Hello everyone. I’ve finally updated again, this time adding a contract game I worked on and that was sponsored back in February, as well as finally updating the Flashplok project page. Check them out via the sidebar or portfolio page!
I’ve also added a PayPal donations button, so if you feel as though you want to help me out (everything helps as I’m a poor freelancer these days!) you can drop me a dollar or two. Thanks!
In other news, I’m working on my third Flash game, due to be finished in the upcoming weeks so there’ll be more news about that as it begins to surface. Music is also going exceptionally well; I recently composed the score to the epic game Castaway 2 which is among the most followed and anticipated RPG Flash games around. I absolutely love composing for RPGs and I’m currently working on the soundtrack for another upcoming RPG in the form of Amiran developed by Zac Linton. Lots of projects are coming up and it’s looking to be a fun and busy month for music and programming alike!
I’ll later be adding some of my more recent music to my music portfolio as well as creating a page specifically outlining the terms of my music contract work so that more people can use my composition services.
I’ve updated the Music Portfolio page to have an embedded music player. The track notes are still available but mp3s of the tracks are no longer available to download – this is because I plan on selling more of my music. In future I would like to still add the music to the site but it may cause licensing problems if I have them all up for download. It also makes the page a bit easier to use and the sidebar is no longer huge. All in all a great success!
Note that any past links to individual tracks will still point directly to the track notes for that specific track; If you want to listen to the music just scroll up. In future I’ll just be linking to the portfolio page…
So I managed to let a whole year go by without posting any of these tracks that I composed for flash games. I’ve basically been accepting requests to compose custom music for games (specifically games made by my friend who develops games under the company name Cacti Games) over the last year or so and have done 11 or so tracks so far. I’ve added them all to my music portfolio (which can also be accessed from the sidebar to the right) so you can listen to them in a central place. I still have some more music I have yet to add to the portfolio but I figured that it was a good idea to get all the ‘flash game’ ones done today, so there they are. Included are the following:
It really doesn’t feel like it’s been so long since I updated this blog. FlashPlok was sponsored and is awaiting release (which should be happening in the next few days, after which I’ll update and add to it’s portfolio page) and I collaborated with Revive Games on a game called “Mr Fat Snake” which is up for bidding now. I’m about to start on a new flash game which I’ll probably be writing about over the next month or so. My new year’s resolution is officially to make sure I keep updating this blog regularly; I’ve missed doing so and it would be really helpful if it was actually up to date!
A new Flash game by Cacti Games has been published around the web – Deep Diver (Kongregate link). Cacti Games is a friend of mine from university and I often make music for his games. This particular game is doing very well having had over 100,000 views in its first few days; that’s 100,000 players who have heard some of my music!
There are two tracks featured in the game: “Tropical Paradise” and “Deep Explorer”. I’ll be uploading these short tracks to the site at a later date.
ActionScript 3 behaves somewhat differently to C++ or C# in terms of optimisation strategies and performance of code. Little things that you’d naturally assume wouldn’t make a big difference in a language like C++ actually have astonishing performance demolition capabilities in AS3. While on my AS3 learning journey, I spent some time researching optimisation techniques specific to the AS3 language, and I was quite surprised at some of the suggestions I found – so surprised that I didn’t believe a lot of them at first. Things like using Number (similar to a C++ float or double) instead of uint giving clear performance bonuses, and typecasts being more efficient if you force them implicitly rather than explicitly typcasting with such code as int(numberVar).
It turns out some of these optimisation ideas are leftovers from AS2 where things were still very much in the process of becoming more than just a scripting language, but a lot of them actually hold weight and do indeed have a significant impact when they are in a tight loop or a piece of code that has to be highly performant. One of the greatest resources for optimisation strategies in AS3 that i have found is Grant Skinner’s “Optimisation Strategies for Flash” presentation, available here. The big difference between this and the wealth of tips available elsewhere is that this is actually an AS3 app that tests the optimisations suggested at runtime giving you the real results of how the code performs. It really is a little golden guide to keeping your AS3 code performing pretty nicely!
I’ve added the FlashPlok!! project page to the programming portfolio. The bidding is still in progress for FlashPlok!!, so it might be a while before I can put a playable version of the game on the page. At the moment I’ve got the trailer and some extra information on the page, along with a work-in-progress review page that until now was private. I’ll be adding screenshots later. Enjoy!
Over the last month and a half I’ve been working on a Flash (technically FlashDevelop + Flex 3) project to test the waters of FlashGameLicense, a site for selling licenses for your Flash games to sponsors and earn a bit of money from all that hard work (;P). Some may have guessed that I was working on something in AS3 since I started making posts about it a little while ago…
Considering I am and want to be a programmer (or possibly a musician as backup), I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years working with programs like 3DS Max and level editing tools like Hammer and UnrealEd. I don’t really have any interest at all in being a 3D artist or level designer myself, but I feel that one of the most important aspects of being a good game developer is team play. A large part of being a good team player is knowing your other team members and how they work. This is even more important, of course, if you want to be a tools programmer, but any programmer should strive to have some experience with the tools their other team members use.
Here’s a short video I created using my rudimentary knowledge of 3D Studio to give an example. While I personally may not use the program very often, I’m really glad I know how it works because it gives me insight into how the artists in my team are going to be doing what they do; I don’t need to be an expert at it, but since I know the workflow I could theoretically step up to the mark if I needed to fill in as a tools programmer. Not only that, but I can design an assets pipeline around how the artists are used to working, making everyone’s job easier.
Video is hosted on Vimeo. Also available on YouTube.
One of the most frustrating things I’ve had to contend with while working with Flex/ActionScript 3 is its somewhat dodgy implicit typecasting. It’d be fine if there were method to its madness, but a lot of code I’ve written that includes some implicit casts has been working fine one minute, then broken for no obvious reason and suddenly a compile later began to work perfectly again. A most annoying and frustrating issue indeed. It is entirely possible, probable even, that it’s simply a problem with the specific version of the Flex compiler I’m using – I’ll explain it anyway though. Here’s an example I’ve been working with over the last 30 minutes, involving my RandomNumber class.
While browsing I happened across this blog post, which I found incredibly interesting. The guy who made it, Simon Gladman, says that he wanted to try generating font characters using random triangles and genetic algorithms, and the result is pretty much awesome. Within a minute or two you can start to see the characters forming, and it doesn’t take long before you see genuine results. The actual application can be directly accessed here.