Busy busy busy. I'm like a broken record. A busy broken record.

X is on hold for the time being, but it doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it. I think being denied the chance to work on it is making me think about it more, it's like smoking.

Quite a few people are feeding back that the controls stop being responsive on lower end machines. This is due to the main loop it uses. Rather than me go into depth about it, have a check of the great tutorial at the other end of that link.
The only downside to it is that so much of Flash's time is spent actually updating the display that input listeners can be missed, making it feel that the game is being unresponsive ( I'm guessing a listener buffer within the vm is checked every frame, and if the mainloop over-runs due to the sheer amount of data which is being plotted then the listener handler misses it's chance to check the buffer for any triggered events for that frame. That happens 60 times or so and that's two seconds where the game is ignoring you ).

One of the ways I'm looking to fix this is to add an options menu to the game, so people can turn off the eye-candy to suit their set up. The downside to this is, do I default to the game not having everything turned on by so anyone can just come to the game without messing with the options ( As it should be really, a game shouldn't expect or force a user to jump through config hoops before you can play it ), or do I max it out and put some comment in the game telling people that if it's slow to go and mess with the options ?

My current thinking is to run a cpu speed test at the start of a game. So some text explaining what's happening, that the user can go to the options page etc. and a counter runs down whilst it does it's thing ( So we can get an average of say 5 seconds ). This generates it's own problems though ( Doesn't everything ? It'd be so much easier to just be making banner ads for twice as much money ).
The first being, what test do I run exactly ? Should it be a maths formula in a loop and it running some bitmap plotting at the same time ? Is that the best way to judge a machine ? Then, should it be running under a normal enterFrame, or using the timer loop ? Next up, how much can you trust this test ? I don't know where this game will end up, so in theory whilst the test is running something could be happening in the background ( From the user opening a new tab to a nasty chat window to the right of the game doing something ).
Finally where do I get a good spread of test figures from ? I can tell you how quick a quad core pc running FP10 in FireFox 3 with 2 gig of memory will run the test at, but from there we only have so many other test machines. Are there going to be enough of you good readers of this blog willing to give good feedback on such a test ?

Even so, using the figures themselves isn't totally clear cut. To try and explain that, let's say a test on my machine comes back with a value of 10. I know X plays perfectly on my box, nothing I've thrown in there has affected anything at all, so 10 <= is a perfect machine in terms of playback. Great. Say you test it, and you get a rating of 20. What does that mean in real life ? I really doubt it means your machine is twice as slow as mine, 'cause it's just too much of a generalisation. But let's say it means that, what options do I turn off ? Do I kill the particle effects and leave the others running, or can I get away with removing something else.

I'm thinking the way to do it is run the test, output your machines rating, and then turn all the options off. Then when you're playing it, ask you to turn each bit of eye-candy on 1 by 1 until your machines screws up.
Quite a big ask.

I'm really throwing this open to all of you guys, what do you think ( About any of it ? )

Oh the new asteroid images are in the game btw, usual place.

Squize.

Slowly but surely getting closer to the deadlines for the current projects. That's not really a time to worry, as it means they'll be done soon.

To everyone I owe an email too, sorry, I do love you, I just can't show it right now.

Just to give the blog a slight shot in the arm, I found an article which you guys may find interesting.

In-Depth: Biggest 10 Browser-Based Game Sites Ranked

A few surprises for me there, I thought some of the portals listed would have been higher up. There's an insane amount of traffic and therefore ad revenue being generated by those 10.

There's an interesting nod of the head to the newer browser plug-ins ( Such as Unity3D, which is coming to Windows at last, and StoneTrip, not to mention QuakeLive , which although "closed", is still bringing quality 3D to the web within a community ) at the end of the article,

"It also means that we will probably start to see a shift in the monetization model," he predicts. "This will be hugely underscored by 2008 technology developments allowing full-blown immersive 3D in the browser."

The future is more than papervision and Away ? Possibly. Hopefully. I think there will be a lot of smaller micro studios with existing 3D pipelines who will be looking at browser based content a lot more now, as an alternative to XNA and WiiWare ( And iPhone ), all of which are either already really saturated, or heading that way.
It won't be long before mochi, google and gameJacket ads are in more than Flash, and perhaps that's the Flash killer app that everyone has been glancing over their shoulder looking for all this time. It won't be silverlight, or Unity or any other plug-in, it'll be mochi-ads and gameJacket. If you can make money from Flash and make the same amount from something done in Unity, which are you as a game developer going to want to play with the most ?

Yeah, me too.

Squize.

Just a short one to say that our good friends over at dot-invasion have recently re-designed their site, and although the last version of dot-invasion was a site of true beauty, the latest update of dot-invasion is even nicer.

If you are looking to outsource art for your project we really can recommend dot-invasion, they are our 3rd party artists of choice.

( Too subtle ? )

Squize.

I thought it was an idea to show we're not both dead by posting about what we're working on as a stop gap between proper posts.

We got sign off for a new project today, one that I mentioned in a comment recently about being the best IP we've had to work with yet. Although I don't think I can mention what it is until tomorrow, so ignore that for now.

Next up, a new game for the NFL rush site... ah, NDA, k you'll have to wait and see ( And register to play, joy ).

With re-working X, which was my second ever complete Flash game, the irony isn't lost on me that I'm reskinning MJ-12 ( Space Invaders clone, here's another reskin of it ), my first ever complete Flash game. This is for a big boy Dreamworks movie, although this has been outsourced to us with the caveat that we can't pimp it as our own project, or even mention we had anything to do with it really ( I imagine a lot of game devs reading that will just baulk at the idea. I know a lot of people hate sponsors posting their games to portals such as newgrounds and would much rather do it themselves, so to do a game and get no credit at all ? Well, it's not great, but sometimes it happens. If it was something I was really proud of I've got to be honest it would hurt, but a reskin of a game from 2003 which has already made it's money ? I can live with that. Not great, but it's part and parcel of what we do, like handing over the source to clients. If you work as a whore sometimes you have to swallow things you don't want to ).
So, nothing to report there either, and never will be.

Erm, got a meeting Friday to talk over a new project that I'm really looking forward to, but can't really chat about that yet.

We've been asked to pitch for a couple of cool projects, but obviously we can't say anything until at least we've done the GDDs ( Game Design Docs ) because we want to win the jobs.

And that's it, you're all up to speed with what we're doing now. Any questions ? Good, 'cause I can't tell you anything anyway.
And that's how to pad out a blog post where I don't actually tell you a thing. We've gone from linking to other peoples work to not talking about our own. Next week expect blank posts passed off as a witty satire on the middle East crisis, and a critique of the Bush presidency using a 1px by 1px gif.

Squize.

Way back at the start of October we posted about the FHM game awards.

It seems the shortlist is up, and, well it's not awe inspiring to be honest.

There are some gems there, Bloons ( Not exactly bang up to date though, in spite of a steady stream of expansions ); ECaps was quite nice but far from stunning, Raccoon Racing is on there which was so good it's one of the few games we've blogged about ( Complete with typo ); Shift 3 is excellent like the rest of the series but aside from those there's no other games I really feel the urge to name check ( Doom port ? Clever, but kinda like picking Commando in FMame ).

I think the thing to take away from this list is what the audience is. It's young guys working in office swapping viral games to waste time. Tetris still rocks their world apparently ( It's a bit like Spank the monkey being on there ).

It's red carpet season right now in the Flash world too, with Jay having their awards too. Now this is more like it, the proper cream of last years games, and some very tricky choices in there ( For example the Arcade section has you pitting Dino Run against BoxHead, both a pair of beauties ).
Even if you can't be arsed to vote it's essential reading if you're a game dev, this is a collection of the current bench marks.

I can see winning an award at Jay's end of year review being up there with a Flash Forward in the next couple of years, it's a lot more grass roots and less elitist, and it's more focused on gameplay rather than branding dollars.
The Flash indy scene is growing, money is being thrown at it, it will need it's own relevant awards soon. I'd much rather see a site like Jay's, which has a real joy of playing games, pick it up than someone like Kong.

What else can I link to ? Found a beauty the other day, Xbox related rather than Flash, so please feel free to stop reading now if it's got to be actionscript or nothing.

levelmy360 is just great. "Are you having trouble leveling your X360 Gamerscore? Let us help!"
If you're that desperate to boost your gamerscore / achievements to the point that you'd rather pay someone else to have the fun for you, then this is the site for you.
They do different plans, with plan 1 being 500 gamerscore, and for a mere $39.99.

Want to hear GYW's plan 1 ?
Grab Rally-X, that'll cost you 400 ms points ( $5 ). It's a pig of a game, and a joke that it's on there ( You wouldn't play it on Mame honestly ), but it's an ultra simple 200 gs. It'll take you around 30 mins to max it out.
Next up is Doritos' Dash of Destruction. I think this may not be available in every country, but if it is get it, 'cause it's free. This isn't the best game you'll ever play, but it throws the achievements at you. The only slightly sticky one could be the multiplayer one, not 'cause there's loads of l33t Dash of Destruction boys online ready to spank your ass and tell you nasty things about "yo momma", but because it's local mp, so you'll need a 2nd joypad ( You don't need a 2nd player, just the pad plugged in ).

That's 400 gs for $5, so we've got $35.99 of our budget left.  Can you pick up a second hand copy of Gears2 for that ? Or a game in the classic range or even just discounted ? Or buy up all the XNA games on the marketplace to put some money in indy devs pockets ? Or, well anything but give it to levelmy360 basically.
I'm sure you'll get those missing 100 points in whatever game you spend the difference on.

It amazes me that you can pay someone to have fun for you. I'm thinking of launching letMeDestoryYourLiver.com where I'll just get smashed for you and you get the bragging rights ( Plan 1, quite merry, look at that girls chest a little bit too long, put my hand out infront of me when I urinate just to steady myself; going up to plan 5, wake up in my own piss with a dead stripper in the bath and not able to remember anything since last Tuesday ).

And that's it, have a good w/end, hopefully there will be time to actually talk about what I'm doing next week instead of just talking about what other people are doing.

Squize.

What has been done on Calisto Eclipse so far:

• the main menu is done, all the neat rollover effects are in place
• you can reach the two highscore screens (one for the action and one for story mode), alas the backend for that isn't working yet
• the medal screen is in place and the medals are defined, same as above the backend isn't done yet (more on that later)
• parts of the API for handling medals and scores are layed out (yet again ...)
• the game working is layed out and waits to be coded

What's need doing (in no particular oder):

• transition between the menu screens and the game
• the game :)
• finish the API for medals and highscores
• the backend for medals and highscore (oh there's so fucking much to do on this bugger, but maybe I can give away some more infos soon)
• ingame help
• ingame newsfeed reader
• even more backend stuff ...
• even more of that oh so boring backend stuff ...

what a boring post. damn.

I post an image next time, promissed.

nGFX

Sorry about our absence the past couple of days ( Although I can't imagine anyone pining for us too badly ).

Remember me saying right at the start of the X dev that if proper grown up paid work game in then it'd be dropped straight away ? Well...

I think we've had a years worth of work all arrive in our inboxes in the past week, and it's now time to do some of that work. I did update X the other day and posted it, but didn't blog about it. I think the main thing is the striker baddie, which is the good old UFO from asteroids.
The game feels much better for having that already, more balanced, and hopefully removes the ability to just sit still and shoot ( Which to be honest was something I always did in the arcade original 'cause that inertia is harsh ).
Also some instructions are in there now, although I think either level 5 or 6 shows the wrong ones ( Fixed on the version on my hdd ).

With X having a rest for the next couple of days ( Only code wise, Olli is about to fire up the 3D package and make beautiful pixels, and then leave it rendering for 3 hours only to come back to see the lighting was wrong ) I thought it would be a nice chance to catch up on all those links I mean to post but never get around to.

Don dropped us a nice line about Hero Town, a game he's developed single handedly. Development started in July last year and took him around 6 months to get it to the lovely standard it is now. This is what you get if you mix a hint of javascript with PHP / MySQL ( I know we're a Flash blog, but some things need sharing ).
Also as the dlc for Fable2 goes lives today ( Don't get me started on the Love Hurts bug in that, I'm one gargoyle short of getting the lot and that bug is stopping me. Of course for anyone who's not played Fable 2 this doesn't mean a thing ) it's good to mention that come this Feb "The Sprite of the Wanderer" update will be coming to Hero Town.
Give it a bash and if you get chance leave Don some feedback, it's what all us developers crave.

I promised a long long time ago ( 19/08/08 to be exact ) that'd I'd drop a link to www.2dgames.eu and I obviously didn't. Sorry GC. What seperates it from all the other shovelware sites that don't give a shit about your copyright is that GC has written his own spider that sniffs out Flash games from all over the web.
The design needs some love, but if you're looking for a specific game that's a great place to start.

What looks like a quick and easy way to hit those social sites with your bad ass game, J2Play is something we'd like to look at sometime. If you have, share in the comments.

Another thing I'm panting to play with, and hopefully will with in X, is Flash Joystick. It supports rumble, how sweet is that ? Yeah I'm going to go to a ton of effort to support it in X when there's quite possibly only me in the whole world who will go to the effort of setting it up. But it rumbles!

Flash Truth blog, man you get away with murder, I love it. That's the sort of honesty that gets dog shit posted through your letter box and is always a joy to read because of that.

A little late, but there's always time for good will to all men. 8-Bit Jesus, that is pure retro gold.

Wow, just linking to things is much easier than having to think of my own words, I can see why there are so many lazy ass blogs now.

Squize.

We're not ones for double posting here, single posting is more than enough effort, but just a quick mention that we're two years old today, so happy birthday to us.

We've got the club booked, there's money behind the bar and we're waiting here for you to come down and join the party, just remember to bring your invite with you or you won't be allowed in ( To be fair, nGFX arranged the venue for the night, sorted out sponsors for the drink and got a great deal on security, he just left me in charge of sending out the invites ).

Squize.

So what was his task again? Playing tetris with parts of the station that was meant to be built on Calisto?

What the heck.

Anyway it seems easy enough.

"No worries," they told him. "this is just a simulation right now."

"See, each of the modules has one, two, three or four air locks. The problem is that they can't be moved on their own. So all you have to do is to make sure that there are no unused airlocks. Once you have a closed set of modules, they can be filled with air and moved away from the landing site."

"Erm ... yes?"

"Yes, the orbiter is releasing new modules in a set interval, so obviously the landingsite would become a junkyard if we don't move away the modules fast enough. That's why we have this terminal, you coordinate the dropping position and make sure they connect to closed stations, before the buffer space is filled up. You can even swap parts of unfinished stations in order to build bigger ones - bigger stations are easier to move, so you'll get a higher scoring."

"OK. What is this other mode? It reads Action mode and Story mode?"

"oh, yes, easy ... Action mode is the test mode, you simply keep going until the buffer space is full, the release rate gets higher every stage. Story mode ... well that is the real deal. You're going to bring the station down to Calisto's differnt landing sites, there are different tasks waiting for you, ie. build a station with a specific size, or fill the all the empty space on a landing site - we'll give you instructions along the way."

"K. I think I get that."

"Fine, see you in the orbit then, Commander."

... That's what Calisto Eclipse is all about.

nGFX

Hi,
long time no post (but Squize has pretty much made it needless).

What happened so far ...

After a few days off from nearly everything except gaming (on my new shiny plasma) I finally got back to work on Calisto Eclipse. I decided to go the hard way and rewrite most of the menu code (before I even started coding on the game) and ended up with something I might just call the "ScreenFramework".

Basically I usually use the same style for coding:
1st there's a Singleton main controler class through which I can access all the low level stuff, because I hate having to post around references or "crosslink" classes.
This class also provides access to the ScreenFramework (name might change to something catchy), the SF class allows an easy way of switching screens using a predifined "transition".

So to get from "mcScreenMenu" (currently active) to "mcScreenMedal", it's just this (pseudo code):
SF.showScreen("mcScreenMedal", [optional transition code to use]);

... attach the new screen, perform transition, remove the old screen

All screens are "self contained" so before removing them I call the "dispose" method (did I mention that all screens use the SimpleScreen interface?), which cleans the mess the screen has caused in memory and might set a few things in the controler class.

As Calisto is also the testbed for another project we have been tinkering with for a while, it's not just developing the game but also a lot of backend server stuff, which is a pitty, because I really would like to share a good deal more of the development process for CE (although, after having the screen handling nailed I might just show that for the sake of it).

nGFX

Hi,

More in the world of X++

The final power-up, the pulse weapon, is in now. It's a big old powerful shot, slow to move, slow to reload, but two hits from that and anything is dead.
To try and make it bigger and give it a bit more wow, I've used the particles playfield too. The particles are just little images ( Not pixels, they look too small, and it's something a lot of Flash GWars style games do, either that or they add a big ol' blur effect onto them. Neither being very nice ) which are blitted into a canvas bitmap.
Every couple of frames I run a colorMatrixFilter on that bitmap canvas to fade the alpha down, all straight forward stuff we've all been doing since F8 came along.

With the pulse I just draw() it's image into the canvas bitmap so it creates a trail / thickens it up ( For want of a better term ). Draw() is a bit costly, but I'm only ever running at most 10 pulse bullets at once ( They were always going to be slow to reload, that's why I figured I could get away with doing this extra trail effect ).
I'm really happy with it, it's in keeping with the very glowy nature of the game. BlendMode.ADD is the best thing to happen to Flash for a long time.

Once that was all in and working I did even more tweaking to the difficulty curve, the flockers now get nastier as you go, which is based both on the current level and the number of lives you have left ( If you're not doing so well there's no need to make it even harder ).

Then back to the power-ups again, and the space bar now swaps between them, which works a treat.

It's all going to plan so far, and seeing how we're on what, around 12 ( Full days ) development time, it's pretty good. It'll be nice to add the final baddie type ( Did someone say bullet hell ? ) and then the biggest thing should be the sound, which I'm a little concerned about 'cause there's a lot of things going on, and it'll be easy to just overwhelm the player with sound and make it really jar. Some thought is going to need to go into that.
From there we're looking at presentational issues and then bugs, love and play testing.

Squize.

Things didn't work out as planned today, and I've spent most of the day hitting X again.

I think this is going to be pretty brief as it's just gone 2:50 am and I'm pretty dead on my feet. Main changes are the asteroids now use the bitmap technique as mentioned in the last blog ( Not final images, and the way they animate shows up the circle to circle collision checks quite badly, the final images will animate in such a way as to hide that ), the baddies drop an icon which can be shot to select your power-up ( Again placeholders. The final images will be a lot more colour coded to make it much easier ).

I've decided after a long think today, and some great ideas posted in yesterdays comments ( Vex, didn't reply there mate, but I really liked your timer based idea, but I think for a web game I have to strip away complications as much as possible. Too tired to go into depth right now why that idea could be complicated, bug me in the comments if you really want me to justify it  ), I've opted for something quite straight forward.
A power-up icon is dropped after killing 20 baddies. You can shoot it to change it to a power-up you want, and then collect it. Every time you collect one you boost it's power ( Shown by the 3 new indicators at the bottom left ). Tomorrow ( Today ) I'll add the option to press space to change what power-up you're currently using ( Space was being reserved for a possible smart bomb, but I figure the player is going to have enough fire power as it is ).
Also the pulse weapon hasn't been coded yet, so collecting the icon with a little star on will break things. Not every build I post was going to be nice and neat I'm afraid.

I've also played with the difficulty curve a bit, and it's coming together a lot more. I've got at least one more baddie type in mind, maybe two ( And a third has just come to mind, but I've got to draw a line somewhere ), and then I should really be able to have a big push to finalise when things are triggered, how many shots they take to kill, how much energy you lose etc.
Also the asteroids themselves may drop point based collectables, as there's no combo system in this game, and I do want to give the player an incentive to move rather than just spin on the spot.

Despite my bloodshot eyes it's coming together nicely now, I'm finally starting to get a real feel for how I want it to play. A couple more days of giving it a really big push and we should be looking at something a lot more final.

Squize.

I'm starting a reskin of the bowling game I was working on last year ( Working on a reskin of a game which isn't even live yet, that's weird ) tomorrow, the holidays are over so I've spent a good couple of hours this weekend working on X whilst I've still got time / energy.

Some minor things to start with... the credits have been updated slightly to reflect your input, there's a new section on the title screen called "Notes", which is basically just this blog repeated there. In an ideal world there would be a nice audio commentary but that would take an insane amount of bandwidth, so this is the next best thing ( Maybe a youTube clip with developers commentary at a later date ? )
It's a nice touch and isn't hard to do. It needs some love as I'm not a 100% happy with the presentation ( It's annoying that it's height > 2880 pixels, which means I can't cacheAsBitmap, which in turns means I can't use a gradient mask on it ), but I think it adds to the game overall.

Next up, the explosions are in their final state. Shoved into tilesheets and dropped onto the stage by directly adding the bitmap ( Rather than using a sprite or mc as a container for that bitmap ), which is a sweet tip that Pany posted here. They're animated by using scrollRect ( To just show a small "window" of the tilesheet ) and look pretty damn good. I've got to convert the player's explosion frames to a tilesheet ( It's painfully boring ), but I'm still mulling over exactly how to blow the player up, so that can be put on hold for a little while.

Along with doing the explosion tilesheets FireWorks was fired up and a lot of the existing final images were compressed as 8bit pngs, which dropped the filesize down a bit.

The homing missiles have been optimised too, seeing how no one flagged up any issues with them from the other build it wasn't really needed but it all helps.

Finally, the first baddie type is in. Nice and small "Flockers", which strangely enough are exactly the same as the Flockers in Orbs. Weird that.

They teleport in waves of 5 in a circle, and I'm pleased with them. I need to tweak triggering the player's shield if they teleport in on you, but aside from that they're pretty much done. Oh, the images are place holders before anyone asks.
( Also as I've stressed before over and over, the game play balance isn't done yet. So some levels you'll have cleared all the asteroids and just be sitting there waiting for the baddie waves to appear, other times all the waves will have been destroyed long before you manage to kill the remaining asteroids etc. ).

A good productive weekend for me, as you can see on the X Dev page.

Next up a bit of a tricky one, ideas are more than welcome. I need to allow the player to get power-ups one way or another.
My current thought is to just level up the power-up every level ( The power-ups will all max out at level 5 ), but I'm going to have 3 different types ( Spray, missiles and another one I've not quite sorted out in my head yet ). So how would the player pick which power-up to use ( The mouse wheel would be nice, but then Mac owners are left out in the cold ) ? I'm still in two minds about having a smart bomb, which means the space bar would be used for that.
My original thoughts were to have power-up icons dropped like in Polarity, and the player can shoot them to change the type before collecting them ( Think of the old 19xx shooters ). Perhaps that's the way to go, and just level up the weapon every, or every other, level.

I'm loathe to have a shop in there were you can buy upgrades to your power-ups. It's a lot of extra code and design, and will break the flow. This isn't a game of strategy and missions, it's pure score attack. Even with a shop, it would mean the baddies / asteroids dropping credits for the player to collect, and then there would still be the issue of being able to select the power-up you want to use.

The old style collecting tokens and then selecting a power-up from a list is out ( Nemesis and it's sequels ) because there just isn't the real estate on the screen for a list.

I need to play some old shooters and have a think, but really if you have any ideas please comment me up.

Squize.

I've already mentioned that I got Left 4 Dead for Christmas, and it's sex ( If you've got a 360 and a gold account, there's no good reason not to buy it, it's stunning ).

Whenever I get a new xbox game I often wonder what it would be like if it was written in Java and fits in only 4k. So far all my dreams have been dashed, but not any more.

Left 4K Dead

If that alone isn't the best title for a homage I don't know what is.

Squize.

There's a newly posted update on the XDev page.

This isn't really a "I did all this last night" build, it's what I've squeezed in during the holidays, and is I guess around 8/10 hours work in total, so counts as a 1 day-ish. I'm not trying to be totally anal about how long each build takes.

Now I've actually got to remember what I did. The first main thing I managed to drop in there was the asteroids bouncing off each other. The small ones ignore each other as I think it'll be far too cpu tasking, and too much of a head fuck to be honest ( It'd be like pinball with 30 balls ).
It all seems to work quite nicely, it's pretty subtle, you've got to be watching for it, but I know it's doing it and that's enough for me.

In saying that, I think on later levels ( Level 6 seems to be the first real "kick off" level, around that level it feels pretty sweet ) I may have to drop the checks, or at least test for the number of objects running and skip them when there are too many to test.

Next up I added the "waves". Basically, not all rocks come at you at the same time, there's a trigger point where extra ones will be released. This will need some balancing ( Like all the gameplay, which for me is a long way from being done ) when the baddies are in there.

I guess the biggest thing, in terms of the blog title anyway, is the power-ups. Firstly I added the spray power-up ( I don't think I'm going to stick with that name, it conjures up images of dogs and lamp posts ) which is your standard weapon, plus friends. It looks really good when you've maxed it out at [ Weapon ] level 5.
For all the power-ups there's give and take. For example with the spray power-up, yeah you get 5 shots at once, but the reload time is increased to try and balance that out. It helps me as the coder because it means the games not running as many bullets as it would be if I didn't increase the reload time and will also hopefully bring some balance to the game ( If you max out your power-ups and you're as hard as hell, how do you still make the game fun ? Do you make the baddies that before died with one shot now take 5 shots to keep the challenge going ? If that's the case, you've not actually got a useful power-up, you've just got more sprites on screen. Do you increase the sheer volume of baddies ? Then you could slip into a grind if their easy to kill. It's always a tricky tricky problem ).

The spray PuP didn't take too long, so I moved onto the homing missiles ( Which I knew would ). I've optimised these quite heavily already, but I still think with 4/5 running with a lot of objects there's a performance hit, and that's why I've left them unlocked and maxed out in the current build, so if anyone whose got two mins could give the game a quick play ( 'til around that magic level 6 would be good ) and feedback on their performance and specs that would be great.
If they are generally running crap for everyone ( Fine here, but quad core machine. This baby could run seti@home on it's own, so testing a swf in a realistic enviroment is tricky at times ) then I've still got some ideas to try and claw back some speed whilst still keeping the same look to them.

Squize.

It's time for our annual review of what we've managed to achieve over the previous 12 months, so bring that hangover and stale mince pie with you as we go back in time and space...

Jan:

This saw our first birthday, and Olli experimenting with web servers and the Wii. Quiet month, I'm putting it down to hangovers.

Feb:

The most loved up month of the year saw what has got to be one of the most camp games ever,