Published on
August 14, 2007 in
News.
I’ve been fiddling around with a new game in past few weeks. It’s built of that ball physics prototype I posted, but with tons of improvements.
I’ve been making this game as a little AS3 playground, there’s been no real “push” to finish it, allowing me to do whatever I feel like.
So, I’ve managed to cram in framerate independent physics (within reason of course), a nice object oriented structure, linked lists for keeping track of the balls and I’ve also moved the project from Flash CS3 to the much more pleasant FlashDevelop.
I’m not sure what Adobe did to the CS3 gui, but it’s horribly slow. Especially on my three year old laptop. In principle CS3 is better for editing code, but for some reason Adobe didn’t go that extra mile making it usable for larger projects.
So, when speeding through the Google reader the other day I saw that jayisgames is having a new competition. About ball physics. And not only that, Jay himself actually popped by to remind me. So I guess I’m entering.
Experience has taught me that promising things beforehand about stuff you’re coding is doomed to end in disaster, so I’ll stress the guess here.
Published on
July 4, 2007 in
News.
I’ve been taking a little break from argblargs the last few weeks. In this time I’ve done lot’s of stuff.
Most importantly I’ve been working on my portfolio, check it out!
I’ve also had time to play around a little bit with ActionScript 3, it really is a veritable speed fest compared to AS2.
I made a little physics test yesterday: It has with 151 balls, all colliding with eachother, that amounts to almost 12 000 collision calcs each frame. Uncapped it cranks out around 90fps on my three year old laptop. Amazing stuff. Doing this in AS2 would have exploded my computer, Flashbombs has a similar thing going, it can do 20 balls max.
Check the little test out after the break!
In other news I just stumbled upon Kyle Gabler (of experimentalgameplay.com) and Ron Carmel’s game development blog 2D Boy. Aparently they’re making Tower of Goo into a full game. I wish I could get to do the same thing with one of my game. Anyway, the last post features a crazy association game called Human Brain Cloud which is pretty neat. Go check it out!
Continue reading ‘Tiny update.’
Published on
March 18, 2007 in
News and Rant.
Wow. I’ve been fiddling about with my latest game for what i thought was about a week, turns out it’s been more than a month since my last post. Oops.
Well, the time in between hasn’t been entirely uneventful. The main reason I don’t post here as much lately is my final project that takes up a good 9 hours a day, combine that with the potent distractions such as Castlevania and God of War 2, there’s not much time left for the poor blog. But enough with the excuses for now.
We’re about two weeks from a beta of the game, and it’s coming together very nicely. If you’re interested in being a beta tester once we get that far, please drop me an email. Somehow it never seizes to amaze what you can accomplish in a couple of weeks when you’re six people instead of just one.
I have another little game in the works, well, actually it’s all done. I’m struggling with getting my new highscore thingie working properly. The one I have for flashpipes is working out great, but it’s a bit of a bummer that the top fifty places or so are the three same people 
So once I get that done (which should be within a few days) there’ll be a new game up here.
In other news, Petri got to go to the GDC. That gives me mixed feelings, partly I’m glad for him, partly I’m so jealous my arms are about to fall of.
Well, I’ll go next year, by then I should be rich and famous enough.
Published on
February 13, 2007 in
News.
Wow, loads and loads of visitors lately. That makes me really happy, but it sucks a bit that I don’t have much new stuff to give you. I’m silly hard at work with my degree project and all the flash magic I work (whoa!) go into that.
I can’t reveal exactly what It’ll be yet, but I guarantee it will be most awesome. It’ll be a bit more interactive and community styled closely intertwined with minigames and some other cool stuff.
We’ll be in early alpha in a bit more than two weeks, and by then there should be a bit more to show for it. Once we go into beta, in yet another four weeks, there’ll be even more neat things to show off.
Once that game’s done, I’m done with school. And that means I need a job. All suggestions are welcome. Wink, wink. Nudge, nugde. My email.
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a site called mochiads (click here for non-refered link), they run an ad-network for ads inside flash games. This was exactly what I had been looking for for some time. This allows me to spread my games beyond my site without having to worry about bandwidth expenses.
So if you happend to like flashpipes, my most recent game and guineapig for these ads, and would like to post it on your site/blog/myspace/forum or even your grandmother. Now you can!
Copy ‘n paste this html into any page of your liking and have your visitors playing in notime.
<object width="500" height="310" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.grapefrukt.com/games/pipes/newpipes.swf">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.grapefrukt.com/games/pipes/newpipes.swf" />
<img width="500" height="310" alt="no flash" src="" />
</object>
I have a few more features I’d like to put in the game to make it even better for pasting on your own page, but I need to find some time to implement those first.
Per usual, the plug for kloonigames, I wasn’t expecting Petri to hang in there as long as he has, but boy he’s been busy! He also managed to get his games on 1up’s list of the 101 best free games on the intertubes. I’m a bit envious of that.
Published on
January 28, 2007 in
News.
Wow. I got featured at jayisgames.com again which is awesome. Then came the digg/reddit crowd, downloadsquad.com joined the party aswell.
A little bit less awesome was the 8gb a day of traffic that generated
20k+ visitors in three days managed to bring down the entire server this page is hosted on. Oops.
This caused a little downtime, I was pissed at my server people for not giving me the extra bandwidth, and they were pissed at me for bringing down their entire server. But now I’ve installed caching, removed some performance hungry stuff and added some more bells and whistles just to keep this place going.
Published on
January 21, 2007 in
News.
Wow. It’s been more than two weeks since my last post, here come the excuses!
I’ve been silly busy lately, I’ve just started working on the final project on my current education. So me and my group have been busy writing design documents and fiddling around with databases lately.
I did spend my spare time during christmas making a wii portal, but It’s not really up to par yet and I’m afraid I won’t have much time to work on it within the reasonable future. A pity really.
I do however have an unreleased game more or less complete, and if I get my way I’ll release that tomorrow.
It also seems I’ll be holding a five week class in flash game development this summer. I hope to make some tutorials and put them up here too, watch this space for more news about that.
Published on
January 4, 2007 in
News.
There, all the christmas and New Year business sorted for this time around. The holidays have given me some time to toy around with the browser.
It’s not as awesome as it could be, but hey, people can easily play my games on their tv using a super neat pointing device, so I’m not complaining.
Since everybody loves lists I’ll do a pro/con list!
Bad
- You can’t use the accelerometers (or hardly the buttons)
- It’s slow (it even runs at a higher resolution than displayed, making performance even worse)
- It’s Flash 7, not super awesome bitmap wielding Flash 8
Good
- It’s a browser with flash for the Wii
- You use the wiimote for pointing
- It’s Flash 7, not some gimped older version
Anyhow I’ve been fiddling around with porting my games back to Flash 7.
Swallows works nicely.
Hovercrafty needed alot of rewriting for better performance, it was somehow going slower and slower, it does this on PC’s aswell, but it’s not as notable there, so after a couple of hours of fiddling around I got it to move like it should.
Fungus has been ported but is too slow still, I doubt it’ll ever be possible to run because of all the calculations it needs (every fungus checks for neighbours, calculates distances and so on).
Isotope was a quick port, but I’d like to add some additional functionality to it aswell since the copy-paste won’t work on wii.
Eater of worlds can’t be ported because it relies too heavily on Flash 8.
I’ve also been mucking about with my wii-native game, and it too is nearing completion. All this will be on my very own little wii-portal, which also needs to be made.
A lot of work, but it’s a labor of love.
Since this has turned into a wii-centered blog recently, i might aswell link this movie. An amusing little look at the wii copy protection.
Published on
December 22, 2006 in
News.
Today Nintendo released a demo of the Wii browser, and just as expected it supports flash. I just tried it and none of my games work in it, i suspect it only supports Flash 7, and my games are version 8. Most of them however should be fairly easy to port, but with Christmas and everything coming up this weekend it might take a bit longer (though I’d very much like to get it working this instant).
I happened upon this blog post earlier today, and if the Wii runs flash like that I will be a very happy man. The future is exciting!
By the way I have another little game in the pipeline, and I think I just might make it “native” for the Wii, but more on that once I get a chance to explore this a bit more.
Merry Christmas to you all!
I decided on the name for my game today. Eater of worlds.
The release is drawing near, though I don’t dare to set an actual date just yet. I have a presentation for it in 47 hours (omg!), but I doubt it’ll hit the internets before that.
I have finished the first level, and only some level design is missing from the second one. The third level is still MIA.
I’d absolutely love to make a level editor for this game and let everyone add their own stuff to their own music. That would be awesome, but that’s another two weeks of development, at least. So no go for that.
In other news:
This whole Web 2.0 (and/or mod community) thing with user generated content is so exciting, I think my next project will be something that involves the players a bit more. I mean, procedural content is cool and all, but if you get actual people doing content that has to be better.
Lost garden has an article on this.
The wiimote for PC is making real progress, read more on Wii Hacks, watch the cool video on YouTube and wait for WiiLi to get back up.
And also, the wii-browser will support Flash. YES! I read it on a feed from opera.com somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.
Let’s just hope it’s proper flash and not Flash 5 or something.
And while I’m at it, Kloonigames has a new game up. Go check it out.
Published on
December 1, 2006 in
News.
I read a while back that the wiimote was a regular bluetooth device, atleast regular in the sense that it appears as one when looking for devices to pair with.
Now a crafty individual actually managed to get some data out from it, I guess that getting proper input from it is far of yet, but still it promises great things to come.
Read more on engadget
The video on youtube
I’ve been fiddling around with a new game in past few weeks. It’s built of that ball physics prototype I posted, but with tons of improvements.
Recent Comments
I think it was Jared Tarball's session on "The Circle" at Flash on the Beach a few years back. I ...
Best news I've heard in a while!
Danny B is totally awesome. His music is the best. Check out his website.
This looks great. Can't wait to play it !
For the love of my productivity, please don't release this game.