Latest Posts

• By Rich

  Tags

  edge, Happy New Year, html5

  Posted in

  Game Development

  12 comments

  A quick glance back and a long look forward

  1st Jan 2012

  12

  Happy New Year! 2011 was certainly eventful. While I won’t dwell too long on the past I will pick out a few key moments and drop my 2012 thoughts into the mix.

  

  2011 was the busiest year yet in terms of blog posts. As well as a new redesign we published 104 articles. Everything from coding tutorials, lots of Ilija’s stunning artwork and of course observations on the Adobe debacle. This is a pace I don’t intend to reduce in 2012 although focus is going to shift from being so heavily Flash based.

  At the start of 2011 we were still riding high from the successful launch of Cat Astro Phi and it remains to this day my favourite game we’ve created so far. In terms of actual game releases 2011 was pretty light with only 1 full game Chickaboom and one mini-game Jingle Bells. The reason being that at the start of 2011 I released the first version of my Flixel Power Tools. What started out as a few helper classes turned into quite the monster by the end of the year, boasting 32 different classes, 88 examples and an interactive test suite that I’m still really proud of. It was my largest open source project yet and I’m extremely proud that developers are genuinely using it in their games.

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• By Rich

  Tags

  balls, christmas, game, one-click

  Posted in

  Games

  0 comments

  Play Jingle Balls – Our Christmas gift to you all :)

  22nd Dec 2011

  0

  

  I felt like making a “Game in a Day” and this little Christmas mini-game pinged out the other end as the result. 6 hours last night, about the same again tonight and we’re done. And putting me to shame Ilija did the graphics in just 1 hour, on a lunch break at work. Damn his lightning fingers 🙂

  You get 3 clicks (1 click per round). When you click it explodes a snow-flake which scales up in size a little bit and then fizzles out. If it touches anything while it exists, that item explodes, and thus a chain reaction occurs. Basically see how many items you can destroy per round with your single click.

  Ok so it’s not exactly Skyrim, but see how high a score you can get anyway 🙂 and enjoy the cute music and fx from Olley Neale, who literally composed them in the space of a few minutes notice as a result of a tweet I sent around this morning. Ahh the power of twitter!

  Anyway have fun and if you celebrate it, Happy Christmas!

  (hit the jump to play the game, embedded below)

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• By Rich

  Tags

  amiga, demo, flodjs, mod, xm

  Posted in

  Demoscene

  2 comments

  Amiga Demo Gallery and JavaScript MOD/XM Replay Source

  17th Dec 2011

  2

  

  I’m a massive fan of demos, both old-school and new. There’s just something elegant, creative and raw about them. A while ago I downloaded the complete Break’s Amiga Demo Scene Collection. And I’ve been pouring through them file by file, taking screen grabs of the bits that caught my eye! I’m not very far through but already I’ve taken over 600 screen shots. I find them quite inspirational as well as containing some amazing pixel art work here and there.

  So I’ve opened an Amiga Demo Grabs Gallery on this site to collect them all in. Feel free to browse the collection, 100 images per page! There’s a lightbox script with easy slide-show if you’d like to sit back and just watch. Each image also has a permalink should you wish to share it. I’ll be updating them irregularly, dropping another 50 or so images in whenever I can. They’re ordered by “most recently added first”, so check back from time to time for the latest grabs. Incidentally the screen shot above is from Ilija’s very first Amiga demo artwork 🙂 Say no more.

  FlodJS 1.0 – MOD / XM Replay in JavaScript

  Remaining on an Amiga theme Christian has recently released FlodJS 1.0. This is a JavaScript port of his famous set of AS3 libraries that replay a massive variety of Amiga format music. From the original Ultimate SoundTracker, to NoiseTracker, ProTracker and more esoteric formats such as SidMon and Future Composer, he’s covered them nearly all. There is also a JavaScript port of his FastTracker 2 player meaning XM file playback in your HTML5 games is now totally possible. Full details can be found on the FlodJS page.

• By Rich

  Tags

  AIR3, gpu, home sheep home, iOS, pc download

  Posted in

  Aardman

  26 comments

  Home Sheep Home 2 is out! Developer insights into the cross-platform build process

  8th Dec 2011

  26

  This has been a long time coming. Nearly a years worth of puzzle boarding, planning, animating, development, testing and packaging. But it’s finally out! Home Sheep Home 2: A Little Epic landed today across multiple platforms: Web (Flash), iOS (iPhone and iPad HD) and PC Download and is sitting happily on homesheephome2.com waiting for you to pay it a visit 🙂

  

  The original game was something of a viral success story. Created in around12 days, primarily to promote new Shaun the Sheep episodes, it went absolutely ballistic on launch getting nearly 1 million plays per day at its peak. In 18 months it had managed 102 million plays and even today still pulls in quarter of a million players daily, with large clear peaks at the weekends.

  It’s fair to say the success of the game took us a little by surprise. We knew it was good, we knew the concept was quite original, had nice cross-gender appeal and the puzzles were challenging without being frustrating. But we had no idea that so many people out there would agree! It was quite amusing at first when the clones started to appear. Somewhat less respectable companies ripped the game off and it was unofficially ported to iOS and Android.

  A Chinese company even decided to steal all of the graphics and code, re-colour the sheep pink, throw in a few new levels and released it as “Home Sheep Home 2”. Somewhere around this point it was no longer funny any more and we realised it was time to  invest in making a true sequel (and as a side note: In the PC version there is a cheat mode that turns all of the sheep pink, in a not so subtle middle-finger to the original rip 🙂

  [ Read more for developer insight on the build process ]

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• By iLKke

  Tags

  black and white, game art, paintings, pencils, pixel art

  Posted in

  Art

  10 comments

  A year in Pixels and Paint (2007)

  6th Dec 2011

  10

  

  A collection of 48 pieces of artwork created during 2007, spanning pixel, pencil and paintbrush styles.

  Full gallery after the jump! Let us know your favourite in the comments 🙂

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