flash. the game that started it all. got to #1 on digg when that was a cool thing. probably launched my game dev career. still pretty fun! never thought anyone would make it past level 15, so i never bothered to write a victory screen. ooooooops
I built the game in a couple of weeks in December on a tiny little 8.9" netbook using the Flex compiler. It had no art and only a few sound effects purchased off of SoundRangers.
I shopped it around and fielded 3-4 sponsorship offers.
I ended up going with Kongregate as the sponsor and released the game in January (release post here). You can download that version and run it with the desktop Flash Player, but sadly Flash is kaput on the web. I wrote about the whole saga of finding a sponsor in a mega-post that I resurrected here.
Did you know things could go viral in 2008? #1 on Digg!
Over the next year or so, I sold somewhere around 20 individual site licenses when that was thing. The game made pretty good money! I also posted quite a few recaps that I decided to resurrect from my old WordPress blog:
Released Filler 2 (TODO: rebuild that). Released Filler for iPhone. Released Filler for XBox Indie Games.
Looks like Filler 2 is live on Shockwave!
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) February 3, 2009
Filler is now available on iTunes! http://www.simianlogic3d.com/filler
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) May 15, 2009
still going strong five years later, Filler is at over 30 million gameplays and cranking out ~1500/day
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) May 30, 2013
Filler is still cranking along on the web!
filler must've gotten linked by some end-of-year-time-waster or something, getting like 2-3 comments a day on my crappy old wordpress site
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) December 19, 2016
...and still limping along on mobile.
Apple just sent me $8. I actually feel bad that people still buy 480x320 filler... Need to update it at some point.
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) March 8, 2016
Filler removed from iOS App Store in the 64-bit purge. It never did well enough to justify rebulding it, but I was thinking about it.
I really like Swift. Getting a little itch to make a small iOS game just to stay fresh on the language. Maybe I'll resurrect Filler out of 32-bit jail next time I feel like doing a game jam.
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) April 23, 2018
Tinkered with rebuilding the game in Unity as a PC game.
Building Intro Maker in Unity. Tinkering with Shapes. Kongregate death spiral news. I should rebuild Filler for PC before it disappears from the web. pic.twitter.com/zegAIa4NuM
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) July 3, 2020
Filler x Hamburger pic.twitter.com/UoCfFSigm8
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) July 4, 2020
End of life for Flash... makes me sad.
New life as an HTML5 game!
Relearning linear algebra so I can find the bug in the 14 year old AS3 physics engine I ported to html5 so I can put filler back up on my website.
— SimianLogic (@SimianLogic) May 8, 2021