Monthly Archive for November, 2006

More work?

Published on November 21, 2006 in Log and Rant. 0 Comments

FlashDevelopAs I’m into the third week of coding the game is getting a bit big. When trying to find stuff in the almost 700 lines of code, almost all of it in one single frame, it gets a bit frustrating. I remembered reading something about a Flash IDE, kinda like Visual Studio, but for flash.
I’ve used these types of software before, and the added organization really speeds up the workflow.

Turns out the program I had read about was FlashDevelop. It’s real awesome. I did a quick try to move my game to it, but it does need a bit more object oriented and strict code than I’ve been using. I will however use it for whatever I do next, and I’ve moved smaller projects into it already.

And the best part is that it’s all Open Source, I really like where this is going.

Flash. Slow as lightning?

Published on November 17, 2006 in Log and Rant. 0 Comments

Optimizing picture
Flash is a weird beast. Things you expect to be fast are slow and vice versa. With this project I’m really pushing the limits performance wise. And also, running the game in a browser gives a good 10-30% decrease in fps.
It’s a real downer when you’ve got tons of ideas for cool effects you want to do, but there’s just not enough speed to do it.
But with AS3 right around the corner speed is coming, i mean, if you can do a C64 emulator you can do almost anything.

A really good resource for optimizing flash is http://flasm.sourceforge.net/

Planning. It sucks and rocks. I will call it srucks.

Published on November 15, 2006 in Log. 0 Comments

I finally got round to planning my current project, while it’s not in any way amusing it’s necessary. It’s easy to forget that coming from prototyping, there you get to make stuff for three days (or whatever timeframe you choose) and not have to spend time on all that peripheral stuff.
For this game I have five weeks, in which I need to do not only the game code but also highscores and challenge systems, get the songs from my friends that are making music for me, do graphics for the game and it’s four levels.
Damn. I just realized I forgot time for sound effects in my planning. Guess I’ll have to rethink it a bit.

If anyone should be interested my planning is on Google Calendar.

Back in black.

Published on November 10, 2006 in News and Rant. 0 Comments

sneak previewWow. It’s been almost a month since my last post, my internship took up most of my time for the last four weeks. But now I’m back home and hungry for making some games.
I decided to scrap the multiplayer Moonlumber project, multiplayer action games are damn tricky.
I will however make a bigger game this time, I have a bit of a head start since it’s a prototype I’ve been working on for some time. I don’t want to reveal too much about the game just yet, the release won’t be for a few weeks yet.

What I can reveal is that it will be most awesome.

And while we’re on the topic of awesome you really should check out Kloonigames recent post on rapid prototyping. Partly because it features stuff written by me, but there’s some actual relevant stuff in there too.

I’ve also managed to get my games on a few other sites, Playaholics and Mousebreaker. If you’re running a similar sites the games are still available for licensing.