My name is John and you found my website! I make Flash games and do other things. I have this website as a sort of homestead for myself and my work. Thanks for visiting :).
I already featured Parappa the Rapper in a previous episode of Old Game That Doesn’t Suck Thursday. But someone asked me the question the other day, “who is your favourite video game character?”
What a tough question, I responded.
A favourite video game character could mean a lot of different things. One character might be more fun to play over another, but one may have some defining characteristic such as persona or demeanor. One might just look cool while one might be super powerful and stylish doing so. There’s so much to take into consideration.
But as you may have guessed, I instantly bring up one character: Parappa the Rapper.
Parappa embodies everything I strive for in life: Honesty and integrity, hard work and positive attitude. During the game he spends his time preparing to impress a girl by training at a gym, learning to drive, and getting a job to fund all that. He never faltered even when others shadowed his efforts and when things seemed impossibly hard to overcome. And in the end it all paid off.
He has incredibly positive attitude and good demeanor; something rarely seen in modern gaming. The FPS culture of today seems to forget about genuinely good characters and at most resolve to a karma system that relies on a much harder path of being good. Parappa exerts this quality from start to finish. He’s awesome.
So Parappa the Rapper is my favourite video game character. A bit of a diversion from the usual OGTDST but it’s the way I look at my own life. It’s good to find something in common with a complete stranger, especially a rapping dog.
While I am void of any good screenshots for the text based-adventure I’m working on, I can take this time to talk about the programs I use for Flash game development at the office and home.
Adobe Flash CS3/Flash CS4 has been the powerhouse for the past few years for my Flash production. It’s expensive at $700, but it is by far the best tool out there. There are other programs out there that are free but most I have worked with don’t quite seem to do what I want. It’s both drawing program, Actionscript coding environment, and test platform for your Flash projects. They have a 30-day trial on the website so it’s worth checking out even if you want to see if Flash is a viable option.
Adobe Photoshop Cs3/CS4 have also been incredibly helpful as a graphics tool. I primarily use Photoshop for manipulating photos as seen in Dark Cut 3, TBA2, etc. The power of image editing becomes important when working with large backgrounds and bitmaps that Flash can’t handle too hot. It’s also really good at sizing down screenshots and working with static images for the web, there tends to be a lot of different size images and screenshots for different websites. It’s also $700, so once again check out the demo if you want to see it on your own computer.
Audacity is a free program I have been using for sound editing. I typically don’t make my own sound effects but I have to edit my music and sounds somewhere. This program isn’t terribly powerful but that’s exactly what I need. Any bulging program would not play nice with Photoshop and Flash being open at the same time.
And with these three I’m pretty much set to take on a Flash game.
One other thing to note is that most Adobe products are only $200 with a student ID. So if you’re jet-set on making a Flash game past the 30 day trial think about getting a student version of the program.
Last weekend I went with Tin, Roo, and Carlie to the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It’s a really neat museum, especially since they revamped the entire museum and upgraded a huge number of exhibits. It was a photographer’s dream, and with my new wide-angle lens I managed to snap a few good ones.
One new exhibit I really liked was the rainforest exhibit. It’s an enclosed ecosystem full of wildlife and plants to replicate a real rainforest.
Inside there were so many butterflies! I ended up with about 100 photos of butterflies but got it down to a few butterfly pics I really liked.
The butterflies really liked Carlie for some reason.
Elsewhere the museum had beautiful aquariums and different animals. There was so much to see it took the entire day to see everything. One last thing I saw was the roof which was made completely of native plants. What a neat roof.
Maybe those who played enough of infinite mode had enough… but one player didn’t. They decided to play Fox Fyre as long as they could and behold, they beat level 100.
*Spoiler Alert*
This is quite an accomplishment since we built to game without knowing if someone could actually beat level 100. We put an ending there just in case. There is a point in the game when there are so many turrets it is impossible to even generate a level, so we had to stop the game at 100.
I got a new lens this week! It’s a super wide angle meaning that it grabs a lot of picture compared to a normal lens. I played around with it for a while but one of the first things I did was play around with some long 20-30 second exposures in my apartment.
I tried to procure some basic shapes such as a happy face, it’s rather difficult. You can totally see my shorts and leg in the above picture.
The star turned out rather nice. Below I used a really long exposure to capture a path across the apartment.
If you want to check out all of them you can clicky here. There’s not many but I hope to do some more outdoor long exposure in the future (I want to get some traffic and such in-motion).
