My Little Friends

Defense Shooter

This is my entry for Ludum Dare 23, a 48 hour game competition. The theme was "Tiny World".

The game is a defense style game where you have to protect the tiny people of the tiny world from five waves of bad guys. You control a robot who can move around the tiny world but who has to be careful he doesnt land on the people he is protecting.

The game was programmed using Flash Develop with the Flixel engine. Graphics were created in Photoshop and MSPaint and the sound effects were created using Bfxr.

Here is a link to the Ludum Dare entry page for My Little Friends

Ludum Dare 23

Thu, 19 April, 2012 - 10:11:16

The latest Ludum Dare game making competition is only a day and a bit away and this time round it looks like my weekend is going to be clear enough to enter. I have been voting for my favourite themes over the last few days and I'm looking forward to seeing what makes it through to the final round tomorrow. So far, I like the sound of Alternate reality, The moon, Time, Survival and Castles in the sky.
I will most likely program my game using the Flixel library as I already have experience with it. Graphics will be done in photoshop and if I get time for sound, it will most likely be a mixture of sxfr and Audacity.
Once the theme is announced, my plan is to spend some time with pencil and paper working out what I'm going to do. Once I have an idea I'll break open the supply of snacks and Red Bull, line up a playlist of movie sountracks and get coding!
I'll will be tweeting my progress over the weekend.

Looks like GAME has an extra life

Mon, 02 April, 2012 - 11:03:21

The last few weeks have seen GAME in the news as it struggled financially. Analysis seems to suggest that a combination of increased competition from digital retailers and cut price deals at supermarkets, have hurt their profits. Also GAME have cited a “cyclical low point in the industry” with no new consoles released for a few years. In fact, the Xbox360 is approaching 7 years old! The rumours that the next generation Xbox won’t have a disk drive cant be good news for a high street retailer.

Seeing this news got me thinking about my time at GAME. I first worked there for a year during my second year of university, when it was still Electronics Boutique. I had to leave to do my industry placement year, but on completing that, I was able to return to a shop that had a new name above the door and, as is the case with retail, an almost entirely new set of staff. I have very fond memories of both years that I worked there, though some of it admittedly is down to the rose tinted glasses! I suspect my time was something of a heyday for GAME. When I first started they were very heavily based on customer service. We would always give refunds if that’s what the customer really wanted and I even remember us unofficially accepting competitor gift vouchers in order to win business. The shop was manically busy on a Saturday and we always had a good turnout for our midnight launches. We had a great set of regular customers (whom my former boss James recently blogged about) and as far as I know, business was good. One criticism of GAME that I often see now is that the staff don’t know what they’re talking about but when I was there, the staff were very knowledgeable.

For whatever reason that the company got into trouble, undoubtedly the saddest part is the lost jobs. The GAME shop had a real community feel for me and I expect there was a similar story at stores around the country. I’m still friends with a number of former colleagues and I ended up living with friends that I met while working at GAME. I would not have met my soon to be wife had I not been out celebrating my last day there.

The most recent news is that the stores have been bought and that the company is out of administration, so the company will live on to fight another day. I just hope that the new management team can find a way to adapt the business to the modern games market. Just today, Tesco have made a play to be “The Home of Gaming”.

Unforgettable Games

Fri, 09 March, 2012 - 10:10:30

The Flixel game that I have been talking about in the blog for a little while now is almost complete. The game itself is done, as are the graphics, scores and achievements. All that is left is to add a little music. For this I have been tinkering with a great little free tool called Musagi. I'm not much of a musician unfortunately but with this tool, even I can create a tune! This is important as I hope to generate some ad revenue with this game, so I need to make sure I have the rights to all of the assets within.

Just as I'm finishing this project off, I'm looking into something new (of course). After attending the LFPUG event mentioned in the previous post I decided to look into using the Starling framework to create a mobile app. At this stage I have only got as far as setting up the development environment and creating a very basic app, but with the tutorials provided and some helpful forum posts from the community, this has been a relatively painless process. I will talk more about this in a future post.

On Gamasutra today I saw an interview with Reisuke Ishida, chief game designer at Taito, speaking at the Game Developer Conference. He gives his top 5 tips for creating unforgettable games. This post comes at a good time for me as I hope to apply these ideas when designing my game app.

The future of Flash

Mon, 27 February, 2012 - 12:51:29

Last Thursday I attended the London Flash Platform User Group (LFPUG) meet-up hosted at the offices of WCRS, where Adobe would be making a presentation on the future of Flash. The room was packed when I entered and there was a good atmosphere with Flash devs noisily chatting over beers laid on by the hosts. I sat down and chatted with a guy who was a little concerned about where Flash was going. He worked for an advertising agency creating Flash Ads for websites and was concerned that the emergence of HTML5 and CSS3 meant he would have the wrong skill-set.

After a short introduction from the hosts and from the organisers, Mike Chambers began his presentation. Just a few days ago I gave my view on where I see Flash going in the Future. Just a few hours later, Adobe released its white paper Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes. Mike's presentation focused mainly on the content of the white paper. The main points were that Adobe are moving the focus of Flash to two areas. Premium video and Gaming. They stressed that Flash could still be used for everything that it had been used for in the past, whether that be branding websites, ads or animations, but that the future would focus on gaming. Mike didn't go into much detail about premium video but did talk more extensively about gaming, saying that Adobe believes that Flash is "the game console for the web". He also discussed Adobe's decision to discontinue development of a standalone player for Linux, which will be replaced with a built in player in Chrome for Linux. This means that viewing the latest Flash content on Linux will only be possible in Chrome.
The group was fairly vocal with questions flying out from the crowd throughout. Some people questioned Adobe's decisions to discontinue support for Flex and Flash mobile. They expressed their concern that clients can have the view that Flash is dead. This led to the Adobe team's admission that PR and community contact had been bad in the past and that the point of meetings such as this were to improve those relations.

After a short break the session continued with Lee Brimelow's presentation. Lee talked about new features that will be available in the next few releases of Flash which have been added with gaming in mind. These included Mouse Lock and full keyboard support in full screen, the ability to disable the context menu (which raised a cheer) and right click and middle click support. There will also be hardware acceleration support for iOS and Android and support for desktop graphics cards, initially back to 2008 and later to 2005. There will also be multi-threading, improved audio support for low latency audio so that sound effects can be triggered without delays and a performance index API which will allow Flash application to check the performance of the device it is running on and optimise itself. All of this was well received by the crowd but I think a new piece of software called "monocle" had the biggest wow factor. Monocle is a piece of diagnostic/monitoring software that allows you to look in detail at what is happening when your Flash is running. It breaks down the Flash, frame by frame, and displays statistics of what resources are being used in each frame and what functions are being executed. You can even step through each function and watch as the scene is drawn in each frame. It will be a big step up from the trace statements that appear all over my code! After that, Lee finished up with some impressive demonstrations of 3d Flash games that ran very nicely despite the amount of objects on the screen.

The presentation was very enjoyable and there was plenty of banter between the community and the Adobe guys. The Adobe team were very honest with their audience, admitting when they didn't have an answer for particular questions and being very frank that, ultimately, Adobe is a business and that if something is not going to make them money they will stop developing it. From a personal standpoint, it was great to be in a room with like minded people who really care about Flash. It got me very excited about working with Flash and has got me thinking about my own future. In particular, I need to look into all this 3d malarkey!

Drawing Widget

This is a drawing widget that I created in AS2 when I was first learning to use the Flash Drawing API. It uses relatively simple code which, when the mouse button is down, constantly checks the cursor position and draws a straight line from its previous position to the new. With a high enough frame rate (100 fps in this case) the individual straight lines are small enough to not be noticeable. The API makes it easy to adjust the properties of the line. In this widget I have added the possibility to adjust the thickness and colour of the lines but there are options to add blur, glow and drop shadow effects that can be used to create different types of line. I hope to soon upload some other work I created to demonstrate this.
The original version of this, that I created some years ago was, very plain with a white background and a black border to denote where to draw. I decided to update the visuals before uploading it. In PhotoShop and other image editing software, icons of real world objects such as pens and pencils are used to give an impression of their digital equivalents. For this widget I took that a step further by creating a desk with a sheet of paper to give a familiar context. The desk texture is by naveenvverma from deviant art. The Pencil icon is from the BasicSet icon set by Pixel Mixer and the eraser icon was from the MixedIcon set by simiographics. The paper was created in PhotoShop as a simple white box with a slightly warped drop shadow. The indented titles was created within Flash by adding a black knockout inner glow to the text.

London Flash Platform User Group

Tue, 21 February, 2012 - 12:49:09

This Thursday (23rd Feb) I will be attending the London Flash Platform User Group meetup. Mike Chambers will be talking about the future of Flashincluding recent changes to the Flash platform and how the player and the actionscript language will evolve in the future. I personally see the focus continue to shift to gaming. The majority of web designers seem to shun Flash, especially with the emergence of CCS3 and HTML5. Yet at the same time we are seeing new developments on the gaming side of Flash with the use of Unreal and other 3d engines in web and mobile games. I expect to hear the evenings second presenter talk alot about this. I have been following Lee Brimelow and his work for years now, via his FlashBlog, his gotoAndLearn tutorials and on Twitter. It was one of his tweets that first made me aware of the event in fact.
I'm looking forward to meeting some other Flash Developers and seeing what I can learn from them. It should be a great experience. Plus, there's always the chance I might win the Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection!

Post Code Checker (AS2)

This is another old piece of AS2 code that I created to validate British postal codes. In AS3 this is an easy task as AS3 supports regular expressions and there exists a regular expression for post code formats. See BS 7666. In this case I had to create a function that took an input string, converted it to a format code and checked that code against the possible values for each format. I have made the code for this function available here on the off chance that it is useful to someone! Feel free to use it, but leave me a comment if you do!
I used a transparent glass UI PSD provided by PixelsDaily.com and some tick and cross icons that i found at icon finder for the visuals.

Ideas...

Tue, 07 February, 2012 - 13:02:13

I made a minor change to the site today, renaming the "widgets" section to "ideas".
When I first created the widgets section, my intention was to have a page where I could upload bits of Flash that weren't necessarily whole games, but were work that I wanted to display. I considered a few names for the page; misc, flash, stuff, etc and finally settled on widgets. However, thinking about it again recently, I realised that the widget title wasn't really appropriate. I think ideas is better because it more accurately describes the content there. In particular I can use the page to upload half finished game ideas without having to polish them up as "finished" games. Expect to see a few posts appearing in that section soon.

Yanmania... Website troubleshooter

Mon, 30 January, 2012 - 9:59:07

In the last week I have run into problems with two otherwise stable websites. What was the source of these problems? People of course!

The first problem was with this site, It was a sneaky one that must have appeared sometime since my last post on Jan 17th. I didn't notice it until I tried to upload a new image to the art page. I found that I just couldn't publish. I knew the site had been working correctly. I checked the form fields, checked the templates, cleared my cache and tried different browsers. Then, when I tried modifying a template, I found I couldn't do that either. At this point I wondered if my expression engine installation had corrupted somehow and considered updating the version of EE that I was using. However, it turns out that the free version of EE that I use is no longer available and that I would have to upgrade to a freelancer license. I considered this for a while and am in fact still considering it despite having fixed the issue. The free version I am using does not entitle me to support and does not allow me to use the current features. Though I don't have support, I was still able to google my way to another user's post on the EE forums. He had the same issue as me and, it turned out, the same solution. My hosting company had tightened up the security on their servers, preventing malicious scripts from running. This had the adverse effect of preventing the submission scripts within EE from running as well. I contacted them and they were able to add an exception there and then and I was able to continue posting my images.

The second issue was with a MODx website I created for a colleague. In his case he had created a second site hosted on the same webspace. He had moved the files for the site into a sub-directory and this of course broke everything! The front end was missing all of the text and images, which are loaded from the CMS, leaving only the theme. Once I connected to the FTP I could see that he hadn't moved the associated MODx files and folders, so I moved those into the new subdirectory. That fixed some of the images as the relative file paths were now correct but the content still wasn't appearing. Also the back end wasn't accessible. I knew there must be a further issue with file paths but I didn't know where to look. Once again google saved the day. Searching for my problem I found a guide to moving a MODx site to a sub-directory. I went through the steps, updating the config files and performing a reinstall to be safe and the site was aback up and running. My colleague was very happy (and so was I).