New Bounty Hunter 2 demo

Check the side-panel it's on there. Will write more about it tomorrow, shattered right now!As usual, few bugs. At this point in time all you can do is shoot, steal weakened craft and eject your astronaut. I'll update the game and post it regularly.

Where'd you go, Dude?

Indeed I do seem to have dropped off the face of the planet.
Truth is I've just lost interest in coding games for a while. It's great fun to develop games but it's hard work, especially when you're not just working in Flash but other apps such as Photoshop and 3DS Max, which each have their own steep learning curves.
So, for the time being, I've gone back to my other hobby, writing. You know, novels, short-stories, scripts for movies etc...that was what I did before getting into Flash. And when the motivation to do that fades (it will) I'll be back with avengeance. I'm a bit of a butterfly like that, jumping from hobby to hobby but I always come back around eventually.

Another thing is I've been getting into gaming pretty heavily recently- playing - that is ^-^
You can catch me on PS3 Network EVIL_KRIS_JAPAN. At the moment I'm only into Metal Gear Online and GTA4, occasionally WarHawk. Tekken 6 is coming out in Japan in December so I'll be on that like a fly to shit if anybody out there wants a challenge.

Have patience folks- the dude will return,
Kris
ydjapan.com

Some small Fighting Engine revisions..

Ya nothing major, just popping in to let you all know I'm alive. Actually have been entirely immersed in something other than coding for most of the past year so please forgive me. I know a bunch of you have written to me mostly in regards to the SplatterHouse tutorials but I've been bombarded with so many mails about them that I if I can't get round to you all, once again, I apologise.

I'm so limited for time these days that I've had no chance to sit down and have a pint with my old mate Flash. Actually started a prototype of a Last Ninja remake the other day, got my little ninja leaping around in isometric up already. Definitely getting more comfortable with AS3 these days too.

Just a wee update to the fighting engine I posted before. There's tons of bugs in there I know, but it's getting there, wouldn't you agree? I figure I'll design the whole game first using known sprites as placeholder, then swap them for custom graphics when it's all done. Feel free to decompile this little demo, but be warned the code is dirty, so much so it almost makes me cringe to look at it. I treat me code like my woman folks, beat it around and get it to do what you want whether it wants to or not.

Ok back to the real world. またね

Little Update...

To my Nexus/Sirius demo.
Check it out on the Sidebar link.
Few more levels (to to Floor 5 now!). Better character graphics. Rudimentary enemy AI. Character can now perform some tasty karate moves. That's it. Too busy on Monster Hunter 2 and studying AS3 these days for much else. Hey any sponsors wanna buy Trivia Casino?

Hello guys, been awhile.

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Xmas season and whatnot. Been busy and Jesus CHRIST have I been addicted to Tekken 6!
I don't even want to talk about how much of my salary goes into this frickin game.
You guys outside of Japan won't have played it yet but let me tell you it's a hell of a game. I pretty much gave up on Tekken after about 3. Far far better than the previous versions. Better, faster, more competitive, longer combos. To make it more interesting the game centers have a monitor unit that shows battles between Japans greatest fighters, very entertaining. You can also customise your own player on your mobile phone using a stats card buyable from a nearby machine. Unfortunately, I live in Fukuoka where some of the best players in Japan reside, that equals getting my ass handed to me on a regular basis. It's just frightening the reflexes of these guys- it makes me wonder how they'd handle themselves in a real scrap. Probably kick the crap out of anyone.

As for coding updates;-


It's tough trying to find inspiration to teach people how to make games in an almost obselete environment in AS2. People keep sending me mails about the beat-em up tutes and such but what you've got to understand is that sure, people are still making AS2 games for now but give it a while and watch while the next-gen of AS3 stuff comes out, utilising Papervision 3D and the extra grunt of AS3. In other words, continuing with the tutorials at this stage would be a waste of time. My aim is to gain enough knowledge of AS3 that I can convert most of the tutorials over, but it's extremely time-consuming. People forget that I can't program worth a shit. I'm very much an ideas guy, not so much into cutting-edge programming techniques but rather the whatever-works approach. I've got an artist guy just dying for me to finish him a tile-engine in AS3 and I'm finding it impossible right now. If anybody has some great links to making a flexible tile-engine in AS3, get me in the know OK?

I decided I want to finish off my current projects before I abandon AS2 completely. I've been getting on with the Nexus/Sirius demo. Currently developing a series of combat moves for the main character and found a great mocap resource at http://www.mocapdata.com/
Should be an update soon.

New trivia game about finished...

Ok, EvilKris game usually = hardcore blood'n'guts violence but in this one case I took a step out of my usual psychology and have gone and done us all a juicy little trivia game.

Little background- when the wife unchains me for a night, I often consume my wages playing darts in these amazing Japanese electronic darts-bars (which I KNOW will swoop over Europe one day) and afterwards when I get tired I like to sit down and play those little pub trivia machines they have. Addictive little bastards. So I thought I'd throw one out there myself. That's it. It only took about 3 weeks from start to finish, but I'd say TriviaCasino was one of my classier productions, well-nurtured from start to finish. Every font is drop-shadowed, every question hand-typed, transitions, blur filters, fake 3D, cute sfx, you name it. This one's even been obfuscated so no 15yr old decompiler is getting his greasy mits on that high-score without memorising the encylopedia. No loader in yet, sorry, and it is 1.8 meg so guys with slow internet connections will have to stare at the blank white screen for a bit. Plus I'm trying out FlashInCrypt with this one so there is a trial version stamp on the swf.

The version is beta- there's only 20 questions for each category so far, but I THINK that's all that needs doing. That's kind of why I'm releasing it here, for you guys to give me some feedback. I realise most gamers don't give a ff about Sports and History so I've only bothered with less elegant categories that most gamers can relate to, Music/Entertainment/Video-Games. That's right, bet you've never seen a pub trivia quiz that has questions about games.Don't try too hard to get the high-score as I'll be wiping out the current records when the proper game is released.

I have spotted a couple of bugs here and there and probably forgot about them, so if you see anything, any bad fonts etc, please report it.

So what is TriviaCasino? just your average multi-choice question game with a bit of gambling thrown in. If you get 4 questions right in a row, you'll get a chance to win more points in a bonus round that resembles a slot machine. Furthermore, from time to time a random 'Double Your Money' event will be launched, and if you decide to risk it, you'll have the chance to win twice your current points, or lose the lot. Having the high-score readily viewable on the first screen of the game adds incentive to beat it IMO, and I think I'll probably stick with that design for most of my future games- I figure the more EK trademarks that are recognisable in my games, the less chance my artistic license will be infringed upon by some unscrupulous website.

Well the good news is, me and this fellow Pele/Robin Mitchell chap have decided to embark upon creating a little Metal Slug clone. Not a hell of a lot of originality going on there and if he wasn't such a fabulous artist I'd probably not be so keen. I wouldn't say I'm not a big, big Metal Slug fan, but the businessman inside me was like "The art will sell the game by itself!!" so what the hell...? It's not like I'll be running back to The Damned any day soon after losing months of work on it. Coding new stuff - even if you're not into it- is fun and all is potential cut&paste for use in other projects anyway.

I committed myself to coding it in AS3 to start off with, but progress has been slooooow so instead of trying to get my head around the complicated innards of the new language I decided I may aswell lay it all out in AS2 and then convert it piece by piece to AS3 when it's all done (or pay some other sucker for the task). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for AS3 but Jesus does it make the simplest tasks a pain in the arse at times, I mean, just the other day I was trying to create some simple lines to show me the co-ords of bounding box on an mc- something which would take like two secs in AS2- and three hours later I still couldn't get the bastard compiler to stop throwing out error messages. I guess I'm just an ambitious rodeo-cowboy without the chops to pin down the beast, for now.
I've decided to keep note of what changes between the two languages screwed me up so far, and will be creating a new little AS2-AS3 Ref.Guide for Game Programmers to go up on the Sidebar any day now.

As for the engine, I started off using TonyPa's Tile-Engine but being frank I think if you're going to make a game that has as much art in it as say Metal Slug you're better off with art-based, as you're not repeating many tiles anyway. Andre Michelle created a sweet little art-based prototype for mario over on GotoAndStop.it using vectors and so far it seems the best option to me, being I can derive the co-ords for every platform just by drawing a line over the art background and taking the x,y for each end, and don't have to muck around with a ton of code, either.