• @pperon my games still target FP9, but my personal projects are FP10 yes #
• RT @flashdevelop: FlashDevelop 3.0.1 RTM was just released: http://bit.ly/L8jyB #
• just finished my interview with 8-bit Rocket + tech edited Jeff's great article on early Atari ST powerhouse Michtron #
• @mrdoob are you there atm? #
• @mrdoob ahh right, it's just up the road from our offices #
• @JamFactory you sure that isn't your bones now, old man? #
• RT @8bitrocket: Interview with Photonstorm's and http://www.atari.st 's Richard Davey: http://bit.ly/njjaP #
• @sirflo hope you won't be as disappointed with the book as I was! (it just reads like little more than LiveDocs in print) #
• Nothing like being sat in a traffic jam for 3 hrs in 23 degrees with no air con. #
• @rosedragoness enable gradient component, custom gradients created in there in reply to rosedragoness #
• Stuck in traffic for 5 hours now. M4 still shut. Police handing out water & turned 2 fields into male / female toilets! #
• best thing about being stuck on the M4 for 7 hours was hearing Florence + The Machine on the Live Lounge.. amazing! just pre'd the album #
• coo.. #PhpED 5.8 release installing now #
• RT @joe_carney: LiveLeak.com – MacBook transforms and … well just watch it's AWESOME! http://bit.ly/15fvZa #
• @beinteractive Apple don't #
• @GamingYourWay you wouldn't say it was naughty if those coins were going into *your* account #
• @GamingYourWay it's optional though init.. you don't HAVE to pay – it's not as evil as say coin-locked levels #
• @GamingYourWay in a game designed to showcase MochiCoins surely you'd shoe-horn them in anywhere you can! #
• @GamingYourWay you and I both know we're about to see a glut of MochiCoin shit hit the fan – but the market will level it out like always #
• @stewartgilray page 56? I thought that was you on the cover #
• @stewartgilray on the plus side, you have more bottles of beer on your table than any other team #
• @stewartgilray the secret of success perhaps? #
• @Scarybug that's because you have scruples.. can you say the same for the majority of other devs? #
• whoa, I did a tweet search for "michael jackson" and 2 seconds later 746 new results came in! #
• (err incase you are wondering WHY apparently he's dead) #
• @JamFactory Reuters suit you sir? http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE55O6AK20090625 #
• time to queue-up Sasha and Digweed's classic Northern Exposure 1&2 and code code code … #
• @pperon a 90s classic for sure! but it just hasn't lost any of its charm over the years, still blows me away when in the right mood #
• @JamFactory Tommy used to love watching Pocoyo. I love the full-white graphical style. He just loved SleepyBird. #
• ok let's try submitting my RSS feed to Adobe Feeds again.. (4th time lucky Adobe?!) #
• mmm http://www.vuze.com looks pretty sweet (am a uTorrent fan myself, but Vuze does look nice!) #
• @o0Corps0o yeah, probably the same way you can do that already, used to all the time until 360 played divx natively! #
• @JGOware talking of which (fun experiments) check out the GYW forum later today #
• @n2flash_games thanks for the follow, just uploaded 2 of my games to your site. Hope you like them! #

I use an excellent service called Xmarks which allows me to sync my bookmarks between my home and work copies of Firefox. I can also access them via mobile and a special web page. Part of the service allows me to share my bookmarks out – so I have decided to share my AS3 folder. There are hundreds of bookmarks in here covering everything from physics to PixelBender.

You can access my bookmarks here: http://bookmarks.photonstorm.com

Whenever I add or edit bookmarks this page will update automatically. You can even subscribe to it via RSS if you feel so inclined.

I know it’s not as pretty or social as Delicious, but I’ve never really got on with Deli, Xmarks suits me far better.

Jeff over at 8-bit Rocket has just published an interview he conducted with me.

If you can wade through some of the waffle for long enough then hopefully you’ll take away a few ideas re: Flash game development. Plus a few parts about my early geek life and how it influenced the type of games I make today.

It was good fun doing the interview, and I thank Jeff for the opportunity.

Despite an incredibly busy time at work I have managed to progress my chameleons game by quite a considerable amount. It’s an action / puzzle platformer and I’m using Box2D for all of the platform elements. It just feels lovely bouncing off the blocks, gliding, sliding and slinking about the levels. As a side effect of this I have learnt loads about the b2PolyDef, sensors and custom contact listeners. It’s all good stuff though – you can never stop learning

Fruiti Winnings

Since release Fruiti Blox has been going down well. Loads of plays, decent enough NG and Kong scores and it even won the Mochiland “Flash Game Friday” award (and $100 in the process), winning this is a first for me so I was really pleased about it Here is the review:

This puzzle game has you matching four corners of the same color and eliminating all blocks within that space. The gameplay idea isn’t new, but the execution is definitely top notch! I like how clicking on the color highlights the selected and dims the others (makes for finding corners faster). The bubbly graphics and smooth interface make it even more fun! You can’t just buy this kind of polish in a store, folks. With leaderboards and achievements rounding out the game, it’s definitely a great experience.

I’ve had some player feedback come through that I am going to implement in a new build that I’ll release to Candystand and BigFishGames next week.

The 8-bit Interview

I also finally managed to complete an interview with Jeff over at 8-bit Rocket. He sent it through to me around the start of May, and I only just got it back to him, which is incredibly slack of me. Hopefully it won’t take him as long to edit out my weirdness and get it live as it took me to finish it.

GameJacket

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know how disgruntled I was with GameJacket. Their recent collapse into bankruptcy has left a lot of developers out of pocket, myself included. I’m not going to dwell on this any further, a number of good people have lost their jobs there and a really well built system is now in tatters. I understand why it happened, what I will never forgive them is offering me the $1000 advance in the first place even though they knew full-well they could never afford to pay it to me. That just stinks. I’m even more annoyed by the fact that Kyobi was all set to actually make back that advance, and then some, had it had a chance. It had already earned nearly 60% back by the time they went under. With GameJackets collapse the game dropped out of hundreds of web sites across the world, which of course also effects the amount of referrals it can send to Kongregate (my primary sponsor), so I’m almost certainly going to loose money as a result of this too.

Still, life goes on. There’s no point even giving this any more thought. I recognised the “dying” signs of GameJacket a good month in advance of their death, and released Kyobi onto Mochi as a precaution and now I’m glad I did. Otherwise it’d be fighting for distribution against the rest of the wave of GameJacket orphans now hitting the service.

AS3 Atari ST YM Player

Christian Corti, the mastermind behind the AS3 Mod Player library Flod, has been working on a YM Replay library and it is sounding incredible! The YM format is a direct register dump from the YM soundchip found in computers like the Atari ST or the MSX. There are hundreds of YM tunes available (converted from classic games and demos). Although SNDH is the format of choice for chip-tune replay on real Atari hardware, getting that to replay within Flash means emulating an entire 68000 CPU, which is quite a tall order. YM replay at least means it’s “just”  having to emulate the YM chip itself.

How useful is YM replay in Flash games today? Virtually none unless you were doing a retro remake and wanted an authentic sound (without using megs worth of mp3 files, YM tunes are typically around 4k in size).

But how cool is the fact that FP10 is powerful enough to do this at all? Loads

• @pcmacgames Dune 1 or 2? 1 was nice, but 2 was the genre defining RTS daddy (and superb too!) #
• RT @mochimedia: Flash Game Friday Winner: Fruiti Blox http://bit.ly/OizKr(yay, my game! uber cool) #
• @GamingYourWay I love the way their screen shot shows up a font embed mistake #
• @HexagonStar @GamingYourWay Times New Roman FTW! I showed it to the artist and he was like "what the fuck happened to that?!!" #
• @rosedragoness I wouldn't say "overwhelmed" ! I only make like 1 game a quarter #
• listening to Marbles album – genuinely shocked at how great #Marillion still sound today #
• @Chronotron I bet iPhone will never support SWF because of the implications to AppStore and Apple's lack of control! #
• @danielalbu re:Max Kerning – it's just a clever ad for the Extensis Suitcase app, it's not a real portfolio #
• @danielalbu it's easier to figure out if you click the suitcase #
• RT @aardmanonline: Exciting news, Morph has a new online home! http://www.morphfiles.com go and explore and let us know what you think! #
• @rosedragoness if you have JS enabled all the links (news, downloads, etc) make the page horizontal scroll for you #
• @UnitZeroOne re #FOTB – I don't care what line-up they've got, last year showed me it's mostly pointless going more than once #
• @HexagonStar you only posted that because it has a bloody cat in it #
• @MichaelJW edit your template? #
• @EgoAnt aww, but Mr. Jobs needs you to line his pockets with gold #
• RT @adobeted: AWESOME AS3C. Compiles AS3 bytecode from assembler instructions. __asm('woot'). It's AS3s own FLASM http://bit.ly/2lHyEC #

• @JamFactory sounds like a good time to chill, or work on something totally different #
• does anyone know if you can collapse all *methods* (but only methods) in @FlashDevelop ? (RC5) #
• @GamingYourWay same URL tells me GYM is worth $8132! shows how accurate it is #
• @GamingYourWay one of my old sites is "worth" $49,000 – utter tripe #
• @GamingYourWay PoundLand maybe #
• Just found *six* unfinished games waiting to get some coding attention. I hate having so many loose ends. #
• @tomgidden menus are SO boring, but so easy! get to it man, you could be earning billions by now #
• @tomgidden 1 – Start Game 2 – Help 3 – Send me your moolah… simple! it's a menu, who cares how fancy it is? You're not EA #
• @tomgidden buy them? 1Sound, Twune, SomaTone… Won't cost much, adds a great deal. Same for logo. Speculate to accumulate 'n all that. #
• @tomgidden SomaTone are excellent for that – just send them a video of the game and they can advise on it. Excellent quality results. #
• @tomgidden you'd be surprised.. $300 would get you 100% original commercial quality fx + a short ditty for the menu (longer music = more $) #
• damn you Flex.. "Build Failed" is NOT helpful! Give me a line number, or a reason for the failure at the very least #
• RT @flashdevelop: FlashDevelop 3.0.0 RC6 is out now: http://bit.ly/LePRe #
• Well it looks like GameJacket are finally dead.. site totally offline, email unresponsive. Never did get my payment from them. Assholes. #
• @yezzer my mochi stats indicate they haven't been serving games for 48 hours now, and their site doesn't load for me, can only assume so! #
• NG ratings appreciated http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/498906 #
• @annilita maybe it just doesn't want you to leave? #
• last pimp request of the day for my new game http://bit.ly/2pug6 #
• @JamFactory prepare yourself for eye candy and you won't be upset. #
• @MichaelJW nope and I don't expect to either! #
• So Fruiti Blox hits Kongregate and several comments say "did you make this or steal it from Candystand?" I mean WTF! click "Credits" morons. #
• @Scarybug I reckon they just didn't pay their host #
• @Chronotron SuperSecret appear to be on a game sourcing mission right now (sold 2 of mine to them this month) #
• RT @TheGameCreators: iDork video released. A new game for the iPhone & iPod Touch. See it here; http://bit.ly/eLdlj (*awesomeness!*) #
• @JamFactory I'd love to axe some webblis (Cuckoo's Nest style!) #
• @State_of_Play my guess is they've simply run out of money, fingers crossed for the good guys there (mike/oli esp), finger up to the rest #
• @efergan Chuzzle, Amazon Survival, Royal Bingo, Luxor, Bunny Bon Bon, Word Pop, Midas Solitaire, Civiballs, Jelly Swelly, Twist Me Silly etc #
• it's official.. GameJacket are gone: http://is.gd/YTCR (and so is $1000 of my money) #
• @jaycsantos yeah, obviously all lies.. may their managers burn in hell #
• @danielalbu they offered me a $1000 advance (which my game would have made easily, had they not died) #
• @sbergel yeah, I'm not the only one either, lots of devs owed money that they will never see #
• @danielalbu there were signs in the last month definitely, this is no surprise to me, but they owed me from *months* ago #
• @Chronotron I put my game onto Mochi weeks ago, coz I knew this would happen! Will still impact my Kong referral payments this month tho #
• woohoo! Kyobi gets awesome MySpace Games front page treatment http://games.myspace.com #
• @Chronotron missing a stage ref? #
• @FGL_Team yeah I'd use IRC for sure #
• this is going to be a *massive8 hit on the iPhone – http://bit.ly/eLdlj
  well done TGC #

Well it has been a long time coming, but I was pleased to be told that Kyobi was finally released by Oberon Media today, and is now sat pretty on the homepage of MySpace Games. Oberon have been hard at work updating their game delivery system to support AS3 and MySpace is one of their first sites to carry AS3 games, of which Kyobi is their flagship title.

Anyway they’ve done a great job with the attract sequence, so I hope some of those 18,000+ current players give it a click

I finished my game Fruiti Blox back in December 2008 and sold it to Candystand.com. A few months went by and they still hadn’t released it. I asked them what the problem was and basically they were flat-out designing and releasing their new site. So Fruiti Blox got side-lined in the process. They are re-doing the graphics and branding for the game entirely so I can understand the delay.

However part of the original agreement was that after 3 months I could release a viral version with ads. Obviously the game still hasn’t seen the light of day on their own site, so “3 months” was looking a long way off. I was always very happy with this game. The love and attention I poured into it paid off, so I was a bit upset that until now no-one got to experience that.

Thankfully they agreed this situation was a bit pants, sent me an animation to use and said I can release now providing it appeared at start-up. I took a couple of hours, packaged it all up and now it has finally entered the wild!

So you can now play Fruiti Blox on NewGrounds and Kongregate (ratings welcome on both!). It will start seeding fully over the coming weeks as it’s on Mochi Distribution and FGD.

I’ve no idea how well it’ll go down on NG and Kong, but releasing it there is like one of those developer “rights of passage” tasks you have to put your fledgling games through. Some get flamed into hell and back, some limp out with mediocre ratings and a feeling of averageness, while on those rare occassions you may actually get some comments beyond “meh” and ratings beyond “1/5 – No zombies”.

I’m guessing due to the fact you really do have to read the tutorial in Fruiti Blox (otherwise it just doesn’t “make sense”) that it’ll get slammed until it hits the more casual portals. Time will tell.

• RT @crashposition: AIR + WiiRemote + WiiBalanceBoard + Google Streetview = japanese awesomeness http://tinyurl.com/nxcxmr #
• 0@jemK I make it about 195 #
• For some reason felt the urge to update my http://www.atari.st site during lunch. Fixed some 2+ year old bugs Forums/comments back online, etc! #
• @ericclarksu it’s Microsoft. I couldn’t care less what happens to it #
• @JamFactory aww what’s wrong with random images of Turkey (or wherever the fuck it is) – doesn’t that just scream “search” to you?! #
• @adobeted What exactly is refreshing about it? there isn’t a single innovative feature, unless I’m missing something #
• @pperon the what?! #
• @pperon I was going to send you a grab of what we see here (it ain’t balloons!) but the site just times out for me constantly now #
• @stewartgilray what are you watching? #
• @stewartgilray where’s the live feed? #
• @stewartgilray will watch it later, it never connects once too many geeks are on #
• @stewartgilray the gamespot feed is good and fast, am on there #
• #e3 whoa.. CoD Modern Warfare 2.. whoa..!! #
• @stewartgilray do you think CliffyB is trying to pump his pecs up as much as Marcus Fenix? #
• #e3 Crackdown 2 and Left4Dead 2 !!! woooo… best 360 games ever gets sequels only on 360 #
• @stewartgilray ODST meh.. Reach, woo.. #
• @stewartgilray Alan Wake looked so utterly shit until they started fighting.. now it looks insanely weirdly cool #
• @stewartgilray lol! hah.. we get Final Fantasy AND Metal Gear #
• @burtonposey re: DigDug – just don’t use a grid at all! #
• RT @flashdevelop: FlashDevelop 3.0.0 RC5 is out now: http://bit.ly/OkGZI #
• @annilita now way? how come?! #
• just ordered the awesome looking C64 Forever pack (http://www.c64forever.com) #
• @annilita someone *drove* through your house?????! how the heck #
• right, time for a round of Left4Dead and then it’s chameleon game coding time #
• @GamingYourWay really never liked any of the Monkey Island games! but I can see why this might get a lot of pants wet (just not mine) #
• anyone know of any games with great GUI / status panels (that shows lives, score, etc). Can be console, arcade, retro, don’t mind what. #
• RT @stewartgilray: RT: News: Gravity Crash for PlayStation announced! http://tinyurl.com/p7zc86 #
• RT @mProCreation: Have you already voted? Which ActionScript version do you use? http://bit.ly/2kJhk Please ReTweet #
• just got sent the most amazing AS3 Amiga Mod replay class *ever* for integration with PixelBlitz #
• @kreig13 yeah, almost as bad as that imperator dude #
• I love with you max bid on something on ebay up to £40 and then win it for £0.98p #
• @Jimcoov obviously no-one else wanted a big pile of old retro gaming mags, except me #
• @MichaelJW they may as well just sponsor Torrent sites with prices like that, it’s the same end result for lots of people! #
• @MichaelJW surely awesome would be no issues in the first place? #
• @MichaelJW unless something you did caused the problem, not really! I call it being a good host #
• @Scarybug I’ve got to ask – why on earth do you use Outlook?! on a PC “The Bat” is the best mail client around #
• just the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time: http://soytuaire.labuat.com #

In the immortal words of the BudBrains: Check dis out:

Now Amiga mod replay has been done in AS3 before, most famously by Joa and Andre in the 8BitBoy Popforge library. And more recently in Flash Mod Player by Badsectoracula (although that is written in haXe it still compiles to AS3). But today I was blown away to receive a tiny zip package from the talented Christian Corti, lead developer at TrinityEffects. It contained a little test swf and a few class files named “flod”.

Flod is his native AS3/FP10 Amiga Module playing library. And as you can hear, it plays very well!

It has full support for 15/31 instruments and all the effects up to Protracker 2.3 including Inverse Loop (latest version, not the Funky Repeat), it also supports both Amiga A500 and A1200 filters. It adds less than 10Kb to your SWF file size (excluding the mod itself of course), but more importantly the CPU impact is minimal.

Christian has released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3 (Unsupported) License, which basically means you are pretty much free to use it however you want, for whatever you want. It requires Flash Player 10, which at it’s current adoption rate of 76% and growing, shouldn’t be a big issue for anyone these days.

I fully intend to integrate this with the FP10 branch of PixelBlitz. He also has a set of SoundSpectrum classes for generating beautiful VU meters (and also extremely useful if you wish to link the music to in-game events or effects). They are being tidied up at the moment, so hopefully they’ll be released soon. I’ll post about it here when they are.

Feel free to download the zip file and have a play!

Please comment here to let us both know what you create with it.