Two posts in one day, check me out.

Anyway, this is a good one rather than a "Adobe, what the hell have you done" style post.

The Game of Life is finally live! Not on the actual client's site, but it's out there for people to play. Thanks HSBC for letting us run with this project, and cheers to Dom and team Tak for not stressing out during the development :)

Also a huge thanks to both olli and marmotte for their hard work on this. One of the most satisfying projects I've ever worked on, and to me it sums up everything about GYW. This is us.

Hurray!

Squize.

Well with "The Game of Life" due to go live any day soon, I figured it's about time we wrapped up the blog posts for it.

Here's the final game, "Gift Shop"

... Just see what youve done

The last game of the GOL collection and my 3rd (while Squize is still missing one :) ).

Anyway, this time your task is the joy of gardenening. With movement based on Asteroids you just have to chop down as much grass as possible in the (short) given time. Earn some extra by making sure those nasty little buggers stay off the lawn.

As Squize already mentioned this game has the weakest name ("The Day of the Triffids") but may be the one with the most action.



Nothing much more to say, we just have to wait for them to go online now ...

nGFX

ps: and now ... if can tell me the artists of the three songs I've quoted ... you can win ... well I'll find something.

Of course you can, more cheeky grabs from GOL that is you little trickster.

... Let my spirit carry me.

So this is the third game (yes, I know, there are currently only two (including this one), but it seems that Squize didn't post yesterday ... shish!)

You surely remember the time when you just walked up the diving platform, stood on the highest one and did a somersault, backwards ...
... and you surely noticed that each year you thought about "what can go wrong" a bit more.

Well, after a certain point you forget about the risks and you go hang gliding, High Jinx in our case or short HJ.





Distance is the key to get your blood flowing again, and of course you have to do some resource management to get as far as possible.

After all I enoyed doing HJ, hope you enjoy plaing it.

2 games left ...

nGFX

 ... and it want it painted black.

Nah. painting is pure joy. Keeping an eye on your grandchild, too. Don't try it at the same time, though.

Finally after all those weeks here are some screenies from "Holding the Baby" or short ... HTB, one of the five games from the "Game of Life" collection we did (and one of the games I had the joy of doing).



Did I mention that you have to get it done in time?

Well you'll see yourself ... 4 more to go.

nGFX

Not posted many updates about "The Game of life" here for a while, so we're well overdue for a catch up.

My "Gift shop" game is done and dusted. It's only a straight forward Mastermind style game, but it plays pretty well and looks great too. I like it as part of the package because it's so different to everything else in there, a slow paced logic game ( Albeit still against the clock ). Fits in there well, and I think it achieves the projects umbrella aim of being able to target as many different players as possible ( Not everyone loves games which use the arrow keys ).

Olli's just finished his final game, currently called "The Day of the Triffids" ( Or Dot ), it's the exact opposite of Gift Shop. Really nice fast paced action using an asteroids style control system to control a lawn mower as you cut the grass and remove unwanted visitors.
I think it's everyone's new favorite game within the set, and a great one to finish on.

So after all this time, and blood and sweat and swearing, we're nearly there. There are some front-end alterations that I've got to make this evening, but purely visual stuff to update the existing images in line with the final ones, and we're ( Touch wood, and I don't mean that in a nob joke way ) gold.

Be so cool to see this bad boy live. Soon my beauties, soon.

Squize.

"Free bar", "Lesbian twins" and "Signed off".

All perfect phrases, but only one of them is making me smile right now.

Yesterday Souper Bowl was signed off. Sweet.

Really pleased with it actually, it's only a small little game ( But then they all are in this project ), but it plays pretty well and looks great thanks to marmotte jumping in at the 11th hour to reskin it.

At present we're looking ok-ish to hit the deadline. I'm in that fluctuating mood, where every hour it swaps between "Yes, we're actually going to make it", and "Cocking hell, we've got no chance, my to do list looks like War and peace".
The controller is looking good to go, I've got one major thing left to do for the beta delivery tomorrow, then I've got the w/end and Monday to add things like send to a friend and set up the translation handling code correctly.

Also tonight I'm going to dive in and help with the skinning up of "Holding the baby", Olli's painting game, whilst he attempts to get "High Jinx" into a fit state to wow the crowds.

Lot's and lots to do, but feeling almost do-able.

Squize.

It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand.

-- (Terry Pratchett, The Truth [deutsch] [English, US])

Same with some games.
I'm usually pretty solid when it comes to the code layout for a game, depending on the requirements I normally use the "best" way. Normaly. This time the thing got a bit ugly, the basic idea was quite simple, the requirements quite low all in all a short game.

The engine was done in two days, about 400 lines of code and because it all was so easy, I just dropped into an extended MovieClip class. No need for a big layout with a set of classes that divide UI, logic and so on. Normaly.

So now there is a quite cluttered class, lots of ugly code and no real time to make it readable again. Shish!

Anyway, mending the last pieces of it together now (and trying to clean up the 950 lines of code).

nGFX

A brief update from me is long overdue.

So where are we with a week to the deadline ? Feeling like we need two weeks before the deadline.

Souper Bowl is coming along well. It's basically Tapper, but in a soup kitchen. I managed to knock the majority of the game engine out in a day which I was really pleased about, and since then it's been a case of skinning it up, fixing bugs and tweaking the gameplay.
There's one minor gameplay addition to add, and aside from the sounds / remaining visuals / love it's done. Hopefully tonight will see the end of it aside from an hour here and there, and it'll be great to get the first one down and out of the way.

Olli's game is coming along well. The core engine has been complete for a while now ( Even to the stage where he can post code :) ), but we've had issues with the gameplay. It's a pretty original concept, and for a while we thought it was nailed but just lacking visually and sonically and once those were in place it'd all come good. After a lot of chats with the client and standing back from it a bit, we've realised it wasn't there at all.
So Olli's throw a load of new ideas at it which are working really well. It's much closer to the vision I had in my head of how it would play now ( If only that vision had been clearer at the start ).

The w/end is going to be spent sourcing soundfx ( Which I do actually enjoy ) and working on the controller movie which holds everything together. At present it loads and triggers the games, handles the game over etc. but it needs a lot of work throwing at it. Just today we came up with the idea of tooltips within the games just to help people along, and the controller will have to handle these too ( As all the text is translatable, it's better to just have one movie deal with it all and saves each game having to load in their own specific xml file with the text in ).

Lot's and lot's to do. Hopefully Monday's post will be a nice gloaty one where everything is done. Not going to happen, but let me hold on to the dream for a little while.

Squize.

The controller is well under development now, and over the weekend I hit the first real snag(s).

In the good old days when as1 was king, you'd create an movieclip and load your external swf into that, and then just call a function directly. Nice and easy.
In the slightly meaner days of as2 it's a bit trickier. Let's load the swf in, now where the hell is the main class that I need to get to ? Arse.

Now I'm sure there is an easy way to do it, a way I've totally missed, but this is the solution I've come up ( And it's as long winded as you like ).

I've made a CrossSWFInterface class, which the controller brings in and creates a new instance of. Now by being cunning I know that packages/ classes are placed in the _global name space when they're created. So, each loaded class just passes it's entry point singleton to the CrossSWFInterface class via _global, eg
        _global.Interface.CrossSWFInterface.setLoadedAPIClass(gameControllerObj);
And because the controller swf is the first one loaded, I know these methods are going to exist in _global by the time the loaded swf sends it's goodness to them.

Then by using static properites in the CSWFI class, the controller class can get all the info it needs from the loaded swf, and visa versa.

Now I'm sure there's got to be a easier, cleaner way, but it escapes me and we're badly up against the clock on this project, so it works and I'll happily admit I'm a dumb arse when someone explains how to do it correctly, but until then I'm happy with this approach.

I did mention snags at the start didn't I ? In my vain attempt to be a grown up Flash coder I use mtasc ( Which is so sexy ). The one issue with it I found this weekend was that you can only ever have one entry point to a swf ( ie, mtasc expects a class called "main" to be there, it's what it calls to run the code in the swf ). You can't change it to anything else, that's set in stone.
This is all cool normally, but I want to create seperate packages within my project file for the games themselves, but I can't have a different main class for each of them ( eg, main_game1 won't work. mtasc just wants main and nothing else will do ).

Cosmic.

But this bad boy came to my rescue, hamtasc. Basically it's a "hacked" version of mtasc which allows you to define the entry point. Never has something so out and out geeky made me so happy.

I'm hoping tomorrow to have the controller in a useable state so I can start focusing on the game I've got to do ( "Souper Bowl". Tell me that's not genius ), so it'll load in and hand over control to the game etc.
I'm getting so close to doing something fun...

Squize.

The project has finally been green lighted, we're off and running.

Completed the road map tonight, so all the dates for deliveries are set, which is nice 'cause we know how much time before we have to panic.

The project has grown ( They never seem to shrink do they ? ) but because of the delay in getting the concept signed off it's going to be split into 3 distinct phases for release ( It was two previously ).
It's good in many ways, it means the quality won't suffer because of trying to cram too much stuff in before the deadline ( Which is set in stone, it's got to coincide with something, and there's no moving it ), and I've done my share of episodic games, it's always proved to be a nice way to work when you're dealing with a lot of different games.

As to the code, the "controller" movie's development has already begun. Doesn't do a great deal atm, loads in a bit of xml, displays some buttons and not much else. The start of a project is always slow where you're arranging classes and spending as much time thinking as coding to ensure you don't code yourself into a corner.
One aspect of this project is that it's got to be translatable, so I've done a button class which resizes to match the text inside. No biggy, but just one of many things which need to be thought about when the text can change.

I really need to have an interesting blog entry soon, it's all very worky right now :)

Squize.

So all the design docs have been done, some more vague than others, but they're done and sent for sign off...

The client has come back with quite a hefty amount of feedback already which is going to alter how we go about developing the project, and has expended the scope of it quite a bit, which we're going to have to factor in ( Both budget and time scale wise ).

To touch on the project itself, it's a collection of mini-games which follow you as you go through life, from toddler to retirement age.

And that's about it for now. Hoping to get final sign off on the concepts soon so we can start the actual coding.

( Yeah its a boring blog entry, but projects aren't all flv clips and moving sprites, but hey whilst you're along for the ride you're going to have to take the rough with the smooth along with us ).

Squize.

Hopefully going to go back to what the stimunation blog used to be, and focus on the actual development of a game from start to end.

It's always tricky 'cause everything has a NDA these days, so it's often a period of 4 weeks or so when you can write very little about what you're actually working on, and then ta dah, here's the game everyone, let us know what you think ( And retroactively answering questions about its development ).

With this project there is still going to have to be a slight viel of secrecy, but I'm hoping we can still give you some ins and outs of it's development along the way.

So I guess we can call this day 1. And day 1 is... writing up the design docs day. Not the most fun thing in the world, and to be honest I'm a firm believer in games evolving rather than being planned out to the nth degree, but this is a game made up of lots ( Around 12 ) of sub-games and a five week turnaround so we really need that structure in place.

This project is a first for me too, in that I'm more project manager than coder ( Due to prior commitments rather than a huge desire to wear that hat ), so more of my time is going to be spent making sure our client is happy, ensuring that olli and Elliot ( Our artist on this project ) know what's going down and when and other such organisational feats.

I think that's about it for this post. I've still got 11 docs to write today which should keep me off the streets, and hopefully they'll be signed off without too much alteration so olli can start getting down and dirty with the code as soon as possible.

More soon...

Squize.