a href="http://www.mygamingwebsite.com/>Mygamingwebsite, with one title currently online: Dropsum, a clever puzzler that combines elements of Tetris and sudoku. Numbers drop from the top of the screen, and will disappear if you line them up to add up to a certain figure. There are of course various multipliers and special tiles to add more spice to the proceedings. It's picking up great reviews on the key flash sites mainly because you can play to quite a decent level with almost random tactics, but you have to be really good to score really highly."
Nick's making about ten cents a day out of this so it's not about the money - I think it's about taking a break from overseeing multi-million dollar projects. I'm also interested in the fact that Ubisoft is happy for its staff to work on their own programming side-projects; I guess it makes for a more creative environment, plus, the experience can only give staff a more rounded appreciation of development.
Nick's site gives some insight into the Flash development process, with a little 'making of Dropsum' feature, "I talk about the things I tried or failed at with the game prototypes. In fact the original game wasn't going to have the Tetris-like elements in it: you'd just try and make groups and that was it. But I realised two things - that it lacked depth and that a non-skilled player could do just as well as a skilled player by randomly clicking."
Dropsum fits into an emerging sub-genre of online puzzlers dealing with sums. Games writer Margaret Robinson covered the phenomenon on her blog at the end of last year, namechecking the likes of Plupon, Add 'Em Up and Chain Factor (part of an ARG designed to publicise the maths-based cop show Numb3rs). I also like I/O and Armor Picross 2.
And of course, with Professor Kageyama's Maths Training performing well in the UK charts, maths games are going mainstream.
So what's your favourite nerdy game?
