Author Archive
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Blockparty 2010 Invtro and the Opensource demo engine evoTinyEngine
23rd Feb 20106Blockparty is an annual demo party held in the US, and 2010’s is about to hit in a few months time. As with all good demo parties there is usually an invitation demo to announce it, and to whet the appetite somewhat. This year EvoFlash created this little beauty, and of course it’s AS3 to the core:
I’ve not been to a demo party since 1999, but boy does this make me wish I could be there. Nice one guys, nice one.
There are some lovely effects as you’d expect. Evoflash have been at this for years now, and obviously have a highly streamlined demo pipeline going on. With impressive pre and post render effects; gorgeous blooms, radial blurs, reflections and shadowing. And what’s more – they have released it as open source, free for demo coding plebs like me to use!
Called evoTinyEngine it’s a small framework that offers you three core elements: Assets, the main Engine and Modifiers. The Modifiers can be stacked up on-top of each other. The Engine handles the construction and destruction of all the Modifiers for you, and there are some really nice things ready to use. Everything is based on 16th note beats, which allows for tight syncing with the audio in your demo.
I haven’t dug through the code much yet but I’d be willing to bet there are some insane routines in there, that would be well worth studying for game development as well as demos.
(Now let’s see if this blog post kicks off a 20+ comment flame war about “is it really a demo?” yadda yadda … 😉
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ImmorTall – or why I love Flash games
19th Feb 2010I rarely blog about Flash games I’ve played. Very rarely in fact. I don’t really see the point, as there are a hundred other blogs out there willing to tell you their thoughts on what’s “hot and new” in the gaming world. Often full of useless suggestions about how the game could be “improved”. I’d rather you just play the games for yourself, use your own sense of judgement.
Then I come across a game like ImmorTall. And I feel it warrants 30 seconds of your life to play it, and a few minutes of mine to write about it. Because it’s different. It dares to break a few conventions, to tell a story, to draw you into something you probably aren’t used to. To make you think.
And I like that. I like that a lot. I like that Flash game developers have the balls to do this. To push boundaries, to redefine the very concept of “game”. There are no rules but their own.
Then I read the comments from the knuckleheads on Armor. And I close my eyes, and a part of me inside breaks. Crushed by the realisation that there can be so many idiots on our tiny little planet.
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Droplet Game Updated
9th Feb 2010
After the blissful chaos of preparing for the Droplet 2 launch party, I finally had time to take stock and catch-up. The party was an absolute success. Both the game iLKe and I made, and the Twitter wall I coded for Gav went down a treat. The Twitter wall featured this awesome video that was projected, Bat symbol like, across Bristol’s Park Street onto an adjacent building. People in the queue (and there were a lot of them!) could send their tweets to the wall and see them displayed in near real-time. Here’s a video taken from someone there. And here’s the actual SWF that was projected (give it time to download, there’s a 3MB FLV streaming in)
Before I discuss the game – can I just say you MUST check out this montage picture of the incredible custom Droplets. They were all featured in the gallery, and the level of talent displayed in some of them is nothing short of breath-taking. There’s a whole Flickr group dedicated to the Droplets.
The game was released onto the Droplet web site the day before the party. It was also mentioned on Twitter (lots!), Facebook (lots!) and best of all could be seen running on TVs in both the store and the gallery. The footage was from an earlier build, but it still looked great, and I got plenty of compliments 🙂So what’s happened since then? Well there were a couple of bugs in the game, as is to be expected with the last-minute rush we endured. Most notable of which was that the scores didn’t reset when the game was completed! So people could work their way up the highscore board a little too easily 😉 Thankfully Katie spotted this one and I promptly zapped it.
There was also a display issue with the background sky scroller, that absolutely no-one noticed except me – but it bugged me every time I played it. iLKe also tweaked the level layout quite a lot, refining a few areas and making others cleaner. He also saw fit to redraw my Pause screen a little. Damn pixel gurus 🙂 I also updated the Droplet page here on my web site, to include the missing Development details.
Anyway the new build is up on the Droplet micro site. And yes I wiped all the highscores to keep things “fair”. Enjoy!
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New Game Droplet Released
6th Feb 2010This game was created to celebrate the launch of Series 2 of the awesome little Droplet vinyl toys. iLKke and I took the Droplet characters back into an 8-bit NES style era, complete with platforming action, colourful scenery and a truly micro bipbop vibe.
Read more about the game, and of course play it on the Droplet page 🙂
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Gravity Crash Anthems Soundtrack Available
11th Jan 2010
I’ve got nothing much more to say other than – it’s out! The Gravity Crash soundtrack by CoLD SToRAGE is available to buy online for immediate download. It costs £10 (which is probably £3 more than it ought to) but you get 16 tracks for your money, including some awesome remixes – most notable of which is a C64 SID rendition of the title track Scarface.
Track previews, downloadable PDF booklet, exclusive mixes and direct support of the composer are included in the price. Have just thrown it on my mp3 player ready for the drive into work tomorrow. Even if you’ve never played the game, still check this out – as the man himself says, it’s a “buffet of 80s electro” 🙂
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