Latest Posts

  • Flash Game Dev Links Round-up

    I don’t normally post pure link-lists to my blog, but there have been a number of really interesting things happening recently. And while the 8-bit Rocket guys are on a bit of a hiatus here is my lowly substitute to their links round-up 🙂

    AS3 Space Invaders Emulation. Most people code their space invader clones the “traditional” way – “borrowing” some invader graphics from Google Images, shoving a load of sprites on the stage and creating their own mini shmup engine. Thibault on the other hand wrote an Intel8080 emulator in AS3 and ran the original arcade machine ROM through it 🙂 Truly great stuff.

    Bryson Whiteman over on Sokay.net has an excellent write-up about good multiplayer design elements in games. this is based on the work (and GDC presentations) of Dani Bunton Berry, the author of M.U.L.E. Personally I think the advice given is really great for any game, multiplayer or not, and it’s worth reading over. I especially liked the “Legends must grow” and the “Norm Effect” considerations.

    Things have been going a bit nuts in the Alchemy camp recently. Somewhat kickstarted by the 300,000 pixel dot objects post things have grown at quite a pace. Ralph Hauwert over at UnitZeroOne has an excellent summary with links to extremely beautiful effects like Yonatan Offek’s Sierpinski Particles and David Lenaerts Smoke, Milk and Ink. Or perhaps you’d like to texture a 3D object from Alchemy?! It’s all quite fascinating stuff.

    And finally nothing to do with Flash at all: I utterly cannot wait for Popcaps new game Plants vs. Zombies. I am sure it will be a monster success (and the 9/10 rating in Edge this month backs me up on that), but it just looks like such a fun game! Check out the music video on the web site for a taste of what’s to come.

  • Vector Maskor Wallpapor

    made in inkscape

    1280×1024

    1680×1050

  • Particle Worm Explosion

    I was messing around tonight with the explosion code I wrote for Infinite Ammo, with a squiggly “worm like” behaviour and created the following weirdness. Click anywhere to set off an explosion. Click as much as you like to create total mayhem!

    [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/eskaflow.swf” width=”600″ height=”400″]

  • Kyobi:Whirled Released

    Kyobi on WhirledWhirled 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

  • Kyobi is now live on GameJacket

    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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