Lunatic Pandora

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.

Now I just need to remember to update more often…

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:

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!

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…

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I’ve updated the programming portfolio with a small demo I made in my second year of University. It was a side project based on my “Sweets” game’s cel shading. I took the code from “Sweets” as a base and worked on improving the cel shading algorithm’s speed – the original idea being to showcase the cel shading from “Sweets” in its own small program. In the end I managed to significantly improve performance as well as adding an improved lighting system that allowed for different coloured lights, as well as multiple light sources and colour mixing. The end result is not really traditional cel shading but still looks pretty cool.

You can find it in the programming portfolio, or at the project page here.

I’ve been hugely busy with my BSc Honours Dissertation over the last 6 months, and have finally finished and added it to the programming portfolio page.

The game, evolution program and source can be downloaded from the  Genetic Tower Defense project page. The game is fairly simple to pick up and play, and those interested in the ideas of genetic programming might want to have a play with the evolution program too.

These last few days have been surprisingly hectic. The results of my testing provided some very important last-minute changes that needed to be made to the code. The most important was that the resume support was broken if the application had some form of unexpected quit. We had a 6-hour power outage half way through my 24 hour test runs. Once the power was back, I attempted to resume the process only to find that the serialization data was corrupt and the process could not be resumed. This made perfect sense as I was overwriting the same files each time – I’m glad this happened when it did though, as I’ve been able to rectify the problem by making it alternate the main ‘resume.txt’ file with a backup ‘~resume.txt’ file and serializing classes to a separate file each time. I’ve also made it write the resume data every generation instead of every 50th, as hard drive space isn’t really a premium and the most this will run to is a few gigabytes.

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I’ve released the playable version of the game to the masses, ready to start collecting results!

Here’s the original post:

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First of all, you can download the game HERE.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a simple tower defense game to investigate the relationship between human learning and machine learning through genetic programming. It is part of a research project.

I’ve finished the basic game, and now it’s time to start collecting data both from the evolution of the computer AI and from human players. I’m posting this here in the hope that some of you might want to try my game out, and in the process help me to gather data about how human players learn to play the game.

All I need you to do is play the game; when you’ve finished playing and close it, the game will send the score, time and number of times you’ve played the game to my webserver, so that I can later use the data in my project report. (note that this functionality has now been disabled)

I may also continue to develop the game after my research project is done, so feel free to give any miscellaneous feedback too. In fact, the more you give me, the better, even if it’s not constructive or whatever. even if you think the game is just shite, let me know because it helps me gauge interest

Here are some screenshots…

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The game is practically done at this point. I’ve been doing some additional playtesting to find any bugs that need fixing, as well as game balancing issues and geenral improvements that need to be made. One of the more prominent problems was that it was hard for players to remember the range of each tower; to combat this, I added a range marker while placing towers that can be seen here:

The range marker displays while choosing where to place a tower, depicting teh area in which is can shoot.

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