The Golden Bird of Paradise is another nice looking Hidden Object game where you will have to search for mysteries and reveal another legend!

“After your city trip to Amsterdam, this time you have chosen for a relaxing holiday. A trip to tropical paradise. No way anything will come in between that can disturb this! It all seems peaceful, but again the journey will be nothing you expected it to be.

The tropical environments will bring you more than relaxing and cocktails at the beach… if only you knew. The jungle hides secrets you don’t know of, locals do know more, but do not reveal all… Questions rise, irreversible decisions have to be made to finally reveal the mystery of the golden bird in Paradise.”

the full version is available for $6,99 here, but a Flash demo version was recently released by Youda Games, the creator of the game.

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Have fun!

FlashGameLicense (FGL) is an online broker of Flash games, run by Adam Schroeder and Chris Hughes. FGL was created by Adam and Chris as a service to address the difficulties in connecting game developers with the sponsors/licensers interested in their games. They were kind enough to answer a few questions for us.

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself and let us know how did you get in Flash games?

Adam: My name is Adam Schroeder. I actually got into programming by making games. This was nearly 10 years ago and I was using Director and lingo. I quickly got sucked into “real” work until I ran across Kongregate last year. I dug up my old games and posted them. I immediately got a ton of feedback and the “game spark” was re-ignited!

Chris: My name is Chris Hughes. I have a similar story as Adam. I used to actually make Flash fan games for Ultima Online starting back in ’98 or so. I’ve been a programmer in various aspects ever since. Then a little more than a year ago I started fiddling with Flash again as a hobby, and actually made some games. Whilst searching the web for places to upload my game I stumbled upon Kongregate. Even though my games were horrible I loved the ability to get feedback quickly, and just the thought of being paid for my games excited me.

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Daniel McNeely and his crew are in the process of revamping Armor Games, one of the leading Flash games portals, and he took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for FreeGamesNews readers (thanks Dan!)

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?

Daniel: My name is Daniel and I’m the CEO of Armor Games. I went to Biola University where I got a BS in Business and a Bible Minor. I’ve played games my entire life and a few of my favorites are Act Raiser, Ice Climber, Crono Trigger, Secret of Mana, FF3, Anything Mario or Link related, and Halo 3.

FreeGamesNews: could you give us a quick history on Armor Games?

Daniel: Armor Games started in the end of 2005. I being a big gamer, wanted to make a website devoted to great games. Most of these great games came from Newgrounds and not only did I find great games on this site, but great developers. Most of them were friendly and nice, and I got to pay them to develop flash games for AG. We had a handful of hits come out and have been releasing games ever since.

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StormWinds 1.5 is the latest action game created by Jared Riley and his team from Hero Interactive, the game studio behind Bubble Tanks and Starshine. StormWinds 1.5 is expected to be released in a few days at ArmorGames and Jared was kind enough to answer a few questions for FreeGamesNews readers (thanks Jared!)

FreeGamesNews: Hi Jared. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

Jared: Hey there! Certainly! My name is Jared Riley, I’m the founder of a little company called Hero Interactive, based in the US. I left my old job customizing accounting software in August ‘06 to start my own thing, and it’s been craziness since. I didn’t start developing non-client work for the web till about March, since then we’ve put out a lot of fun games I think, including Bubble Tanks, LightSprites, StarShine, and StormWinds.

FreeGamesNews: When did you start developing Flash games?

Jared: I actually started with Shockwave and Director while in school. I really wanted to develop some talent to get into the game design specialization the university was offering, so I bought a lot of books, got the software, and started jumping in. My first online game was Shark Bait in ShockWave back in 2003 I think, not too long ago. My first game in Flash was Alien Abduction as part of a class project.

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Trapped Chapter 2 – The Dark is expected to be released December 30. The Dark is the second installment in the Trapped trilogy created by Rodrigo Roesler.

The author was kind enough to answer a few questions for FreeGamesNews readers (thanks Rodrigo!)

FreeGamesNews: Hi Rodrigo. Would you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us more about your background?

Rodrigo: Well, I’m a front-end web developer since 2002, when I first started to work with HTML. From the beginning I started to focus on programming, that was my whole background and soon enough I specialized in javaScript and actionScript. I have that strange thing that makes me enjoy making things more than using them, such as games. I also have some cats and usually lie to people that I can play the piano.

FreeGamesNews: When did you start developing Flash games?

Rodrigo: Back in 2002, when I started to work with Flash and learn ActionScript, the first thing I thought of was an adventure game, but it didn’t work out because of my lack of experience. In these five years I made perhaps a dozen different games, most of them unfinished, just for the fun of it. I always enjoyed creating or adapting puzzle/board games. That’s probably because, apart from adventures and a few puzzles, my favorite games always involve boards, dice, cards, friends and beer, and a far distance from any computer available.

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Richard Pendry, the co-creator of Mousebreaker, was kind enough to grant FreeGamesNews an interview, which was conducted over email (thanks Rich!).

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself and give us a quick history on Mousebreaker?

Rich: Hi, my name’s Richard and I’m one of the guys behind Mousebreaker. We’ve been working together for around six years now – we began as a small game development business in 2001, developing mainly sports-oriented “sticky” games for a broad range of clients who wanted to increase or entertain their visitors. The Mousebreaker.com website, which we initially built to showcase these games, has grown over the years to become a good-sized game portal with a regular audience.

FreeGamesNews: How many people are working at Mousebreaker and how did the team come together?

Rich: We’re a very small team – only two of us work full-time, which means we’re always very busy. But we also work with various freelancers and independent developers we know.

FreeGamesNews: How did you decide to open new games portals, such as blastbilliards.com or playapal.com?

Rich: Both of those sites – as well as flashcricket.com and playforyourclub.com – quickly developed a distinct audience so it made sense to give them dedicated sites. But we try to encourage a lot of movement between the sites, and try to make sure they all have the Mousebreaker style.

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Months ago, Rob Small, co-founder of Miniclip kindly declined our invitation for an interview. We felt disappointed about it as we wanted to know more about Miniclip and share it with our readers.

Anyway, Rob gave recently an interview to RealBusiness, a website for entrepreneurs and fast-growing businesses, and in an unexpected way, he gave a few very interesting figures.

– “The site boasts 35 million users a month, 100 million visits a month and Small forecasts 55 millions users by the end of the year.

– The site pumps out 100 terabytes a day, half the bandwidth of YouTube. Miniclip now serves the website from two dedicated data centers, in Miami and Madrid, containing hundreds of servers.

– Miniclip made up £12m ($23.5m) turnover in 2006, with a profit margin of 32%.”

Wow, these numbers are very impressive: after conversion, that’s a 30-megabytes a day per visitor!

Read more…

(This interview was originally published at PlanetFreeplay and is reprinted with the permission of the author. Please visit PlanetFreeplay for more interviews!)

PlanetFreeplay: Well, hello Mr Fancy Pants!

Any Super Mario fan that takes notice of the independent gaming community is probably fully aware that many free remakes and clones of this much loved series exist. With the occasional exception, most are pale imitations of the original games. Brad Borne is responsible for developing The Fancy Pants Adventures and fortunately it fits into the ‘occasional exception’ category, except it isn’t exactly a remake and it isn’t exactly a clone. It features an original character doing Mario-esque things in a sketchy world. I had the chance to ask Brad Borne some questions. Sit down, shut up and read.

PlanetFreeplay: Introduce yourself to the readers.

Brad Borne: Hey there. I’m Brad Borne – the guy who made The Fancy Pants Adventures. I’m from Metairie, Louisiana and I’m a college student for the time being.

P.F.: When did you become interested in game development? Why did you choose flash? Is it something you take seriously and use all of your spare time on or more of a casual thing?

Brade Borne: Well, I’ve always enjoyed playing video games and I’m always trying to create something new so I guess I just sort of gravitated towards Flash as a medium. The first time I was ever able to use Flash to publish something was actually for stop motion animation. Once I actually had an excuse to use the program, though, I became interested in action script and really just kept playing around with it until I knew enough to make something that I thought was worth playing. Before Flash, though, I had played around with Ti-86 BASIC but that was about it. Nothing really complex but it gave me a taste of making something that other people were actually interested in playing around with.

After releasing Fancy Pants Adventures, I started freelancing – so those games I have to take seriously but the games that I make on my own – I don’t think I could ever consider it work. It’s just what I love to do. I don’t get as consumed by the process as much as I used to when I was still learning but I guess it takes up quite a bit more time than most peoples’ hobbies.

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Martijn Kunst, the talented Dutch developer behind the previously reviewed Base Jumping, Bee Commando and Rodent Tree Jump is working hard on completing the sequel to his most popular game, Base Jumping. Martijn was kind enough to answer a few questions and reveal exclusive information about the development of his game.

FreeGamesNews: When did you come up with the idea of developing a sequel to the highly popular Base Jumping?

Martijn: I’ve always felt Base Jumping was poorly executed. So I’ve been trying to make up excuses to redo the game. I wanted the new version to have a new concept instead of slick graphics only.
While I was cleaning some fitness equipment on my Xmas visit to my parents I finally got a good idea for the sequel.

FreeGamesNews: when did development start on the game and when do you expect to release Base Jumping 2?

Martijn: Development started at the end of January. Providing no disasters happen, the game could be ready before the end of February. But I like to work on small projects and games when something comes up, so it’s not possible to give an estimated release date.

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Matthiew Annal and his team behind Nitrome are working hard on completing their latest game, Hot Air 2, the first sequel Nitrome have done that should be released soon. In the meantime, Mat was kind enough to answer a few questions and reveal some information about the development of the game.

FreeGamesNews: When did you come up with the idea of developing a sequel to Hot Air and why?

Mat: We wanted to wait a while before doing a sequel to any of our games as we feel they will feel fresher that way. We also didn’t just want to make a sequel be just the same as the original…we wanted to add features that would make it a superior game.

We also took onboard a lot of fan comments about the original which has led to an easier difficulty from the start and the map screen being included.

FreeGamesNews: when did you start working on the game and when do you expect to release Hot Air 2?

Mat: The game was started back in November last year as a side project to other stuff we were doing. We plan to get the game out some time in February….then again if you had asked me in December I would have said it would definitely be out in January so who knows…..at least you will know we didn’t rush it!

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We had last week the opportunity to chat with Ira Willey, the creator of AddictingGames.com, that was sold in 2005 to Atomic Entertainment. He was kind enough to answer each of our questions in this email interview.

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself and give us a quick history on OneMoreLevel.com, and your previous games site, Addictinggames.com?

Ira: Sure, I’m 24 and I live in Victoria, BC Canada. I’ve made dozens of websites, some popular, more not…. it’s what I’ve always done and luckily enough it’s helped me avoid getting a real job. In the summer of 2002 I was playing Bejeweled and realized how popular these little browser games were becoming. I put together a list of the games, all on one page, with thumbnails. Apparently this had never been done before and the site took off. I went through about 5 webhosts in 6 months the traffic was doubling so fast. When I was approached to sell AddictingGames in 2005 it had about 700,000 uniques a day and was still growing. I wasn’t hosting any games on my server any more, I simply linked them in the weekly update. It instantly killed every site I linked, much like Slashdot used to do when it was still popular. AG got too big to handle and became more work than fun so I decided to let it go. It is #1 on Google for “games” and “flash games” which still blows my mind.

FreeGamesNews: You wrote that Addictinggames.com was sold in March 2005 and the deal was announced in November: what happened in the meantime?

Ira: AddictingGames has actually been sold twice since I sold it in March. First to Atomic Entertainment and then to MTV in a package deal. Lots of bigger fish snapping up the smaller fish. It’s crazy how much money is pouring into the whole “Web 2.0” era.

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I spent a lot of time playing Skyboard, the greatest 3D online game ever released by Silent Bay Studios. I had recently the opportunity to chat with Leonardo Montecamozzo, General Manager of the company, who was nice enough to answer a few questions for FreeGamesNews readers.

FreeGamesNews: Can you give us a short introduction about yourself and tell us a little about Silent Bay Studios?

Leonardo: I’m the general manager of Silent Bay Studios, I’m 39. Silent Bay Studios is an Italian independent game developer, founded in Genoa three years ago by a team of professionals with a long experience with real-time 3D games.

FreeGamesNews: How many people are working at Silent Bay Studios?

Leonardo: A dozen in-house, plus a small number of external professionals, aged from 20 to 40.

FreeGamesNews: Silent Bay Studios is specialized in 3D real time application: where does it come from?

Leonardo: The core of the team develops 3D real-time almost since childhood. We developed some action-adventure and racing PC games for Italian and European market and then we applied our knowledge to web games.

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In Part 1 of our interview with Tonypa, we discussed about how Tonypa usually works on his Flash games. Today, we talk about stealing content and copyright! Read on.

In case you missed it, here is Part 1 of Tonypa interview.

FreeGamesNews: You’ve taken your games offline last year, for stealing content reasons. With thousands of games portals on the web today, suspect methods here and there and your reaction last year, there is may be something to say?

Tonypa: I want to say first that I truly believe most people are actually honest and they respect efforts spent to create any kind of material. The stealing/cracking bunch doesn’t concern the majority. It is clear that anything published in the web is available for thieves running free Flash game portals. I think every new Flash game designer is at start just plain happy if his game is being played and does not worry about the strangers earning money from it. Many people develop Flash games for fun and not for money so they don’t find it a problem at all. But there are also people trying to make a living by creating Flash games and for them of course thousands of shovelware free flash games sites are bad news.

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I had the opportunity to chat recently with Tonypa. He took some time to answer a few questions for FreeGamesNews (thanks Tonypa).

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself?

Tonypa: My real name has non-English letters so I use Tony :)

FreeGamesNews: Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Tonypa: I have mostly worked as newspaper/magazine designer. I learned computers at school and made animated movies too.

FreeGamesNews: For how long have you been developing Flash games?

Tonypa: Since 2000.

FreeGamesNews: How many games have you already developed?

Tonypa: No idea. Already forgot some old ones, they were not very good when I look at them now, but then of course I loved them :)
Maybe about 30…

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John Cooney was nice enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to do an email interview with FreeGamesNews (Thanks John!).

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

John: Yeah, my name is John Cooney, or “jmtb02” to those online. I produce Flash games and animations for the web, as free content available to anyone. When I am not producing flash, I am a college student at UC Davis in California, where I am majoring in Technocultural Studies (a mix between digital media and the history of technology and mankind).

FreeGamesNews: When did you start developing Flash games?

John: I started when I was 15, when a friend showed me the program at school. I got into Actionscripting in Flash, and decided to continue doing it.

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce your most famous series, Ball Revamped?

John: Ball Revamped is a cross-genre puzzle/action/skill game that involves the guiding of a small ball to a portal (which in turn, goes to the next level). The challenge in doing so is that the ball is very fragile, and will practically break if it hits anything on its way to the portal… so the ball must pick up power ups to help aid it’s guidance to the end.

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I had recently the opportunity to chat with the two founders of Mausland Entertainment, Mathias Menzel-Nielsen and Felix Wiesner. They took some time to answer a few questions for FreeGamesNews (Thanks guys).

FreeGamesNews: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about Mausland Entertainment?

Wiesi: Hi I am Felix Wiesner, and I am responsible for the graphics.
Matze: And I am Mathias Menzel-Nielsen, I do all the coding and server administration and all the technical stuff. We are both 28 years old and born in beautiful Hamburg/Germany where we enjoy living since our birth.

FreeGamesNews: How many people are working at Mausland Entertainment? How did the team come together?

Wiesi: Right now it’s just me and Matze working at Mausland. We met long before Mausland was founded, he always loved to program and I did art stuff so it was just a matter of time until the idea was born to make games together.
Matze: We met years ago as NeoGeo enthusiasts, a game console of the 90s which had a unique fresh game and graphic style which is still superior and influenced us a lot. We always wanted to make such games on our own and so we try to get close to them until today and probably until doomsday :)
We are also very happy that Row is supplying great music tunes for some of the games.

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Martijn Kunst, a Dutch Flash games developer, recently took some time to do an email interview with FreeGamesNews (thanks Martijn!).

FreeGamesNews: Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about BubbleBox, your own games web portal?

Martijn: I’ve been developing games as a fulltime job for exactly one year now. The first couple of games I made were sold to game sites. After reading about those sites ripping off developers, I decided to set up my own portal site, to see if this was true. I was hoping that some day I could make a living from publishing my games on my own website. I never expected BubbleBox to become an instant success, but it was. The site got close to one million visitors in the third month it was up. This allows me to work on creating new games for the site exclusively.

FreeGamesNews: Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Martijn: I haven’t been able to make my mind up about anything in the past ten years or so. I’ve been moving around like a Gipsy working at over a hundred different companies, and doing quite a few studies. But after the economy went downhill, this became an increasingly difficult lifestyle to keep up.

So I decided it would be best to work really hard and try to become good at something. It also had to be something that wouldn’t keep me bounded to a fixed location. I did have a degree in real estate, but I’m not a great salesperson, and that job would not allow me to move around freely. The only thing I could come up with was web design. But soon, I found out that getting new clients is hard work, so thankfully after a while I decided to do games instead. I have always had many plans for new games (most of which are not computer based) and I guess I’ve found something I have a talent for.

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