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 :).
Haha, well a lot of people took Elephant Rave HD sLoWdOwN Remix as a non-April Fools joke which leads me to believe I should try less hard on future stunts. But April Fools! To me it was a joke because it seemed freaking hilarious to play Elephant Rave for 5 minutes at 5x slower, but others… seemed to enjoy it? Okay, I’ll take it.
Had a good weekend finishing Borderlands and Pokemon White. Moving onto Borderlands expansion packs, that game is wicked fun.
On the homefront I’m revamping the Exit-Path tile engine. The rewrite is one of dozens of rewrites of Tile Engine, which is an engine I’ve been writing, rewriting, and using in my games for the past few years (Exit-Path, Achievement Unlocked, TITOL, Super Mafia Land, etc). I’m working on that this week, as well as supplementing new obstacles and challenges!
I’ve been looking at Smartfox 2 server and it’s looking faster for Multiplayer, so I’m hoping to take a look at that later this week too!
After months and months of work, I am really, really excited to announce a surprise reboot of one of my more popular games that fits under 250 pixels wide, Elephant Rave. But before we do that, let’s see how far we have come:
• 2009 - Elephant Rave releases as a worldwide pachyderm phenomenon, being featured around the world on various news sites grabbing millions of visits. Fights for Elephant diplomacy skyrocket.
• 2010 - Elephant Rave HD releases to the world, enabling those who want to show off their elephant diplomacy on their HD screens to do so.
And now in 2011 I am incredibly proud to announce an even better, more meaningful game… now over 5x longer than the original and with a medley reworked graphics and code. It’s Elephant Rave HD sLoWdOwN Remix, and it’s here to do knock your socks off in the most slow-paced, casual, “I’m at work eating a sandwich but want some jib-jab about elephants” way possible.
I have to admit, I have caught a lot of flack about Elephant Rave being too difficult. “This game is too fast and difficult” they say! “0/5 this game is impossible.” No it’s not! Well, not now at least!
Elephant Rave is a game about moving left and right, trying to avoid laser beams in an elephant-conscious game environment. This is great to someone who excels at gaming, but to those who are more casual gamers or need a bit of help getting through the game… I felt like I was losing them. This is a game with meaning and it’s hard to understand when everything is moving so damn fast. I need to grab that “I can’t beat the first level” audience, but how?
Elephant Rave HD sLoWdOwN Remix not only is a bunch of capitalized and lowercase letters mixed together but a great version of Elephant Rave that runs just a bit slower so you can really sink in the morals of elephant-to-media relationships. The elephant is a really important element of not only human society but world society, and if we categorize, judge, and persecute these noble creatures as haphazardly as we dump them into Flash games we’ll be regretting it soon enough.
A lot of careful work went into Elephant Rave Slow. After playing the original several times I realized that the game played like a 5-year-old with 12 Coca-Colas transfused into their body. This is not a great way to really drive a message home. Who was I kidding? No one could read that fast and play the game to get the message. I needed a better option, and that option was simple. Slow everything the heck down.
Not only will newcomers get a great crack at this game but vets of the old Elephant Rave will get something out of it too. In fact, they’ll be getting a game that is approximately 5-6x longer than the original! That’s over 6 minutes of gameplay! In addition there is 500% more music to tune to. There’s something for everyone in Elephant Rave Slow.
If you are looking for the modified audio track you can play it here:
I hope you enjoy the game! Enjoy the first day of a great, more approachable month of gaming!
I am building Elephant Rave HD at the moment and I am at the point of building the beams that fall down the screen to the beat of the music. The issue is that there is only one beam per beat… each beam, even when scaled up to the new screen size, is not nearly enough to get in the way of killing the elephant as it did at the tiny size at 225w (versus 800w). So what is the proper solution?
Loading 3-4 beams at a time seems like the mathematical solution… the game is 3-4 times bigger; however it means that beams are creating mega-overlapping beams at times when that many are loaded. Even when told to not load on top of each other they create a bit of mega-beam… and then if told to sit even wider it just creates a gameplay environment that is unsatisfactory for beams per beat.
So… what now?
Currently contemplating the issue. Maybe you have some ideas.
