No post yesterday, not because I forgot it, but because I had a few other things to do.

So today is day five, I'm finally going to code the menu screens (or as far as I get today), it's going to be a bit tricky, because I don't want to just move in/swap the screens.

My Idea is to have some sort of main-board like grid of connected elements which all can send "redraw" commands to it's neighbour, so when you "start" one node it'll look like flowing energy (I doubt I can explain it well).

Now, instead of just going to the next screen, I want to give a "clean up" command and all unneeded elements hide one by one (following the connections) and then redrawing the new grid from the existing nodes.

Wow - that sounds really - unintelligible.

And here's a picture of our hero (more or less :) ):

Now lets do some coding ...

nGFX

So I got a bit carried away on Friday. I finished the construction of our new little hero C... (damn I can't tell you his name right now), boned hime up and did a few test renderings ...

And then I got myself an ice cold beer and drank myself away ... nah, I had just one.

I tried to code for a couple of minutes but then thought that it's Friday and I should get my ass out of the door and have some facetime with a few friends.

So on Monday I'm going to pose our new little friend so he can make his apperearance on the titlescreen I'm going to start coding then.

Yeahaaaa!

nGFX

ps: Right now I can't provide an image (same reason I can't give a name - darn - I really would like to)

So today was arms and hand day and later tonight, finally, the head ...

You guessed right, still doing 3d and enjoying it actually. There are times I can't stand it (you know I earned my first squids doing 3d - in the early days of PCs).

Anyway, not much to say (and no image, too) about today's work, but I'm going to code the menu now for a while just to see something different.

nGFX

OK, I admit I didn't get half as far as I wanted yesterday, there have been far to many distractions on the way, not to mention a big mistake on the design of the character.

Half way through the left leg and the half upper body a test rendering showed: 100% bullshit. So back to pen and paper to get a new idea. If I had a working scanner from where I write this I'd post the scetch, but ... oh well.

Anyway, I had some other projects that needed my attention (in fact they screemed at me), so the first part of the days was wasted fixing some long dead flash thingies (and AS1, too) and after that was out of my system I went back to 3d.

Five hours later (just a few minutes ago) I decided to call it a day and have a finall look at what I have accomplished so far:


One day behind my own schedule, though I hope I get it done tomorrow (arms and head and a few modifications on the breast plate, which looks a bit too stiff imho).

I'm starting a highres rendering now to spot any dents I may need to remove and I'm done for today.

nGFX

Inspired by Squize's last posts, I decided to go the same route for this game, too.

Of course I can't tell the name, but I hope to be able to post a screenie now and then. Though, I may say that it will be an "official" port of a (at least it seems so) widely popular game and it will feature an built in level editor to design and share you custom built levels. I still don't have all details about the backend, so when I promise that you can rate other peoples levels and bulit your own favourite levels game, chances are that it might not make it into the final built, but then you still have a game with an editor ...

So this is my "official" day one, I've been working on this game for a few days now (mainly getting a design for the menus and screens) to get "into it".

Today it's 3d day, and I'm building the game's hero. So far I'm done with a leg, the body comes next. I hope I'll be done with him by the end of the day, so I can start building the attractor screens and finally start coding.

some screenies later today, promised.

nGFX

Just a short and sweet post, Flex 3 is finally out. Find out more here
( I've been using the beta for a week or so on and off, but I've not had chance to play with the profiler, but I'm hoping we're going to see a huge list of optimisations because of it ).

Also I'm not sure this is news ( Well it is, just not sure how new it is ), but Air is out too. Continue the clicking frenzy and go here to find out more.

Squize.

We're not really a linky kind of blog, but these two bad boys are just too good not to share.

First up is whitevoid's site. If you've played Dirt then you'll love this, actually even if you haven't it should still blow you away. I'm not a huge fan of experimental navigation, but this looks great and everything works like you'd expect it to.

Next up, Get The Glass. A wow game if ever there was one, produced by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and North Kingdom.

Two example of really aspirational work.

Squize.

Some of the gimme5 community have gone a bit above and beyond and posted level walkthroughs for the Phantom Mansion games onto youTube, which really rock.

Here's a sample one, I'm pretty sure if you're stuck on a level you'll find it on there.

( Oh, if you want to actually play the games, here you go ).

Squize.

Way back on the 5th of Feb I wrote these wise words,

"We came up with the issue of the lower powered shots just stunning the baddies, and then in theory the player could just sit there shooting the crap out of one baddie to earn a hi-score. Ok, you'd have to be pretty anal to do it, but it does happen"

In less than a day people have worked this out. The hi-score at the time of writing is 1,111,580, that's about 500,000 higher than the number of points "readily" available in the game.

There's a lesson there somewhere.

Squize.

Just the finishing touches today, although we lost about 3 hours thanks to Flash's security policies ( The tilesheet is externally loaded, and when running on the test server here and the swf on the live one, it failed to load them. 3 hours wasted on that one ).

I guess I'll liven this post up with a screen grab later, but for the time being go and get Loved Up.

Squize.