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.

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.