The final Phantom Mansion went live today. I just needed to share that, after 8 episodes and nearly a year working on it ( A hetic 3/4 days every month just before release ).

So that's it for me and Hector. Freedom.

I'd like to thank all the die hard fans of the series for their constant support, and anyone whose taken the time to vote on it on any portal where they've been hosted.

And it's time for the final link to mansion for this blog, here, right here.

Squize.

Sorry things have been quiet here for a while, I've been busy going to a couple of weddings and making it to 36 without dying ( Quite an achievement considering my lack of doing anything healthy ).

The pinball game still isn't quite gold yet, we're hoping to finally kill it off Thursday. In the mean time whilst it's sitting on FGL we've been included in the new "First Impressions" feature of the site, which I think is a really great idea ( I think it may well still be beta, so I don't want to blab too much about it here as it's not my place to ).

The thing with feedback is culling out the good useful comments from the noise. And by good I don't just mean the "nice work" style comments, but the comments that make you remove the blinkers a little and be objective about the game.

The main concern which has come up is that people really don't like the fact that it scrolls. I find this weird in that I'm used to the 16bit era of pinball games where they all scrolled. It allows for a playfield which is a lot less cluttered and just gives everything a nice sense of scale and scope. I'm just hoping that the slighty broken camera in the version they tested ( Which is fixed now and hopefully always gives you the best view of what's happening and where the ball is going to go ) is the main reason people weren't liking that aspect. If not, then well it's not going to be that popular and that's all there is to it.

Yeah, that's a reflection on there.

Another interesting point raised was about the flipper movement, a lot of people felt that there was almost a lag on them, so that was fixed last night to make them more responsive.

Aside from that ( And filtering out the noise like I said earlier, eg "there are not enough features on the pinball board/play area itself (no bumpers/ramps/etc)", aside from those 3 bumpers and 2 ramps you mean ? ) it's just a polarised comments ( "Too complicated", "Not complicated enough", "Instructions too brief", "Instructions too wordy" ) and things we were aware of anyway, such as the animations running too slow ( This was due to developing at 60fps and then having to drop it down to 40fps for the browser version ).

So a bit more love, a couple of bug fixes, a few more assets from Olli, and it's good to go. We just need someone to buy it off us then.

Squize.

Just on a quick sidenote:



Law of the West has finally been released to the public.

And as I'm a sponsor slut now ... go play it on newgrounds (and while you there ... vote, damnit :) )

Oh, well, better than gathering virtual dust on my hdd, I guess.

nGFX

Final couple of days of pinball development so time to show a quick grab. As the table graphics aren't quite final yet I can only show the medal screen.

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.