of the "tower defense" genre where you are tasked to defend the cities from giant mutant insects by building various defense towers (gun, laser wall, stun, napalm, missile, generator) of varying costs. The game play is classic, but the variation is pretty good.

read more...

Pocket Gamer Previews Fleeced! Shear Terror

Our friends at Pocket Gamer have previewed our upcoming game Fleeced! Shear Terror! Here's a bit of what they had to say...

"...there's no doubt that Fleeced offers something different from the usual App Store fare. The high quality graphics and music, plus the frantic running around makes for an exciting experience."


Read the full article here.

Fleeced! Shear Terror Gameplay Screens

Here's some gameplay screen shots from our upcoming game Fleeced! Shear Terror, for iPhone and iPod Touch!

Fleeced! Shear Terror Gameplay Screens

Puzzlings Dolls

Take a look at our Puzzlings dolls! We like to have fun with our creations. Each one is an original design by one of our artists, including some unlockable elements from the wardrobe in Puzzlings, available for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Check'em out :












Special thanks to Holland College graphic design students Ben Bain and Dana Harris for helping us bring these awesome dolls to life.

PocketGamer Interview on Fleeced! Shear Terror!

PocketGamer interviews our CEO, Stuart Duncan, about Fleeced! Shear Terror. Click here for the full interview!

Big Top 10 is in good company!

Pocketgamer has included Big Top 10 in the top 10 iPhone games for $.99 We're really pleased to be in such good company.

Here's an excerpt from the article.

"Big Top 10, Sonic Boom [actually Bight Games]

This game joins the likes of Flight Control and Pocket God as games that have been designed with a budget price in mind. The premise is simple – join together a sequence of grid-based numbers that add up to ten, then repeat until time runs out. The more numbers you use, the higher the score.

Despite the simplicity of the concept, the execution is brilliantly compelling. Negative numbers and bonus items add an extra layer of strategy, which leaves you reaching for the retry button again and again.

Big Top 10 is an unapologetically cheap game, but the obvious care and attention that's gone into its creation is worth a great deal."

Read the full article here!

Puzzlings Fan Art Gallery is LIVE!

I created this Flickr set this morning, starting with a Puzzlings drawing I did while I was on vacation this summer. If you are a Puzzlings fan and want to share your artistic interpretation of them with the world, drop me an email with your artwork attached and I'll post it in our Puzzlings Fan Art set.

Send images in jpg, png, or gif formats, with a file size no larger than 1MB. Please make sure you give us your name and any other relevant information you'd like to share with the Global Puzzlings Community so we can post that along with your artwork!

We at Bight Games reserve the right to choose which images will become part of the set.

Tyler Landry
Art Director
tyler.landry@bightgames.com

Fleeced - Shear Terror! Teaser from Bight Games

Bight Games is excited to show the first trailer for Fleeced! - Shear Terror, our newest game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Fleeced! brings the mad world of pseudo-Peruvian Llama rustling and deadly fraternal bickering to your iPhone. Take aim at your opponents walls while rebuilding your own in a desperate bid to foil the opportunistic llama rustlers. Featuring real-time internet multiplayer Fleeced! is truly one of a kind. Look for it on the App store fall 2009.

Fleeced!

So, we're working on something new. Something a little bit different. Something........... fleecy.

MANY years back the guys at Bight Games began building a little mobile game about two Peruvian brothers at odds, their llamas, and a dastardly rustler intent on pilfering every last bit of fleece he could get his filthy hands on. This game saw its way to completion on various 3D and 2D mobile devices, but ultimately fell into obscurity.

A few months ago we were digging through our archives of untapped potential and things to revisit and we came across this little gem. We really felt that it hadn't gotten the love it deserved the first time around, and that there was something special about it that needed to be shared with the world of gaming. We've done a pile of redesign on this project, changing its look, its feel, and its play mechanics to get them juuuuuuuust right. It'll also be our first iPhone game with internet real-time multiplayer!

We're heading into the home stretch with "FLEECED!" so I thought it might be time to share this pre-release screenshot with you:




Enjoy :D

Tyler Landry
Art Director
tyler.landry@bightgames.com

What’s next under the Big Top?

We’ve been very happy with the feedback we’ve received from fans of BIG TOP 10, and we know some of you are eager to know what’s coming next, so I’m going to talk a little bit about what we’re up to.

For the next iteration of BIG TOP 10 we not only want to focus on the hardcore arcade players, but we’ll also want to offer less stressful options for casual players.

But first the hardcore! An all new combo system to will allow players to better rely on skill, and not just speed, earn more points faster by making successive, successful equations. We also have some new attack modes in the works for “hit it as hard as you can” gameplay. In the attack modes, the max time will start small and get even smaller over time. If you want to make it into the top 10, you’ll have to have keen survival skills, but you’ll also have to maximize your points per second because the game won’t last forever, no matter how good you are (promise!).

We’ll also be adjusting the way we handle our high scores. Each mode will store daily, weekly, and monthly scores, in addition to your all-time bests. Each of these can then be uploaded and tracked with the OpenFeint system. We realize how daunting people’s personal bests can be, and we want to add more activity and excitement to checking the leader boards.

And for players looking for a more relaxed paced, they need to look no further then the all new, level based, puzzle mode. The clock is gone, and all you’ve got to do is clear enough numbers to advance. Sounds easy, right? But you’ll have to consider each move carefully to score the most points and as you advance in levels you’ll encounter locked numbers and new challenges which cannot be shuffled. Run out of sums and its level over!

So for those of you who feared we’d forgotten about BIG TOP 10, we haven’t. There’s still plenty in the works… it’s just grown a bit larger. With any luck we’ll have more to talk about soon.

Matthew Edwards
Lead Game Designer
Bight Games
matthew.edwards@bightgames.com

A Brief Overview of Mobile Games Industry

So this week it is my turn to post to the Bight Games developer blog. I’ve spent most of the week trying to decide what to write about, having only been here about 5 months it seemed wrong to write some embarrassing stories. So as in all times of uncertainty I did what any good Englishman would do and went to the pub for a pint and some inspiration.

Unfortunately I’m unable to tell you about the latest game we have just completed so I eventually settled on a very brief overview of the Mobile Games industry and where we are today. I’ve been in the Games Industry since 1998 and moved to Mobile in early 2004. Since then I’ve found Mobile a fascinating and frustrating place to be.

When I first joined mobile it was very much in its infancy. There was excitement about developments taking place and the potential growth of the industry. When you consider the amount of phones on the market there was a huge potential for gaming sales. In 2004 colour screen handsets were fast becoming the norm and 3D mobile gaming became a possibility, the future was rosy.

Unfortunately the industry became stagnant pretty quickly. The quality of titles over the past 5 years has undoubtedly improved and there have been some awesome games on the market. Innovation however became lacking, there are numerous reasons for this which I won’t bore you with here. One I will mention is that from a Publishers point of view it was extremely hard to make money due to increasing development costs, increased handset support and deployment costs, operator and licensing fees.

With less of a return on investment publishers didn’t want to take a chance on a new idea and opted for tried and tested formulas. So for a number of years now it has been a bit doom and gloom with few highlights. Thankfully now though there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that light is the iPhone.

With the iPhone and the App Store there has been a refreshing amount of original IP and new gaming mechanics that have given Mobile gaming a boost. As a gaming device the iPhone is a good bit of kit and holds its own with the PSP and DS Lite. From looking through the App Store we see a number of quality and innovative games.

At Bight Games we have been blessed with strong Design, Art and Code teams which has allowed us to develop a number of strong titles like Big Top 10 and Puzzlings. As we move forward we have a number of exciting projects entering development now both licensed and more of our own IP which I’m sure will be every bit as successful as our recent releases.

The future looks rosy again.


Daryl Bibby
Producer
daryl.bibby@bightgames.com

Advanced 3D Technologies in Puzzlings

The App Store is loaded with hundreds games from all corners of the globe. In this environment it's imperative that innovation and polish be at the forefront of every development project. Here at Bight Games we use this mandate for every game we create. Technically we always try to push the limits of the hardware that we're working with and constantly challenge our developers. When we started Puzzlings for the iPhone, there was a lot of work to be done. The art team had come up with an ambitious character that needed to be incredibly detailed and be able to look like almost anything.

The Puzzling texture design called for millions and millions of possible combinations between all the items and palettes that can be chosen. Underneath this immense scope is a rather simple tech that powers most of our games graphics and animation: BightSprite. This technology allows for graphics, textures and animations to be dynamically generated on the fly from a database of heavily compressed and optimized base image sets. Using a pre-defined layout these images are layered, coloured, and organized into their desired form. Since it is also a lossless format, the quality level remains incredibly high, while the file size remains low. Despite this apparent contradiction, the millions of possible textures for Puzzlings lives in one single BightSprite file only 572 kilobytes compressed. To put this in perspective, if saved individually as pngs, those textures would take up over a gigabyte!




The remaining challenge was in the actual character model. The art team wanted a very high level of articulation and fluidity with a very high polygon count, something we had never tried before. The designers presented us with a design for a 4000 polygon smooth skinned character with 27 bones with 4 weights per vertex. The first thing that we tried was using the built-in OpenGL ES extension for matrix palette skinning. This seemed like the best solution as all the calculations could be done as part of the standard rendering calls, and it should be done in GPU hardware. However, this extension only supports 9 bones at a time, and the calculations are done in the CPU, creating a potential stall situation in the driver. Instead, we created a custom skinning solution optimized with some ASM. This allowed us to meet the high weighting requirements of the system, and implement a system with enough performance to be able to handle the number of bones and transformations required.





The final product speaks for itself. The character movement and flexibility is unchallenged anywhere in the App Store, setting a high bench mark for future titles. By challenging our current limits and leveraging existing experience and technologies, we will continue this trend for all our titles.




Sean Wylie-Toal
CTO, Bight Games
sean.wylie-toal@bightgames.com

Bight... A Studio Tour from one of our Producers

When I was asked to write up a post for our blog I had no idea what to write about. I didn't want to bore people by blathering on about myself, then I considered talking about my role here as a producer, but thought I must be able to come up with something a little more interesting.

So, after much thought (You'd be surprised at just how much.), I decided that it might be cool to give a little tour of our studio. We really do work in a cool space here at Bight. Prior to moving into this building, the spot we worked in was a pretty generic, grey-walled office space. It was also quite small with everyone, including our CEO and COO in the same room. If we had stayed in that office we probably would have had to start stacking people.

We moved into this space in July of 2008. The building is a turn of the century former warehouse and was once home to the Seaman's Beverages, a local soda pop company. (As an aside, you can still buy Seaman's products here in PEI, they have great flavours and they still use cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup.) Anyway, enough about old-fashioned soda and on with the tour!


Here you see the entryway into Bight. The fancy sign you see had to be specially made so that it would fit in on the heritage building.



Here's our first floor (Actually second floor, but the first floor of the studio, confused yet?) dev room. We try to keep our teams together, so there's a mix of all disciplines. We've got two producers at Bight, one downstairs and one upstairs with each serving as anchors for their teams. I'm the downstairs producer and Daryl Bibby is the upstairs producer.



Here's a picture of our lounge area, which sometimes is used for short team meetings. Pictured is most of our team for our upcoming iPhone game Fleeced! If you look on the left you can see our tower of consoles where we've got everything from an Atari Lynx and a Sega Genesis, right up to the current generation of consoles.


This is our meeting room. As you can see we've got a giant mural on the wall showing off the amazing world map from Puzzlings. Try not to be intimidated by the serious looking guy at the end of the table, that's just James and he's really quite friendly.



Most of the studio is open, but the folks at the top need a little privacy, so here you see the area where there are offices for our CEO, COO, and CTO.



Speaking of our CEO, here he is working away in his office. Hey Stu!







Here are some shots of our upstairs dev room. Once again it's a mix of everyone that makes up the teams. Before we moved in we had some murals painted on the walls to give the place a little more colour and life. The first mural is a cool take on our logo, while the other two are some characters from an earlier iteration of Puzzlings. If you've been following our blog, they should be familiar with them from Tyler's post.



Last, but not least, here are our two designers pitching some new game ideas to Stu. (No, this isn't staged, and no, I'm not telling you what the ideas are.) They're currently sharing space with our art director. It's a fairly empty room right now, with just the three of them, but at the rate we've been growing they're sure not to be alone in there for very long!

That pretty much wraps up the tour. I hope you enjoyed this look at our office and that you're slightly envious of our workspace!

Cheers!

-Josh.
josh.zisserson@bightgames.com

From the Art Director's Desk:

Gather 'round Puzzlings fans and I'll tell you a tale in pictures. Witness the development of a concept, the creation of a world, and the birth of an endearing little character. Many of you probably know the Puzzlings and their fantastic world quite well, but the game that became Puzzlings came from strange beginnings...















Tyler Landry
Art Director
tyler.landry@bightgames.com

P.S. Be on the lookout for the official Puzzlings fan art gallery, coming soon.