Over on 8bitrocket Jeff is going through the motions of creating a game in 24 hours (that’s just 24 man-hours.. not all spent at once) and is blogging about the process.

The game he has settled on is a loose remake of the Atari 2600 game Air-Sea Battle. In his first entry he’s spent an hour going over the different game types, how this could map to various levels within the game, and what his next steps will be.

I have to admit I found the post very interesting. Both from the point of view that I’d love to do something similar (a 24-hour game challenge for myself), and also because I think he’s spent too long on stage 1 Planning is crucial, no doubt about it, but I think the plan is far too complicated at the moment and has too many differing factors in there (game stages, different potential level designs, etc). So I’ll be curious to see how many items on his list actually make the final build, because 24-hours for a complete game with original non-ripped graphics (kudos to him for using them) is actually a very short time.

I also think because he is such an experienced programmer I bet it will take him a lot longer than say someone like Emanuele Feronato, who claims to create whole games in 45-minute plane trips (when you see the code, you appreciate why). I do wonder if Jeff will fall into the trap of wanting to make it sound on a code-design basis as well as game-design - and that takes precious time. Can’t wait to see how this plays out

This is just a short post to say that the excellent new album “Behind the Square” has been released on C64 Audio.com. It’s a collection of remixed Mad Max (Jochen Hippel) tunes, put together by ACC:Xess. They are superb, spanning everything from the haunting Astaroth game over track, to some classic demo screen music. Superb value for £4.99 Click the album cover to visit the site and buy it!

http://www.c64audio.com/productInfo.php?cat=STCD2

Last Friday the new Cartoon Network UK site for Chop Socky Chooks went live. This was a great feeling as we designed and built the site ourselves, put together all assets (wallpapers, clips, etc) and built a custom video player all in record time.

You can visit the site at http://www.chopsockychooks.com

I did all the xhtml/css/flash and our superb design team here did the graphics and assets. Believe me, IE6 testing was a joy… oh yes.

The “Coming Soon” area you can see on the games page is my new project that started build today It’s going to kick some! (quite literally)

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.

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!

Flash on the Beach 2008 is coming September 28th. See you there!

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.