Perhaps 'cause it's late, and I'm tired, and I'm coming down from quite a hellish crunch ( All the games got there in time, and the client is pleased. Just thought I should share the good news along with the moans and gripes ), but something is bugging me.

Mike Chambers, well known Flash community facing guy at Adobe, has posted "What new game APIs do you want in the Flash Player ?".

Fantastic!

Why do I feel the need to be churlish about this, I mean it's great news, isn't it ? A chance to air our views to someone whose in a position to push forward ideas to the roadmap.

"I have been learning some game development lately, and building my first game... I think game development and deployment are some of the real strengths of the Flash player, but ones which we haven’t specifically focused on in a while... While working on my game, there were a couple of things I needed to do where additional player APIs could have made the development easier... So, what APIs would you like to see that would make game development easier."

( That's the gist of the post, but please take a minute to read it all ).

Personally, I'd like to see all the things that so many game developers have been asking for since Flash 5. Mike mentions how handy it would be to have a built in pixel perfect hitTest. Surely everyone one reading this right now has been thinking that for years ? Has no one ever requested that feature ?

Why have all the feature requests fallen on deaf ears before ? Flash has been geared towards RIA's for years, with a recent glance at 3D as Away3D et al have helped fill in a short fall with the player, along with the huge ( And really successful ) push to own web video.

But games have been left out in the cold. They're treated like they're almost a happy side effect of the Flash player, that it's not really a real use of Flash ( Noticed that very few of the really high profile Flash developers make games ? Some of them touch on game related mechanics, and do it really well, but actual complete games are very few and far between. I'm sure if they did they would be vocal about the shortfalls in the API and help to have forced a change sooner. Sound got a kick up the arse using a similar approach ).
And yet, GameJacket had a stat that 28% of internet traffic was Flash games ( I can't provide a link for obvious reasons ). The Flash Forwards have a game category. Until a couple of years ago BAFTA did too ( That's now being merged with console games, and in all fairness I can't see Desktop Tower Defence giving Call of Duty a run for it's money ). Millions of people play Flash games, and talk about them, every day
There is a knowledge and interest of Flash gaming, with huge budgets for them, outside of the "Suck and Fuck Street Racing"s.

So why has it taken until now for it to be recognised by Adobe ? Would it really have taken so much effort to not package yet another fucking scroll bar component and give us a hi-score table component just once ? I know there's an excellent one from Mochi, but we're talking first party support here.

Yes to some extent I am being churlish. In effect I'm bitching about Adobe looking to make all our jobs that little bit better, it's just that does it really only take one employee at Adobe to notice the shortfall for things to happen ?

( And yes before you ask I am a bit of a hypocrite as I've never filled in a feature list request for Flash. Maybe all of us who haven't have just got ourselves to blame that we're going to have to wait 'til F11 before getting the sugar ).

Squize.

Nothing really new so here's at least something to look at ...

After a good deal of non game related stuff (some WBTs, a lot of non game flash stuff) I finally found the time (and motivation) to continue on Calisto Eclipse my current private joy project, although I must admit that the joy part has left me untill just recently.

There was some oh so boring serverside stuff to do, plus some database layout and it's still not done at all, because I really wanted to have a working game at some point.
Finally the action mode gameplay is working 100%, I just need to fill in the 150+ levels in order to provide at least some sort of progress (just fiddling with times and percentages for a certain tile type, so no real magic behind this).

Story mode needs yet to be "coded", although it just uses things I've done already for the action mode (with some minor variations, so I can create things like "build x structures with size y."

Today was paint the medal day so I thought it might also be a good thing to give you a quick glance at them:

There are 12 of them all nicely linked to myw (the other thing that dragged me down a good deal).

I guess that's me for now again, but I think it'll be nice to add an ingame screenie too, so here it is:

Lets just hope I get that done before I die ...

nGFX

We've become a bit lazy here just linking to other peoples stuff and pimping iPhone games. It's partly because we're in the usual state of NDA-ness that means we can't talk about a lot of things ( Such as the great, but very crunch heavy, project we're doing for National Geographic right now ) and partly 'cause all our friends are doing great things which deseve a pimp.

So this is going to be the last one for a while, but it's a great one to go out on. Our friends over at urbaniacs have released their first iPhone game. Want to hear more ? Yeah you sure do.

This is a port of Wedgie Toss 2 ( You can play it on their site right now ), where apparently 14 million wedgie's have been snapped out.



Look at Stephen Colbert there, oh Stephen how your faux right wing views make me giggle. But I'm going to pick an angle and twang your pants on this fun and yet surprisingly cheap iPhone game ( £0.59, which I guess is $0.99 to the 65% of our readers. See how I tie all our posts together ? When it's done it's all going to make sense, a novel in the form of a blog, with a twist at the end which will blow you away ) which is available here.
Also look where I left a tiny part of the edge of the logo at the top left on that cropped image which I'm too lazy to sort out, but is really bugging me already. How can I take my mind off that, short of playing the game itself ? Another grab should do it,

More a case of doing-anything-rather-than-work-on-the-current-project I thought I'd have a quick glance at our stats, see where we are in the grand scheme of things ( Our Alexa rank has had a little bump recently, we're back to a more healthy #324,797 ).

In terms of countries visiting us, our friends from across the pond are number #1,

United States,
hits: 150,381
sexy visitors: 25,793
percentage out of everyone coming here ( And weeping ):  65.56%

The following places were a bit of a surprise though,

2     Republic of Korea     10,606    3,795     9.65%
3     France                   10,864    3,735     9.49%    
4     China                     10,313    1,987     5.05%    
5     Russian Federation   4,518      1,691     4.30%

I didn't realise there was such a passion for Flash combined with reading a blog which doesn't ever actually say anything at all, in some of those countries. It may be a little egotistical ( Me ? ) but I thought Germany and the UK would rank higher.

So if your are visiting here from one of those top 5 countries, it'd be nice if you could say hi in the comments. Actually, it'd be better if you taught us a swear word in your respective language, be fair, you must have picked up quite a few English ones here.

Squize.

Rare we do two posts in one day, but this is breaking news and will affect quite a few people who visit us here.

GameJacket closes. Real pity, not just 'cause we've lost a couple of quid, but we were really early adopters of the system and there were a lot of good people involved in it.

We've not long since received an email officially announcing that GJ ceased trading yesterday, and that they'll pass on more info soon.

Even if you never put a game on their system, it's quite a blow for Flash dev in general, as it's another outlet gone.

On a slightly self-centric note, it means our games using the system are screwed. We'll try and rip the GJ code out and reload them as soon as we can.

Squize.

It's finally occurred to me that there must be some blogs out there that are silly enough to link to us, but because we're so wrapped up in ourselves, we're not aware of them.

If you do link to us ( Albeit out of pity ) and we've not linked back, do us a favour and let us know via the comments so we can redress the balance and keep the whole internet ticking over the way it's meant to be.

Cheers,

Squize.

Yet another post where we just talk about someone else's work rather than our own. It's just so much easier.

This time it's our mate Mark, and his first steps into the world of iphone and all the gold that goes with that. It's a port of his hit game Particle Pong.


Now to be honest, he doesn't really need the money. He pays someone to burn the cash that he can't fit in the bank vault, but if you have an iphone and want a great game, then he's all but giving it away ( Guilt I think ).

Interested ? Yeah I knew it, I could tell by the way you were reading this. K, it's as simple as putting your mouse pointer on this link and clicking it. It's really that simple to have a pong game with an orgy of particles running on your swanky iphone.

Squize.

Our good mate Chris over at Kill5 has put up some games for download.

So if you run a portal, or just want to embed a cheeky game into your blog or myspace page ( If you're 12 that is. Any older than that and it's as wrong as an adult reading Harry Potter. And before anyone jumps in with "Actually Harry Potter is a really good read for all ages", what other books have you ever read ? ).

Anyway, looky here, it's there for all to see.

Squize.