Come here a sec and take my hand. We're going to go on a little trip back in time.

Way back when I first started making Flash games I did 3 games as part of the "Majestic trilogy". Making this package was MJ-12, X and Ultra Armageddon. MJ-12 was the only one that met any real success, and it ended up on miniclip as my first ever commercial sale ( You won't find it on there though as it was rebranded and had our logos removed. Ah the good old days when things like that were thought acceptable by portals ).

Later on I tarted up the games a little and added a hi-score API for pnFlashGames ( Which now seems to be dead, which is a pity ) who then sold them for a nominal amount to webmasters so they could have "better than free" game content on their site.
I had an idea for a reskin for MJ-12, with the idea of selling it as a limited edition on pnF. A one week only remix thing. Unfortunatly wires got crossed, and it wasn't made a limited edition ( Which I wasn't happy about as it just came across as a lazy cashing in on an existing game, rather than a bit of fun as was intended ) but rather was just added to the store there until it all died.

I was looking through my storage folder on the hdd the other day, and re-discovered it. After showing it to both olli and Jeff @ 8bitRocket to make sure it still stood up ok as a game I cracked and removed the old branding, fixed and tweaked some minor things, and now it's sitting on GameJacket.

I'm almost bracing myself for the "It's not very original" comments on all the sites it ends up sitting on, I say almost, 'cause to be honest I couldn't really give a shit. It is what it is.

Enjoy.

Squize.

I've been meaning to post this for about a week, and seeing how today ( And yesterday ) have been spent being really frustratingly trying to get the pinball game to work with the new version of Box2D, I thought I needed a break and should post this up.

Orbs is now a game. Hurray! You can start it, you can clear levels, you can die and it'll take you to the Game Over screen, and then you can run it again. That makes it a game, rather than just a demo, and is a really nice and important milestone to get out of the way.

Aside from getting the basic framework in place, I've added a ton of stats to it, put the medal award code in ( So it slides in nicely down the bottom right to let you know when you've won one ) and added a new baddie.

I've been waiting for the new version of Box2D to be ported to as3, and today it's done and out there.

http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

That means I can finally finish a game we've been working on, which required some of the new features of version 2. I don't think I'm giving too much away if I say it features a pin and a ball am I ?

Squize.

some might remeber me posting about a sparetime project of mine: Law of the West. It's been quite about it for a good deal of time now, but after a *shit* week I finally got into gear to finish the last damn 5% of it.

The last two night were spent adding the last pice of love to the game, a highscore/gameover screen (the normal gameover screen was in for ages), levels (99, featuring all uglyness I could come up with) and some additions here and there like ingame key-hints when the level starts (this is for all those people who don't read the instructions) and mouse control (it  was designed as keyboard only game).


Tonight at around 0200h it finally hit gold status, although it took me another three hours to fix (or in terms of flash: work around) some *weird bug*.
Here's a short description, maybe it helps you to avoid it.
LotW consists of two files (game and sound) and I wanted to be able to upload the game and get the sound file from another server, possibly streamed instead of a file reference.

To write the streaming "site" was no problem in .net, so I quickly wrote something that take an ID and returns the swf. I tested it using my local web server - no problem.
Then I uploaded the gamefile to ngfx.de and stored the sound and the streamer here on gamingyourway - guess what: it didn't work.

A quick look at the http headers showed that the file was requested correctly and the size returned was correct, too, but flash returned a solid NaN for getBytesLoaded/Total. WTF?

AH! security! That must be the reason ... ok, changed and added all the "allow *" that was needed and tested again - nope still nothing. Oh well.

To make it short I finally wrote a tiny loader.swf that streamed *both* the game and sound file and viola it worked. F$%&§ knows why.

Anyway here's an image I posted earlier for this game but ...


Right now it's not licensed to I keep a few secrets till then ... but stay tuned (at least I can post about a game here :) ).

nGFX

An update to the progress of Orbs is well overdue.

I just got to thinking ( Not keeping myself awake at night or anything ), but with the self importance of the whole "blogosphere" where we all act like our words may be of some importance to strangers, today would be a good day to get something really bad off your chest, and just put it down as an April fools day joke.

It could be anything from "I had a sly smoke in the bathroom this morning" to "I shook a baby to death", so use the cover of it being a day for big fat lies and jokes to purge your soul. It'll make you feel much better.

Maybe I'll do the same.

Squize.

Recently we were approached by GameJacket to see if we had some content that we could re-purpose to support their new ad system.

Digging around we found an old ( Flash 6 or so ) reskin of the even older JBJ Sisters game.

It seems that the game has leaked from the gamejacket site, and is floating around the net now, so it's kind of pushed me into pimping it.

http://www.gamejacket.com/gamejacket.asp?gjid=00040

( It was on newgrounds, but it got blammed! )

Bit of a damp squib of a release really. Such is the world of ads and sponsors and that.

Squize.

Another rant post (but once I get back on game coding I'll do some more coding oriented posts. Promised.).

The reason I din't post about the current game of mine is that it's more or less on hold while I slave for another project (which is I'm sorry to say 100% not game related :|).

So why is that another rant post?

I bought a new box, a new shiny f$%&ing fast one (and to slow it down a bit I also installed Vista Ultimate on it :) ) (no need to point out that there are other OSes, because I *like* it).

Sometime last year I bought a copy of Nero Burning Rom, the once best cd/dvd burning app. You may have noticed "once".
The version I got was 7.5.7 and except for the darn amount of useless shit that came with it, I was quite happy with it on XP.

Because I like the ease of Nero Express I just wanted to install this (and the Nero app of course) but who the f$%& needs "recode", "showtime" a wave editor(!) ?
Anyway, I decided to install it on my new box and it turned out to become quite a nightmare ...

Once Nero was installed everytime I opened a folder that contained a video file I was greeted with as "rundll32 crash". Sweet.
First and (why not) choice to blame was MS for their OS, but after a quick google I found out that the problem is Nero. To be precise, one of the things I didn't chose to install, the shit codecs that came with it (there's no option to *not* install them).

But how do you remove a codec under Vista?

Quick google again, here we are: InstalledCodec v1.00
"InstalledCodec is a small utility displays the list of all Codec drivers and DirectShow filters currently installed on your system. For each component the following information is displayed: Display Name, Type, Disabled Status, Installed/Modified Time, Description, Company Name, Filename, and more...
It allows you to easily disable or enable any Codec/DirectShow component or export the list into text/xml/html file."

A few clicks later I disabled all codecs that started with "Nero" and viola. no rundll32 crashes.

So far I noticed no problems.

nGFX

After what seems forever "Professor Sauernoggin and the Landfill of Doom!" is live. Hurray!

I doubt you noticed my absence from posting about the current game but I tell you anyway :).

Basically I had a few days off (unplanned) and then a f#%&%$§ cold (unplanned, too) so work came pretty much to halt.

The worst what happened during that time was the constant flow of new ideas. Yesterday was the first day I was working again and I learned my funny little lesson about AS3. I haven't used it much (or for more than a few quick tests) but when I started to code the basic functions of the editor I learned to hate it.
Seeing AS3 from an c++ point of view it all makes more or less sense, but when dealing with it having a few years of AS1/AS2 experience some things just don't come a "natural" as they should.

I think that one of the biggest problems existing AS2 users have when starting with AS3 is the way AS3 deals with the display. It's easy to get by the new event model (which I really like) but the new display model just pissed me off big time during the first 3 hours.
For the editor there are a few things that rely on a timeline so I have to use exported MCs, I got the strong feeling that AS3 isn't made for handling timeline based things. (Some of them might have been coded but to be true I don't see the point in coding a color / alpha tween for some 15 elements.)
But handling a "classic" attached MC from AS3 feels as clumsy as a one legged dog.

back to work ... and hopefully some more code oriented posts in the future ...

nGFX