Author Archive
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Behind the Square
20th Jul 20080This 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!
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Chop Socky Chooks launched
30th Jun 2008Last 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)
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Abombinaball Level Editor 90% finished
20th Jun 2008Right now I’ve got 3 new Flash games in active development. Two of them are being developed at work because they tie-in with TV properties we own. The third is a remake of an Atari ST game called Abombinaball. This game is an arcade puzzler. You control a small bouncing ball that must bounce across a playfield to defuse bombs before they countdown to zero and explode. As you move across the playfield the grid blocks fall away behind you. So you have to plan your route carefully, but also quickly (because the bombs are constantly counting down).
It’s a great game 🙂 So far I am about 3 days into development on it (that’s just working a few hours per evening). I have grabbed all the graphics from the original, resized them, played the whole game from start to end (grabbing each level) and have built a level editor in Flash. I’m really pleased with the level editor, it’s pretty easy to use and let me re-create the original levels with ease, but it also means I can create new ones too.
I’m going to release this with both the original Atari ST graphics (doubled in size) and with a brand new graphic set to give it that shine and polish todays gamers expect. I’ve not yet decided if I will keep the name of the game the same or not. It’s quite a cool name, so probably 🙂 I’m trying to track down the original author (Martin Brownlow), but am not having much luck. I really want his blessing on this project before I release. Fun fact: He was the lead developer on Shiny classics such as MDK and Sacrifice. He’s released a book called Game Programming Golden Rules which is a good read and contains some great coding practises that apply well to Flash (such as BSP Trees and Hash functions). Anyway here are a couple of grabs from the original:
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Cannon Fighter Released
6th Jun 2008
Today I released my first ever true retro remake: Cannon Fighter. It’s a remake of an old 8-bit MSX computer game. A very rare game infact, so rare that the overwhelming majority of people will have never heard of it, or played it. But that’s no bad thing! Everyone wants to widen their gaming horizons, right? 😉You take on the role of a cannon protecting a supply dump in the desert, and must stave off the relentless tank attacks. You can retreat up to 3 times, but once you hit the base it’s all or nothing!
This is a pixel perfect remake and bar a few exceptions it follows the original game to the core. I hope you enjoy it, and if not at least be pleased to know how much I used to love this game when I was a kid 🙂
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AlternativaPlatform Released
3rd Jun 2008
The awesome Alternativa 3D demos released a while back blew the Flash blogosphere away. Now the company behind them have released the full AlternativaPlatform package as an SWC for you to play with. It supports Flash10 out of the box as well. This is great news if you’re after a monstrously fast 3D engine for Flash.
The only downsides (and they are quite significant) at this moment in time are:
1) If you don’t speak Russian, the documentation is non-existent. Even the ASDoc dumping is fully Russian, so unless you can figure out how the whole system works from a couple of demos and a huge list of method names, you’re going to have to do some SERIOUS trial and error!
2) The Commercial use license costs thousands of Euros. If you can absorb this cost (or rather if your client can!) then it’s not an issue. But I wonder how things will fall with regard to people who make the games for free, then try to get them sponsored, or put adverts on the front via MochiBot / GameJacket. I’m guessing that would breach the current license policy.
I’m also very interested in their GUI tools and the Multi-User system, both in development. It could turn out to be a seriously powerful all encompassing suite when complete.
So, given these two things I won’t be jumping in just yet – but it’s certainly something to keep a VERY close eye on!
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