Honeyslug

Once upon a time the mobile phone games market resembled the wild west. Brave pioneering types strode forth to create the best games they could across the wilderness of screen sizes, control interfaces, heap sizes and the countless ropey implementations of J2ME across 100’s of devices. Then Apple’s iPhone was discovered and for those who remained, the gold rush started.

Our first panning of that particular stream (and I promise this is the last wild west/gold rush anaology) was with Balloon Headed Boy, which is now available for FREE from our friends at Gimme5games.com. The game has a long and rich history, and among that history was the incredible popularity the game enjoyed in China.

Back in 2005 when the idea of Apple producing anything other than an expensive CAD machine wrapped in white plastic would’ve been silly, us lot were still part of Morpheme, a rather innovative little mobile games company, and we had just finished Balloon Headed Boy on most of the major mobile devices, at the time it was something of a bun-fight to get stuff placed on major operators without a) Branding and b) Support of a large publisher, so we were keen to place BHB in as many places as possible. We were fortunate to be in touch with the UK representatives of a company called MIG, which located games on behalf of China Mobile and they were blown away by BHB on mobile and immediately got behind it to promote it as much as they could.

We received many links to Chinese sites and magazine features with BHB featured in. Then they told us they were going to promote the game at a university campus in Beijing. We were chuffed to bits! They said that they would promote the game with T-shirts, playing cards (up there) and the usual stuff, but nothing could prepare us for the photographs of what they’d produced to display the game in. Check it out…

Slowly but surely, we’re stockpiling a load of stuff such as audio interviews and videos which we’d like to share with you. We’re going to start releasing these bits of mixed media over time, so you can take a more in-depth dip into the world of Honeyslug. Some of them are interviews with us, whilst others will feature other people talking either about us or our games. It will vary wildly from the chaotic amateur hour efforts usually featuring me, to sharp, well presented talking head pieces featuring the other two.

Our first “node” is pretty exciting. Glean of Glob, for those who haven’t read Ricky’s excellent post here, was part of a collection of collaborative art projects on display at the Jerwood Space in South London. Being within easy reach of all major media (3 times in one post – Jeez!) sources, it would doubtlessly be ripe for review, and so it was on 2nd August 2008, Tom Sutcliffe, that bloke out of, off of the Guardian and a couple of book writers* did some talking about it for top notch Arts programme “Saturday Review” on BBC Radio 4.

*David Aaronovich, Malorie Blackman and Michael Arditti

A lovely prezzie in the post to us today!



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We’ve received a small number of requests for help with saving My Pet Dinosaur games on machines running Vista and Windows 7. The problem centres around the differences between Standard and Administrator User settings under these operating systems. In the case of both Vista and Win7, Standard Users are unable to change the setup of anything installed under administrator privileges, this can include the ability to save games.

Below are the advised solutions to this problem.

1 – If you do not want to give machine administator access to the other user:

There are two ways to provide game access to a standard user without resorting to giving full admin rights.

First and easiest, is, whilst logged in as the standard user, to find the application in the location you installed it to (default is C:\Program Files\Honeyslug\MyPetDinosaur\) and right-click on MyPetDinosaur.exe, select “Run As Administrator”. This will give the user full administrator rights to My Pet Dinosaur, but will not allow them to change anything else. Please note that the standard user may require admin to enter their machine login password before they can run the game.

Second and somewhat more labour intensive is adjusting the security settings as an administrator. As above, find the location of the MyPetDinosaur.exe and right-click on it, then follow the points below.

- Select ‘Properties’
- When the new pop-up window comes up, select the ‘Security’ tab.
- Select ‘Advanced’
- In this pop-up window, ‘Permissions’ should be open, left-click on the user whose permissions you want to change.
- Left-click ‘Edit’
- Click the Allow check boxes between ‘Traverse Folder/Execute File’ and ‘Read Permissions’ if you want to limit them to loading and saving only. Otherwise, simply click ‘Full Control’ which is simpler, but gives the same level of access as “Run as Administrator”.
- Click ‘OK’ on the pop-up windows to confirm your changes.

2 – If you simply wish to give the user Administrator access so they can play the game and save.

- In the Start Menu select ‘Control Panel’
- Select ‘Manage Another Account’
- Left click on the user account you want to change.
- From the list, select ‘Change your account type’
- Check ‘Administrator’
- Left click ‘Change Account Type’ when you are done.

Please be aware that by giving Administator access to the machine, you are allowing that user full editing of the machine.

Please feel free to leave any questions below this post.

Thanks