Latest Posts

• By Rich

  Tags

  colour chain, kongregate, newgrounds

  Posted in

  Games

  1 comment

  Colour Chain Release Stats

  7th May 2008

  1

  The game Colour Chain was officially released onto the Shaun the Sheep site 6 days ago, and has been going down well. The “Top 5 scores of the day” feature is proving a good draw / challenge. So far the game has had 6000 plays in 6 days (which is on par for the traffic levels we get). The average time someone spends playing the game is a very healthy 6 minutes 5 seconds.

  Wanting to experiment further I released Colour Chain onto Kongregate, Newgrounds and AddictingGames to see what the response would be like, and to get used to the submission process.

  I wrapped my game in a GameJacket so I could monitor its travels, prepared some screen grabs and let it fly.

  The game appeared on Newgrounds instantly (as an “Unapproved” title) and I was shocked to see it gain 300 plays in the first couple of hours. Newgrounds obviously has some serious traffic. It’s got a pretty good rating on Newgrounds (3.18 / 5.0) and the comments are surprisingly friendly. Not at all what I expected.

  Kongregate wouldn’t let me use my GameJacket version, so I had to upload a plain vanilla one and trust their stats. It still received 300+ plays within hours of release. The average rating is 2.64, which is totally fair, and the comments are mostly constructive which is nice.

  AddictingGames hasn’t released the game yet, so we’ll wait and see what happens. I’ll post again when I have some more stats to share.
  Play Colour Chain on Kongregate

  Play Colour Chain on Newgrounds

• By Rich

  Tags

  adobe swf

  Posted in

  Cool Links

  0 comments

  SWF format goes totally open!

  1st May 2008

  0

  The Flash blogging world has pretty much erupted today with this news. I read it first on Aral’s blog, but the short of it is that Adobe are going to make the SWF/FLV/FL4 formats totally open, with the license restrictions removed. This is massive, and this video details it all. The more pervasive the format becomes (across multiple devices, hello iPhone!) the more avenues we’ll have to deliver our content into. Which can only be a good thing!

• By Rich

  Tags

  spectrum

  Posted in

  Demoscene

  0 comments

  Pimp My Spectrum

  30th Apr 2008

  0

  The winner of the Breakpoint 64k PC demo this year is just brilliant. It’s not a PC demo done in the “spectrum style” – it’s actually a Spectrum demo, running in an emulator, all in 64k. Ok so the emulator is “overclocked” but still, bloody hell.. this is some mad Z80 skills.

• By Rich

  Tags

  asteroids, flint, glitter, particles, thrust

  Posted in

  Experiments

  8 comments

  Glitter Thrust

  25th Apr 2008

  8

  I was playing around with Flint 1.0.2 and a bit of Asteroids ship code that I had (from the Keith Peters AS3 Animation book.) I had the emitter following the ship, leaving a nice particle trail as it went. And then it occurred to me – why not make the particle renderer a mask for an image? A couple of minutes later and the end result surprised even me! Fly around with the cursor keys, as you do so your ship will push the swirling black smoke away revealing the picture behind, leaving a trail of shiny glitter particles as it does so.

  [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/glitter_man.swf” width=”550″ height=”400″]

• By Rich

  Tags

  particles

  Posted in

  ActionScript3

  0 comments

  Kaboom!

  22nd Apr 2008

  0

  

  I was pleased to read today that Seb Lee-Delisle has released a new version of his particles demos for AS3. While not really a match for Flint, it is always great to have choice, and sometimes it’s better to sacrifice the large Flint library in exchange for a much more light-weight solution such as this. It’s fast, works well and you can produce some really pretty effects with it.

  The downsides are a lack of documentation (basically work it out yourself from the source if you were not lucky enough to attend one of his great talks). But hey, that’s why you’re an AS3 geek, right? 🙂 The zip file contains numerous test files, most offering different style effects and all of the source to learn from.