Whirled is large social Flash world, full of multiplayer games, avatars, toys, rooms, furniture and all the usual kind of things you’d expect from a Flash MMO. Think Gaia / Habbo only looking like the complete visual mess of a typical MySpace page.

Whirled run a developers competition. You can modify your game to work within the “Whirled”, upload it and be in with a chance of winning some real money. What’s more your game is up for sale in their shop, which means that other Whirled players can buy it and add it to their rooms, and you get a cut of the revenue generated by this.

After some sweet talking by Chris of FGL I decided to port Kyobi to the Whirled platform. Believe me, it was not an easy task. The Whirled API is very easy to use, but the fact you are locked out of referencing the stage was quite a shock. When I went through my code and realised just how much I rely on it, and things it inherits (like mouse coordinates, width references, etc) it nearly put me off converting the game at all. But I perservered and after a lot of trial and error, I finally managed to get it working!

I don’t expect to win the competition, but the more I worked with Whirled the more I liked its anarchaic and freeform nature. If I create a new Whirled game it’ll definitely be written to take advantage of their system from the start, not applied at the final stage!

If you’ve got a Whirled account feel free to play / rate Kyobi here: http://www.whirled.com/#games-d_2076_c

• @JamFactory do it, do it it’s not as rocking as CoD4, but having good old Keither lead your squad is neat. Awesome ending too. #
• @BinaryMoon such as? (am always looking for ways to lower requests to our servers!) #
• @jaycsantos nice plugin, just installed it – thanks #
• Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #flash #games #atari #
• @Scarybug that read like you’re going to profit on Friday by visiting the Doctor on Thursday – will you return minus a kidney? #
• phew, just filled out, signed, scanned and PDF’d 60 pages worth of contracts for my latest game! Took as long as sponsor branding it did! #
• [Kyobi] Rev. 11 committed by Richard Davey King.com logo updates and API implementation. #
• damn it, Flash CS4 crashes on every 2nd compile of this FLA. Bloody annoying #
• [Kyobi] Rev. 12 committed by Richard Davey Fixed King.com in-game links. Took ages thanks to sodding CS4 crashing all th… #
• [Kyobi] Rev. 13 committed by Richard Davey Fixed right-click issue in BigFishGames version. Also added iPhone advert to … #
• [Kyobi] Rev. 14 committed by Richard Davey Just **lots** of stuff to back-up #
• @JamFactory you’ll find out when you hear the in-between music ads #
• RT @aardmanonline: our new World of Cracking Ideas website is now LIVE incl a VERY good game http://www.crackingideas.com/ #
• Would definitely appreciate your votes on Kyobi on Newgrounds today: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/488742 #
• @Scarybug what res is your monitor? the game isn’t that big! (600×400), I’m worried it’s a result of GameJacket not resizing properly #
• @Scarybug there is an ad for the iPhone game at the end of the GameJacket version (the one you couldn’t run!!) #

It took a lot of work and coordination, but my latest game Kyobi is now live and starting to appear in the wild.

In the end it was jointly sponsored by GameJacket, Kongregate, BigFishGames, Oberon Media, King.com and Bunnygames. Oberon themselves are responsible for the game content of MySpace Games, Orange, Yahoo Games and other big sites.

Believe me it was hard work producing all of those variations of the game! But the end result was worth it, both in terms of combined income and exposure the game will eventually have.

Right now you can play Kyobi on GameJacket (I’ve also embedded it below the jump), and it should start appearing on the other sites in the following days / weeks, as each site has a different release schedule.

My thanks to everyone involved in the game (Alex, Lindsay, SomaTone), my beta testers and you. Feel free to leave your feedback here.

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I’m pleased to announce that my latest game ‘Kyobi‘ is now available for the iPhone / iPod Touch from the Apple AppStore.

The iPhone version was developed by The Game Creators. It has been re-branded as “Touch & Go” with a new set of graphics more suitable for playing with your fingers.

Touch & Go is available as a free Lite version and the full version costing £1.79 / $2.99.

For those without iPhones this video shows how the game looks and plays:

For those with iPhones here are some links

Lite Version (should be available any day now)
Full Version

The Flash 4k Competition is over and the first and second place winners have been announced (no I wasn’t one of them!) – congrats to both games, and also to the other entries, some of which were truly stunning.

My personal favourite was the sky diving game, Falling with Style, which was a technical masterpiece and great fun to play. The stunt tricks you can perform in the air are stunning, and I was a bit shocked it didn’t get a better write-up than it did.

The main criticism about my game was the control system, apparently it was counter-intuitive and it’d have been easier if the ship just moved up when you pressed up and rotated to face the mouse pointer – rather than the Asteroids style motion it actually uses. Personally I loathe that style of control for arena shooters when using a keyboard vs. a joypad, but each to their own! Just a crying shame the 3 judges disagreed with me

Anyway the Audience Voting is now open, which means you get to play all the great games and then vote for your favourite. So get to it, and have fun while doing so as some of the entries are just incredible.

I’d had the “old” design for my blog since April 2008. All I had done was stick my own header onto the default theme that came with WordPress. Hardly inspiring, but it did the job.

Tonight I sat down and pixelled my little heart out. The end result is this new design which I am much happier with. It makes the place feel like it’s truly mine now I’ve tested in FF3, Chrome and IE7, so apologies if it dies in anything else (Safari I’m looking at you).

I’ve got some plans up my sleeve to enhance the header a bit futher. I think the right-hand section is just begging for a little pong clock. Oh wait, no I mean it’s begging for a mini game. So I’ll see what I can whip-up. On the right you’ll notice I’ve added links to twitter and FlashGameLicense.com, my home from home. Anything that supports the sterling work these guys do is fine by me.

Incase you were wondering, the Predator in the header image is clutching an Atari ST computer. It was drawn by the Pompey Pirates artist Sid-B for their menu disk 95. Click here to see the full image it was taken from, and loads of other stunning 16-colour pixel work.

Well everyone else seems to be blogging about the release of their 4k games, so I’m doing so too I managed to get mine finished and submitted on-time. I don’t expect it to win a thing (results are in 3 days time), but I had great fun participating all the same.

I have created a games page entry for it, and in a slightly unusual move for me I have released the full source code for the game too. You can get it from it’s games page. What you learn from it I have no idea. At the very least there’s a pretty explosion / particle system, and a massively optimised and compressed Tween engine! Or you could just skim down through the code, shaking your head thinking “and he ENJOYED coding this?!”

I don’t know about you, but I rely on the Search box built into Firefox a lot. I use it almost religiously and have a selection of search engines in there, one of which is of course the ActionScript 3 Reference.

It was bugging me that there was no search engine plugin specifically for the Flash 10 version of the docs.

So, I created one.

If you use Firefox (or any browser that supports the OpenSearch plugin format) then you can add the Flash 10 search plugin to by simply going to this page on the MozDev site: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=flash+10 and adding the Flash 10 version I created.

I’ve already used it several times in the past hour, so figured it’d be worth posting about incase anyone else found it useful.