Overview | Play | Screenshots
This is the Bird Blast project page. Here you will find information about the project. I will add links to the game under the ‘Play’ section once it is sponsored.
Project Overview
Bird Blast is my second Flash release that is of my own design. It was inspired by Duck Hunt on the NES and is a somewhat simple game where the aim is to shoot the birds before they escape. It features some cool art by Matt Dean and some voice acting by John Faulkner (my old friend from Shadowsoft Games).
I wanted to try a somewhat different approach with the development of this game; I normally focus on making my code exceptionally clean and easy to read, staying away from Global variables and the like, and generally trying to stick to ‘good OOP’ as much as possible. In this project I wanted to see how I’d get on if I did it the other way; using Global variables, not being so fussed about documentation and commenting and generally just trying to get the features in and get the game done. I actually found that it took me a lot longer to work this way; though some features ended up being a lot quicker to implement than they normally would be for me, the project began to suffer in efficiency towards the end of development where I found myself having to update old code and make sense of things that… well, didn’t make much sense. It was an interesting look into coding practices that I’ll definitely be staying away from in future, but I think it has provided valuable insight into why certain good OOP can pay off. I also got a sense of where cheating can come in handy and learned a bit more about how game development is not so black and white as ‘good’ design and ‘bad’ design, but actually that every choice needs due consideration to give a good balance of production efficiency and robustness of the resultant code.
I think the final game is actually quite fun to play and I’m quite happy with it. There are a few ideas I’d have liked to have improved upon but unfortunately there are bills to pay and as such I don’t really have much more time for this version of the game. Maybe I’ll make a sequel…
Play
I’ll update this page with links to the game once it is widely available.
Screenshots
