http://devmag.org.za/2009/04/25/perlin-noise/

http://flashpunk.net/forums/index.php?topic=928.msg13962#msg13962

It appears that it’s time for my bi-annual post. ;P

I’ve added the project page for my new game, Bird Blast, under my programming portfolio. The game is currently up for sponsorship on FlashGameLicense and should hopefully be widely available online within the next month or so. I’ve also submitted Mr Fat Snake to BlackBerry AppWorld and am considering porting Mr Fat Snake and Bird Blast to android phones.

I’ve done some minor updating to the site including updating the source for Genetic Tower Defense to compile out-of-the-box with Visual Studio 2010. I should probably do the same with RoTo, but that is a much more complex project in terms of dependencies so it may take some more work than GTD.

I have lots of new music to add and I’ll hopefully get around to doing that some time this week. I’m really hoping to be able to find time to update this blog once a week – it’s ambitious I know, but now that I know there’s actually a few people reading this I have a renewed vigour to get back into it!

Hopefully it won’t be another 6 months before I make a new post here.

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.

Now I just need to remember to update more often…

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…

From “Space Cadet Shooter”:

• Ice Planet
• Combat and Discovery
• Clash! (Boss Theme)

From “Deep Diver”:

• Deep Exploration
• Tropical Paradise

From “Fleet Command”:

• And Then There Were Two
• Campaign in Infinity

From an unreleased shooter game:

• Open Spaces
• Chaos Theory

From “Eye Eye”:

• Lurking Cell
• Incognito

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!

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.

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!

For those who don’t know, the way FGL works is that once you have a game ready you can upload it to the site and other developers will play it and give you some feedback and reviews. At your discretion you can submit it for sponsor viewing and if the game passes a basic quality standards approval process it’ll get an editor’s rating and go up for sponsor bidding. Hopefully sponsors who own flash game portals (like Kongregate, Newgrounds and King) will bid on the game and eventually you’ll accept one of their offers. Finally, you add their branding to your game and they will distribute it around the web on their own portals and others – some sponsors even allow you to have ads in your game, leading to some extra revenue!

So to get an idea of how the whole process works and to see how viable it would be for funding  a 6-month or year long break, I decided I’d make a simple little game. The game I came up with is FlashPlok, a fun and addictive puzzle game based loosely on a stage in Meteos for the Nintendo DS. The idea of the game is to swap coloured blocks in columns to match them up in groups, casuing them and all the blocks on top of them to disappear. I’ve actually basically finished the game and am planning on submitting it for sponsorship approval in the next week or two. The trailer is watchable above.

Although this doesn’t clearly explain how to play, it’ll give you an idea of how it looks in action. Two of the things I’ve focused on whilst making this game were addictive gameplay and polish; I’ve always been quite hesitant to work on Flash games because of the stigma that surrounds them of generally being low quality compared to a commercial product. FlashPlok relies on a high level of polish and clean, clear and simple graphics (with some nice effects) to give it a tidy feel reminiscent of games like Peggle. Another goal of mine was to design the game from the ground up with touch screens in mind; the game is fully playable using only a touch screen. This presented a slew of challenges, the biggest being in the interface design – I had to keep the screen size smallish so that it could be hosted on most sponsors’ websites (in the end I opted for 700×540, but I started with 800×600) but I also had to have relatively large blocks and user interface elements to allow for easy touch screen play.

I’ll be posting more information about the game soon, including a project portfolio page for it. I also have a bunch of music tracks to add to the site so stay tuned for those.

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.

It’s not only important to understand your artists and level designers. Every member of the team has an important and critical role in making the game what it is – at least 25% of the job of being a programmer is to make everyone else’s lives as easy as possible. Take the Quality Assurance team for example: I can add a lot of debug output that can streamline the QA process, not only from the tester’s perspective but from the other programmers’ too. Since I know a bit about music and production, I can work with the audio team to make the sound the best it can be – communication with other team members is probably the biggest advantage of playing with all the tools and taking part in all the possible roles.

If an artist comes to me and starts talking about UV unwrapping, I can understand him and facilitate getting his work into the game. If a musician wants to know what DSP effects I can add to the engine, I can tell him, and if he wants a specific effect I can do my best to add it. If a level designer wants a certain gameplay element for his level, I stand a good chance of knowing where he’s coming from. Don’t forget that the whole is more important than the part!