The game Colour Chain was officially released onto the Shaun the Sheep site 6 days ago, and has been going down well. The “Top 5 scores of the day” feature is proving a good draw / challenge. So far the game has had 6000 plays in 6 days (which is on par for the traffic levels we get). The average time someone spends playing the game is a very healthy 6 minutes 5 seconds.
Wanting to experiment further I released Colour Chain onto Kongregate, Newgrounds and AddictingGames to see what the response would be like, and to get used to the submission process.
I wrapped my game in a GameJacket so I could monitor its travels, prepared some screen grabs and let it fly.
The game appeared on Newgrounds instantly (as an “Unapproved” title) and I was shocked to see it gain 300 plays in the first couple of hours. Newgrounds obviously has some serious traffic. It’s got a pretty good rating on Newgrounds (3.18 / 5.0) and the comments are surprisingly friendly. Not at all what I expected.
Kongregate wouldn’t let me use my GameJacket version, so I had to upload a plain vanilla one and trust their stats. It still received 300+ plays within hours of release. The average rating is 2.64, which is totally fair, and the comments are mostly constructive which is nice.
AddictingGames hasn’t released the game yet, so we’ll wait and see what happens. I’ll post again when I have some more stats to share. Play Colour Chain on Kongregate
The Flash blogging world has pretty much erupted today with this news. I read it first on Aral’s blog, but the short of it is that Adobe are going to make the SWF/FLV/FL4 formats totally open, with the license restrictions removed. This is massive, and this video details it all. The more pervasive the format becomes (across multiple devices, hello iPhone!) the more avenues we’ll have to deliver our content into. Which can only be a good thing!
The winner of the Breakpoint 64k PC demo this year is just brilliant. It’s not a PC demo done in the “spectrum style” - it’s actually a Spectrum demo, running in an emulator, all in 64k. Ok so the emulator is “overclocked” but still, bloody hell.. this is some mad Z80 skills.
I was playing around with Flint 1.0.2 and a bit of Asteroids ship code that I had (from the Keith Peters AS3 Animation book.) I had the emitter following the ship, leaving a nice particle trail as it went. And then it occurred to me - why not make the particle renderer a mask for an image? A couple of minutes later and the end result surprised even me! Fly around with the cursor keys, as you do so your ship will push the swirling black smoke away revealing the picture behind, leaving a trail of shiny glitter particles as it does so.
I was pleased to read today that Seb Lee-Delisle has released a new version of his particles demos for AS3. While not really a match for Flint, it is always great to have choice, and sometimes it’s better to sacrifice the large Flint library in exchange for a much more light-weight solution such as this. It’s fast, works well and you can produce some really pretty effects with it.
The downsides are a lack of documentation (basically work it out yourself from the source if you were not lucky enough to attend one of his great talks). But hey, that’s why you’re an AS3 geek, right? The zip file contains numerous test files, most offering different style effects and all of the source to learn from.
In short, the superb Box2DAS3 library has been updated to version 2.0.0 today! This is great news indeed, as the new features allow for some seriously cool stuff. Check out the new demos on the site (ragdoll anyone?!)
This week just keeps on getting better! Proving yet again that quite frankly AS3 development is one of the most interesting and fastest advancing areas out there.
Just check this out! Click the shots for the two demos. Definitely the fastest 3D I’ve seen done in Flash yet. Really state of the art, it blows everything else away. Apparently part of the Alternativa3D Engine. I really hope they release it!
Francis Cheng has a fascinating blog entry about the new way you can use Object Initialisers in ECMA4
Jack over at GreenSock has released two great new classes: TransformMatrixProxy and ColorTransformProxy - being a Shockingly Green Club GreenSock member I already had these but it’s great to see them in the wild.
The uber-particle system Flint has been updated to version 1.0.1. This new build changes the way the renderers work, allowing you to now specify how large the render target is (before it was the full stage size). Release 1.0 also included particle flocking, which is great fun! Definitely check it out.
Over on the Adventures in Actionscript blog a new entry gives away the full source to a feature-rich AS3 pre-loader that includes MochiAd, MochiBot, simple Domain locking and a Vista style glossy progress bar. A nice little package. You can get the progress bar on its own if the rest doesn’t appeal to you.
I was always an Atari boy myself, but I can’t help but smile and adore this charming animated video - created on an Amiga4000 by none other than the mega-mighty Eric Schwartz. Click for YouTube goodness.
Everyone seems to be on the PaperVision hype train at the moment (and for pretty good reason), but it isn’t the only Flash 3D engine out there. Today the Away3D team released a new interactive 3D demo called Green Planet. I tested it on Firefox 3 (Beta 5) and was blown away. Graphically it’s rich, with nicely animated objects and a planet landscape to fly around (it’s under your control). There are interactive objects to pick-up, and the sound fits the whole thing perfectly.
The zip file contains numerous test files, most offering different style effects and all of the source to learn from.
