Before the actual jig competion winners are announced, Jay posted some details about the 4th Casual Gameplay Design Competition.

More here.

nGFX

How pure is pure oop, how usefull are design patterns and how to abuse asBroadcast?

Well, for the current game I'm bound to f8/AS2 because the client's audience is still mostly on f8 and the attempts to make them update the player greatly failed and resulted in a lot of "what is an update of the flash player", "what is a flash player" and "I don't know how" emails ...

The game currently uses my usual structure, that is a single class for the game and some classes for UI, sprites, tiles ... I usually made the game class "LMGame" (LM for the game's name) a singleton, but I wondered if that would be a good practice after all.
(You might guess it, this is a more or less philosophic question.)

I wanted to reduce refrences and singletons to a minimum. (Squize wrote about the problems earlier)

So far I came up with few different methods for accessing the LMGame class from various other classes during the game ...
If needed I pas a reference to the LMGame / needed class but you must admit that this feels rather clumsy.
For the Sprites however I didn't want pass a reference to the LMGame class just to say "Hello" or "I'm dead" ... so I tried a rather unusual way for sprite -> game communication:

While the game has a list of sprites and could call functions directly, I decided to rely heavily on asBroadcast.
I installed a stack (FIFO), to pass values if needed and tried if things were working like I expected ... and they did ... :)

A sprite is moved with this._asBroadcast.broadcastMessage("onTickEvent"); (from the LMGame class' onEnterFrame) and if a sprite dies it places it's id into the stack and calls this._asBroadcast.broadcastMessage("onSpriteDie"); (which is triggered by the LMGame class).

This might seem overly complicated but it really "looks" wonderfull in code and it saves a great deal of thinking, too.

As this is just a "try", I'm not sure if it's going to become very usefull, but I just like trying new "ideas" ...

nGFX

Kongregate seems to have a good buzz about it right now, so I figured it'd be interesting to see if it could be used to help pimp GYW.

I've just uploaded a slightly tweaked version of my old game ( Which was originally done to pimp stimunation ), Crazy Balls.

After finding out ( Once it was up there, as always ) that the swf is actually bigger than what they allow, and a quick bit of editing, it's all looking good. Don't think my hi-score stuff is working correctly with their back-end, but I can live with that for the time being, this is just a test the water release.

One thing that's freaked me out is that at the time of writing, about 20 mins after it going live on there, it's had 5 ratings. Call me a cynic, but should you be rating a game you've only played for at most 3 mins ? ( I know this 'cause of the hi-scores so far, no one has even cycled through the levels ). You can if you hate a game on sight ( Or even love it, which is rarer ), but to think a game's average / ok in just a couple of minutes seems a bit, hmmm, rushed ( Wanted to say shit, but that's possibly too harsh ).

Perhaps it's 'cause I'm looking at this as a developer, knowing what goes into making a game ( Whether it's good, bad or indifferent ) rather than as a games player ( Playing on a site with an insane number of free games to play ). It's just that I remember doing a couple of reviews for gotoAndPlay.it and spending ages on the games. I wanted to know them inside and out as much as I could before passing comment on them.

Maybe it is a developer thing, maybe it's cause you get points for everything you do at kongregate ( "Farted ? Here's a point" ), or maybe it's not even worth worring about.

Squize.

Just discovered that CDX has picked up an award, a cheeky bronze at the Cannes Lions live 2007.

All credit is due to the boys and girls at preloaded for it. I did a bit of work on it ( It was my last project at preloaded ), but really not enough to be able to bask in any of the glory. Although the moped game in episode 2 did rock ;)

Squize.

"Everybody is welcome to download and start playing with it. We believe you will find it very easy to use and to integrate into your Flash 8, Flash CS3 and Flex projects. [...]"

This is really great stuff, though, I doubt it'll be useable for heavy usage in games, but it sure is promising.

nGFX

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 finished the oh-so-boring part of the our new game: the editor, though, whilst enjoying the pure "place the tile" part, I really hate the "enter relevant data and save it" part.

Did I mention that I hate flash for it's form handling capabilities?
You either be stuck with using the normal textfield/button combo (with as much comfort as a nailbed) or use the wonderfull working, easy to handle, well thought components (in case you didn't notice the sarcasm in the last part, well there's a LOT).

While waiting for the upgrade to cs3 (shipped box, which is *cheaper* than the d/load version) I'm stuck with f8 and as2. Whoever had the idea of the event handling system must be a complete genius, I mean he just must be, because I don't understand it. I mean I can use it and I get all events wired, but I don't understand the "why on earth does it have to be so ...".

Anyway, I think I just have to live with it and use my own ".net" style wrapper code.

Having the editor done (and beeing able to load/save levels) I now start to create the game engine (which should also run in the editor, because you should be able to test your levels).
As the game will feature a few indepent moving "characters", I'll have to rewrite some parts of the time based tilemovement engine allowing to check for junctions, stops and of course other things moving around.

I'm not quite sure about this, but I guess I'm going to use the ASBroadcast approach I used for virus.

Back to the hell that is coding ...

nGFX.

ps: Just got my xbox 360 copy of Overlord (us, de) so I guess I'll give a short comment on that later this week.

... 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.

Well that title should bring in more traffic.

Anyway, check out this Spectrum emulator, for a retro boy like me, it really is sex. Although a bit dryer and slightly less awkward.

Squize.