This time I'll post a little tool I wrote earlier this week out of sheer lazyness.

My current game comes along quite well, and the built in editor slowly takes shape and while I'm able to create simple levels now I still can't save them because the backend it all relies on is not yet written ...

As I don't have control over the backend I still want to save out my level-data, though as the editor is built in, each new version of the game might bring changes that need to be saved with the map.

I do use Zinc a lot, but imho it's quite a pain to test with and thinking about compiling the swf, switching to Zinc, compiling the exe just to be able to save my data just doesn't appeals to me.

I could do it as AIR app, but yet again, I don't want to dig into it too deep now for just saving a piece of text ...

So what now?

The solution is as easy as it can get: start Filesave, add the Filesave Class to your swf and just use it to save the file through Filesave.

The current version is rough as a piece of coal, but it does what it shoould right now and that's all I care for atm.


"set file" - let's you set the file to save to - no file no save.
"autosave" - saves when data comes in, best used with ...
"overwrite" - replaces the files when saving
"data" - the data to be saved
"save" -  manual save
"clear" - clears data field
"status" - guess ...

And because I think that there are people out there who can use this ...

Filesave_0.1.zip (2,92 MB)

it contains Filesave 0.1, the API and a demo swf. (the first posted version apparently contained a version of Filesave, that didn't work, fixed now)

Have fun, leave comments here, nGFX

...Flash 10 pre-release player is out to play with.

If you want it, just click this here link.

Squize.

I'm old and cynical and very few things give me a real "Oh cool" moment any more. Too much too young I guess :)

Although today I had a real bit of sickly fanboy-ness. I was checking the FaceBook version of Brain Voyage, just nosing at the stats and in the top five was Jon Hare. Someone I've really admired for years has played my game. He may have thought it was crap, and it may have made him vomit, but I don't care 'cause he's played one of my games ( About 20 years after I first played one of his ).

So yeah, he may have worked on Parallax, Wizball, Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer etc. but I've done a blatant piece of advergaming for Eidos, basically a glorified banner ad, so it all balances out ;)

This has been a pretty sickly post, but I don't care. People like Jon / Sensi were a huge influence on me writing games in the first place so I find this really fucking cool and don't care that I look like I'm 12 again.

Squize.

So "Law of the West" is on it's way into the public now. Final preparations have been made and after *that* long dev. time ... well, I think it deserves some pimping :).

LotW was started back in the good ol' flash 6 days, with some 3d I just made for fun and the first idea was to make it a ***space*** shooter. I think the idea underwent some major changes. It soon became more "Wild West"ish (and later I discovered that I unknowingly adobted the idea of a game I played a lot on the c64 (it shouldn't be that hard to guess the title).

The first major delay was due to my idea to use 3d characters as well, but somehow the first test didn't match the style I had in mind (thanks to BlinkOk from Kazoowee Entertainment, who is the damn best Swift artist I know, for doing a few tests). So the final character drawings needed 2 more artists until the last one finally delivered (that was 2006 I think, thanks to Nephilim).
I got the rough, scanned outlines and started to colorize them in Photoshop with my wacom:


While waiting for the charcters to take shape, I started coding the game using an event-list system (I'll go into detail once the game is online, because I don't want to spoil all the fun). Basically for each "sequence" I set up an array with a timestamp and an action, as the first entry in the array is the next thing that can happen, I just had to do a iCounter++ and see if the counter has the same time as the first event in the list.
If so, the stored "command" is executed and the entry is removed from the array. If the last entry is removed, a new sequence is created ... easy as 1, 2, 3 ... or so I thought.

Anyway, the "game" was coded pretty quickly, but all the little details and "love" took a *long* time to do (I can admit that all the art took way longer than the coding itself).

To give you something you can look at, here are some screenshots frome the game:

Once it's online I'll post the link here too.

Back to work. nGFX

When I'm nearly done with a game, I start to do the paranoid thing and looks around for competing games. I did it with Toxic Shock ( That's the working title of "Professor Sauernoggin and the Landfill of Doom!" and that's what I'm going to call it from now on ), and made a blog entry about Fire and Ice

So with pinball game a week or so away from being done ( And then hopefully a week or two of whoring it around to sponsors before it finally gets out there ) I went a googling.

Bugger. I found a Flash pinball game apparently built with Box2D. And it scrolls. Bugger. It's here if you're at all interested. I'm not too sure how to word this without sounding too much like an arrogant cock, but it's not put the fear of God into us. That intial "Oh hell" quickly turned to a "Phew".

Olli's busy as busy can be rendering out the table, as soon as it's ready to show we'll be putting it here, then hopefully we can put together a video once it's done but still in that waiting to be sold limbo. Check us out, we're being all pimpy and commercial.
I guess it's 'cause we're trying out the whole world of in-game ads and sponsorship that we're slipping into being like a lot of other Flash devs. at the moment that we really admire with a well oiled self pimping machine.
It's a very fine line between generating interest in a new game, and just coming across as promising the earth only to fall flat on your face ( With the resulting backlash ). We'll see.

Squize.

My first ever as3 project went live Friday. I'm not going to slip into a "Phew, as3 is harder than it needs to be" style post, but it must have added at least 2/3 weeks to the overall dev time.

Back on with the show, the game is called "Brain Voyage" ( "Brain Benders" in the UK and possibly Europe, although I think the German version may be called something else again ) and is a port of the Nintendo DS game which launched last week.

It's quite rare a Flash game comes along and raises the bar for a whole genre, but this one does.

Racoon Racing

There's just so much love been put into it. One day all Flash games will be this good.

Squize.

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.