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 :).
What a busy week it’s been! I’ve hardly had enough time to check the Blog comments, let alone write any new content!
Last weekend I visited Davis and Napa to visit family and Carlie. It was a great weekend, I enjoyed the festivities. I did some food tasting for the big event coming up, and it looks like we found a caterer.
On Monday I started my new project, codename “Traffic” for now, which is a whole lot about moving cars through intersections. In my own life I experience a lot of red lights (literally, not metaphorically). I hate them. Not only do I hit every red light on my way to work but sometimes I get stuck behind someone slow and then can’t make it through a green light! So in my frustration I am making a game about traffic lights, and in the game you get to play the role of a traffic light switcher to alleviate congestion on major roads. It’s fun so far, especially when cars are sent through the same intersection at the same time.
On Thursday last week Joey and I launched our “Bunkers” project, which we eventually named Fox Fyre. It is now available here on this website. It’s a strategy game, not a “oh hey set your angle and fire” game which makes the gameplay a bit different. Many of these games are just trial and error but we really wanted to make the experience real-time and strategic. So there you go, enjoy! It’s been a long project (nearly 9,000 lines of code), so we’re glad to see it out and about. It’s done fairly well across the web. Some complaints about difficulty, but it’s been really mixed! I think it’s because some people are just really good at building strategies and getting good combos…. others not so much.
Tonight I am booking my hotels for my trip to Australia. I’m getting excited about the places I’m staying. One of the places I’m (hopefully) staying at is a treehouse, so my childhood fantasies will finally be realized.
As for last post, if your favourite ice cream was Strawberry, congratulations! You get two points. If your favourite ice cream was anything else, you get 1 point.
Welcome to Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday. Each week I’ll write about a game that somehow influenced by life as a game developer and which I can totally recommend to you because the game is flippin’ sweet. It also has to be old or at least forgotten about until recently.
I recently just released a game called Fox Fyre (to be written about later), but this game here was one of the major influences in the game. This game was made in Qbasic by an unknown author, but for some reason it was on my Middle School DOS computers…. and when it was removed by admins we later put it back on with our 3.5″ IBM floppies. Anyway, this game was incredible… but probably because it was all we had besides Nibbles (snake).
You input a velocity and a direction, by number. Your gorilla throws a banana-shaped bomb object and tries to hit the other gorilla on screen. It’s all displayed in rich 16 colours (don’t quote me on that).
What’s fun about QBasic games is that you can edit them on-the-spot. They are just bodies of code, not executables. They compile when they get played. So for the most part, this is where my programming life began. I used to edit the colours and variables in the game to reflect what I wanted to do in terms of gameplay. I tried to make a new game based on the gorilla game in QBasic but didn’t understand much. I could edit values and not much more than that. At that time I didn’t think I would become a game programmer for a living, but it ended up that way!
Nonetheless, this game is a great QBasic game. Simple but enjoyable, and that’s all anyone ever asked for in a QBasic game. Simple premise, trial and error… but it made it really fun. It’s like throwing playing cards into a hat; you throw once and then you adjust based on your previous throw. This game taps that quite well.
It also really made me want to make a similar style game for quite a while…. it only took 10-11 years to finally be able to do it.
Bunkers is almost done. We have yet to reveal a name for it but it’ll be announced within the coming days. In fact we’re just polishing it up, and it should be out probably this week. There is so much testing to be done. It’s my first real strategy game so it’s a careful process of building up the game and making it not broken. You can view more screenshots over at the Armor Blog (I really need to find a way to syndicate what I write here and there).
After that I have a minigame to-do. It involves traffic lights. I hate traffic lights. More about that later.
And there’s a game somewhere in there about Giraffes too. More about that later.
And the RPG! Man there’s a lot of projects. More about those too later.
As for site news goes, excuse my rant yesterday, I was rather frustrated over “muted gameplay” comments last night. I watch other developers get picked on for not having a mute button, and to me the relevence of muting inside a game seemed so trivial compared to things like core gameplay, graphics, etc. I thought I needed to bring it up. And luckily I had the opportunity to listen to all of you, so all said and done it was interesting to get that feedback and I find myself on the short end of that stick. What a humbling experience as a developer. Anyway…
Anyone who guessed “Honey Bunches of Oats” last post got 2 points. Anyone who guessed the same cereal but narrowed it to “with Strawberries” take another 3 points.
The eye twitching issue I have had in recent days is starting to fade. It twitched for just a couple minutes today but has died for the most part. I got extra sleep and an extra dose of bananas like someone said. I also cut back on caffeine as Con Artists recommended via twitter.
Last night I went to bed at 10 pm to get more sleep, but was awoken quite rudely at 1 am by my apartment’s fire alarm system. The entire apartment complex is wired into the same alarm system meaning if someone sets off the alarm across the way I am still going to hear it. On top of that they put alarms inside each of the apartments so just in case you can’t here the million alarms they installed outside you get it straight outside your bedroom. The alarm went off every 15 minutes until 2 am and I couldn’t even get to bed until 3 am, worrying the alarms would wake me once again.
The shooting/bunkers game is going well. Should be done later this month, may have a less ghetto beta test this time around. More screenshots soon, I might take gameplay video too!
***Second bonus question: Name at least two other items besides cereal on top of the fridge.
Working on our ‘bunkers‘ game, we’ve decided to make the jump to Flash Player 10. We want to use some datatypes only available in Flash CS4, so we’re moving from the safety of Flash Player 9 and making haste towards the newest version of Flash.
We’re hoping it’ll make things a bit interesting.
Joey ran some tests today and the new Vector datatype in Flash 10 is super fast at doing computations. This means that if we have lots of particles we can calculate their movement very, very quickly. More CPU draw means more particles. And as we all know, more is always better.
I’m excited to see what happens tomorrow when CS4 gets dumped on the system. It’ll be Actionscript 3 with flair.
