Latest Posts

• By Rich

  Tags

  FGL, RobotJamGames, star fish

  Posted in

  Games

  4 comments

  Star Fish is released

  24th Sep 2009

  4

  I’m pleased to say that my latest game Star Fish is released and ready to play. Enjoy some underwater aquatic antics in this mouse avoider / collect-em-up. Although the whole game was started and finished in a day, I’m still happy with the presentation and playability. If I had wanted to spend more time I would have introduced moving baddies and more levels. Even so, there are 25 to complete, which is probably 20 more than most people will ever see 😉

  The game uses artwork by the same artist that did the cute insects in my game Bug Box. I think the “cute factor” really played against me when the game was up for bidding on FlashGameLicense. Chris/FGL admitted to me that they don’t have too many “kid friendly” portals on there, which made the game a hard sell. Still, my thanks to RobotJamGames and BigFishGames for taking it on 🙂

  I’m very pleased to have created another game this year. I reckon I’ve still got a few left in me, but the months are closing in, and I sense the proximity of 2010.

• By Rich

  Tags

  flickr, painting, prototype, water

  Posted in

  Experiments

  4 comments

  Flickr Water Painting Demo

  17th Sep 2009

  4

  I had an idea for a game where you had to restore colour to the world, by speeding around in a boat and dropping colour bombs onto the greyscale picture below. I thought it’d be fun if the images were pulled in from Flickr dynamically, creating a constant ever-changing sea of levels.

  A few hours and a prototype later, and I realise it’s not actually going to work after all. There’s just no easy way to control what comes back from Flickr – you can’t search for images which just have “Big” sizes available, and you can’t easily exclude black and white images, which totally ruin the painting part of the game! There are also commercial issues with the Flickr API Keys needed to search and request images. So in the end what was a nice idea in theory, turned out to be a bit crappy in reality.

  However I was left a random but pretty prototype. I’ve removed the boat/gameplay element, so it’s just the water painting demo hooked into Flickr.

  Lots of pictures come back with “Image not available“, so just search again. If it seems to hang for a while after clicking Search, then just search again! Paint with the left mouse button. Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes only on the third or so attempt.

  [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/painterFlickr.swf” width=”640″ height=”480″]

  One of my artist friends commented that this made him look at the use of colour in a whole different light. He said that as you start filling the image in, the colours that come through are often totally different to what you’d expect – and when the colour is presented in low volumes it can often look very wrong. As if your brain has substituted the colours for you, and when they don’t match it gets confused.

  I think there’s something quite calming / feng shui about it all personally.

• By iLKke

  Tags

  color, mobile, pixel

  Posted in

  Pixel Art

  0 comments

  Pixel Application for Mobile Phones

  15th Sep 2009

  0

  Here’s a little app I concieved years ago, while I was still wasting a couple of hours every day riding the bus to work. It’s a program for making pixel graphics, and has a very streamlined interface that has been designed especially for use with mobile phones, on the bus, in a park, on the toilet…

  This is a mockup for 176*208 phones. I might make another one in 240*320 soon.

  

  Here’s a version with the help overlay turned on, which gives you a glimpse of the awesomestness of the interface 😀

  

  So, if you are a J2ME or Symbian programmer, and interested in this kind of endeavours, drop me a line.

• By Rich

  Tags

  ide, linkage, movieclip

  Posted in

  Tutorials

  6 comments

  Creating MovieClips dynamically at run-time using the Linkage Class

  15th Sep 2009

  6

  I found myself needing to create a MovieClip dynamically at run-time. But all I had was a string representation of its Class, as set in the Linkage properties for the Symbol. In my situation the string had been stored in an xml file. Now you could use a standard switch/case block to do this, checking the string and creating a new MovieClip as required. But in this case there were hundreds of possible things it could have been, and it seemed a very “hacky” way to do it.

  So how do you go about creating an actual display object from just the Linkage Class value? Thankfully it’s pretty easy, and this new bit of code now sits happily in my “everyday functions” collection!

  Edit: Updated to be a little more robust, and removed an un-needed cast:

  [as]
  public function createMovieClipFromLinkageValue(linkageValue:String):MovieClip
  {
  try
  {
  var libraryReference:Class = getDefinitionByName(linkageValue) as Class;
  }
  catch (error:ReferenceError)
  {
  trace(error);
  }

  if (libraryReference)
  {
  return new libraryReference();
  }

  return new MovieClip;
  }

  var newClip:MovieClip = createMovieClipFromLinkageValue(“playerFishMC”);
  [/as]

  Make sure you have imported flash.utils.getDefinitionByName.

  Simply pass this function the Linkage value as entered in the IDE, and it’ll spit a MovieClip back at you (providing it was a MovieClip in the first place). I’m sure you can see how to extend it to return a Sprite instead, should you require that.

• By Rich

  Tags

  action, bug box, game in a day, mouse avoider, star fish

  Posted in

  Games

  5 comments

  My new game “Star Fish”

  10th Sep 2009

  5

  Woohoo, I’m on a roll! 🙂 Tonight I finished my new game: Star Fish. It has been uploaded to FlashGameLicense and is under bidding there, so hopefully someone will take a bite (pun intended). Star Fish is a fun little undersea mouse-avoider / collect-em-up, spread over 25 levels.

  

  (This is a screen shot of a particularly hectic level!)

  If you’re an FGL friend then you can play it here on FlashGameLicense (developer ratings appreciated!). Everyone else will have to wait until the official release, sorry (or just email me)

  I developed the whole game in 12 hours flat (over the course of 3 days, working evenings). That makes it the absolute fastest game I’ve ever created. It also means I finally managed to achieve my goal of making a game in a day that I set out to do with my previous game Bug Box, but ultimately failed. The next couple of games that I’ve got in development are much larger, and will take a lot longer to bring to fruition, so I’m happy to have sneaked this one out.

  I’m a bit worried that the cute visuals will put sponsors off. It makes the game immediately family / girl / casual portal friendly, but it also means it’ll drop like a lead balloon on the likes of Newgrounds or Kongregate. Such is life 🙂 This is a game I’d be happy for anyone in my family to play, and for that I’m pleased. I’ll keep you all updated as to how it performs.