Goodness, the Interwebs surely have exploded with this whole Flash vs. HTML5 debate. I don’t think I’ve read so much dis-information since “weapons of mass destruction”.

There is an excellent piece here (“I’d rather be a Woz“) all about it, which covers everything I feel, and strips away the sensationalist clap-trap coming from most quarters.

But if that post summed it up so brilliantly, why am I writing here? It’s simple really. It doesn’t matter how many brainless blog posts and comments are made about how “terrible” Flash is, or how HTML5 is the bringer of world peace and technological unity. None of that translates into the real world right now, today.

At work we are building some truly massive Flash based projects, in partnership with some of the largest broadcasters in the world (most projects of which I can’t even mention in passing, let alone link to). Sites that will be visited by tens of millions of people. Last week we released a new Shaun the Sheep game called “Home Sheep Home“. It has spread around the gaming portals like wild-fire, and is currently hitting 570,000+ plays per day. Since this time last week over 3 million people have enjoyed playing that one single game.

And you know what makes that possible? Flash Player does. Adobe does.

Would the same have happened if we’d made it in HTML5 and JavaScript? My arse would it. If we’d done that our support team would be pulling their hair out as millions of people across the world email to say “it doesn’t work in my browser!”. Maybe in 10 years time things will change. I for one surely hope so, as choice is a good thing – and goodness knows HTML4 needs a shot in the arm to wake it up from the 90s. But Adobe don’t sit still. Where will Flash be a decade down the line? Heck of a lot further on than where it is today, that’s for sure.

So you know what fellow Flash devs… stop reading the constant stream of HTML5 / Standards / iPad ramblings (to which I just added ), and get back to making and releasing great quality Flash games and sites. Because for every new release you put out there, you’re just strengthening what is already the largest platform in the world. Leave the zealots to their theory and hypothesis, because you and I are the front-line, and our creations are what makes the web a fun place to be.

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