Hola amigos.

How's it cookin'?

SO, what's new, not so much, mostly I've been working on The Damned first level again, the next chapter in the beat-em-up tutorial 'Weapons' (99% done) and I also rustled up a little Streets of Rage-style fighting game prototype the other night too. Making moves link to other moves when attacking was easier than I thought, and didn't require any complicated methods to achieve.

I'm quite chuffed with the way the revision of the first level of TD (The Damned) is going. In retrospect I can't believe I was prepared to simply let it be at one stage. My thinking was that maybe people would notice it, then the next game would be more popular. Then I noticed some of the effort some of my peers were putting into their games on this http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=717716 thread over at FlashKit and frankly, was inspired to keep pushing the game until I myself am truly satisfied with it. First things first, there's not enough weapons so I decided to chuck an assault rifle into the first level, which is becoming seriously playable now- if I don't say so myself. It was a teeny bit tricky to get the rapid-fire action of the gun done in AS as there is no such thing as a MouseButtonIsHeldDown handler in Flash, and so you have to fiddle around with things like boolean values instead. Also getting the rat-a-tat sound going wasn't as simple as you might think. I broke the sound into a single 'tat' and stuck it on the first keyframe of the firing animation and that works quite well.

Also, I was told by some folks that there should a wider variety of enemies to kill, and so after a lot of trial and error with different types (had ghosts and shit flying over the lake at one point) I decided it might be cool to make a mask-wearing harder version of the lake zombies. Enemies that are slow but take a good and proper mowing down to kill, as opposed to the ones that come at you like Olympic swimmers. On top of this, ammo is now limited and must be collected by shooting the occasional ammo box that pops up through the waves (because they just do that sometimes!), accompanied by my own sexy "AMMO!" voice, audio edited Audicity to sound much cooler.

I also contributed a few minor cosmetic changes, the sliding text boxes used for Rick and Jennifer's speech have been reenvisioned to be more 'antique' and decorated with steel engraving. A flashy extra ammo text box pops up now too. Oh, and the loading screen has been updated.

I'm surprised nobody has guessed what game this is a secret prelude to yet. Hint, Rick, Jennifer? Lots of gore? Masks and things? Certain beat-em-up tutorial on this very site?
Nope, I guess I am old.

Well, all these changes might be for naught, but I'm having fun actually making a game that is becoming more playable by the day. Links on the right-hand side, folks.

p.s.Saw III is awesome. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll say one word to convey a hint to what was my favourite scene, 'pigs'.

Ahh bollucks to it..

I'll post what's done of The Damned online. It's all work-in-progress so don't come crying to me about this and that not working, these graphics are crappy, etc.

There will be constant updates so keep checking in. Working link is on the right.

Okay, a quick post.


Check this out

New demo I've been working on. The physics behind it are all sound, converted from some online projectile motion mathematics I found to code. However I haven't quite equated how to get the arrow to rotate properly yet.

My inspiration for this little diversion came from the game Bowman Prelude which is by far my favourite Flash game on the net - the only Flash game I could play for hours and hours instead of five minutes. In the game you have to defend your castle by firing a variety of arrows at an attacking army and you can also destroy their castle. After every victory you can use the cash you earned destroying enemies to buy better, more powerful projectiles and other types of army. It would be perfect, well, more perfect if only for a couple of teeny little issues.

Bad Points

*No bonus cash for destroying the enemies castle
*Capturing the flag carries little incentive save making the levels shorter.
*The enemy can conjure all sorts of cool baddies but you're stuck with the same basic groups for your armies.
*Graphics do the job but they're boring.
*Repetitive sound loop gets on your nerves after the first hour (though you can turn it off).
*All the levels look the same.

In fact, while we're on the subject let's discuss my favourite Flash games followed by my analysis of just why they are so good.



Guardians of Altarris is my second choice for best Flash game on the net.
If you're into Final Fight clones, you'll love this. The graphics and sound are some of the best ever seen in a Flash game, IN FACT me and most other Flash games hobbyists I know were like "Shit is that really Flash?" when we first saw it. If I ever come across the guy who made the ambient music for this game I'm going to lock him in a room and force him to do the stuff on all my games. His stuff is that good.

Wow. The gameplay ain't half bad either. Though it isn't Aliens VS Predator, it's of a high calibre and stands head & shoulders above pretty much all other fighting games out there for Flash. As it is, it wrestles for the crown with Dad & Me (next review) for best fighting game on the net. With a bit of work on the fighting engine, it could easily be the best Flash game, period. The engineer behind the game (Scott Stoddard) in my opinion is probably the greatest Flash games programmer out there at this point in time. Not in an outstanding technical sense - though his games are obviously well-programmed - but rather in the way that every game he makes is sweet. I played his latest prototype over on FlashKit the other day and it's as addictive as hell.
Certainly a benchmark setter for us other wannabee legends.

Bad points
*Takes a looong time to load (kind of unavoidable for a quality game)
*Kind of slow at times.
*No weapons. Health icons, etc.


Dad & Me is a highly stylised beat-em up. I love everything about this game from the slick presentation to the comedic touches. I mean Tom Pulp and his lot sometimes go over the top with their twisted sense of humour but has genuine moments of hilarity such as boyscouts in front of buses and throwing lawnmowers at punks.

This is the best game on Newgrounds (after Bowman), and I often wonder why they didn't take this one to the N64 or whatever it was instead of Alien Hominid, which was nothing special. Though it can't beat Guardians of Altarris for graphics Dad & Me more than matches it in style and has a more responsive/flexible fighting engine that incorporates some nice physics. Also very well done is the soundtrack, which keeps the same melody throughout and yet changes depending on the environment.

Well, check it out! 6000 almost exclusively positive reviews on Newgrounds can't be wrong.

Bad Points
*Too short



Hmm....
If I was going to make a walk-along-beat-em-up I'd probably make my game more like Spike Out. There are two games I still consistently play in video-arcades, and never get tired of over here in Japan, StreetFighter and SpikeOut. Both are old games, though they contain the kind of perfect gameplay that never gets tiring. Good beat-em ups are all about the timing.
SpikeOuts strength lies in the multiple power meters which require perfect timing to operate. Once you've mastered it though, you can pull off some amazing floating combo's and progress through the game further than before. The bosses are genius, and kind of timing needed to defeat some of them separates the casual gamer from the expert. But if you're good enough, you can literally play the whole game through on one credit.

If you don't incorporate the necessity for good timing in a fighting game, it will never become a classic. Even Final Fight gets boring after a few levels. Aliens VS Predator is a good beat-em up that works not because of the skill level involved to play it, but because of the unique variety of moves available to each character.


Right well, I'm going back to the archer demo now, catch you later.

p.s. Just saw SAW III and it was awesome. Almost matches the first one.

Got some hosting babeeee...

Temporary hosting that is. One kind bloke I know from my other website "Young Dudes Guide to Japan" offered to help me out since I'm having such a bugger of a time getting a visa card over here in Japan.

I want to show you dudes the game- it's just that it's too close to completion now.
However, you can check out my first ever YouTube post, a render test for Usagi Yojimbo, the main character from Samurai Warrior.



Nothing flash (pun intended), but it's only the bare bones so far. I haven't even decided if I'll remake the game (Samurai Warrior) for sure yet. Pretty likely though.


I finally solved the sound doubling problem I had with the Damned. Turned out I was using two Mouse listeners instead of one. Like an idiot, I thought that you needed to declare different variables for every state, ie onMouseDown, onMouseUp then make a listener for each. Nope, one listener takes care of anything the mouse does after you initiate it. Stupid. This is very cool though because really now the only problem I have now is getting my external loaders to work. And I know why they don't, because the AS is all on the first frame, and all the movieclips are dynamic.

Will post some pics soon.

Just dropping in...

Well well, back again, if only for a quickie.

The Damned is very close to Beta stage now. Not only are all 3 levels complete, with new death-scenes and a few extra tweaks, but they've also been tied up to the main menu swf, which now loads them as external files. The menu swf file keeps track of the amount of continues you have left and everything. However, I really, really, wish I had done this fromt the start because it's been an absolute struggle to get the swf levels working smoothly now that they're external. I had simply shitloads of problems, everything from setIntervals continuing after the level had ended to enemies not appearing at all.

In fact I am utterly stumped by one tiny, annoying little error with the gun sound object retriggering on every instance of an external swf being loaded (in other words, every time I load a movie/level, the sound of gunfire 'doubles'). I've a hunch it might have something to do with the function for firing being triggered by a _global variable, instead of a local one. It's such a pain in the arse having the game this close to going live and yet not making any progress because of some idiotic little malfunctions in the code.

In my burn-out time I've been working on some other stuff. You might notice a new 2d engine demo posted on the blog. That was a tricky bugger to pull off at first, but isometric is my bitch now. This might well be the engine used to the Friday 13th game I have planned, or a remake/remix of the Last Ninja (another one of my aspirations)- you heard it here first. p.s. if any of you folks out there who read this are big fans of either game and think you could render up some sweeeet iso graphics for me to use, send us a mail. I won't hold my breath though...

I've got big hopes for The Damned. It's my first game, so it's not supposed to break any new ground in terms of coding excellence or gain much of a fan base, but I do hope a few folks out there enjoy it enough to anticipate a bigger and better second version. Now that I've laid down a concrete engine for the game, I know that the next one will be so much better.

I at least get some kind of a good starting rep in the Flash world. I am very excited that finally for the first time in my life I have the opportunity and the capability to make the games I always wanted to make. Call me a nerd or whatever, but it's almost like my highest ambition to be on the same ladder as the older generation of games makers. Individuals like Rob Hubbard, Matt Gray, Archer MacLean, and the folks in teams such as System 3, Thalamus, Sensible Software, CodeMasters --agghh..like movie stars to me, man! I want that! So if you like the game when you play it, remember that a lot of love went into this baby, and a lot of respect for those who inspired me to become a game author.

Greetings

Title Screen
95%

-have to implement some global variables to record the users score and remaining credits. That's it.

Level 1
100%

Level 2
80%

-I have to play around with the zombies on the second level because for some reason (I think there's some aft code in there somewhere) they cause it run with a terrible lag.
-Fix Evil.K's death sequences.

Level 3
60%
-Lucifer is half-finished and already implemented in the game. However I want to have a 'transformed' Lucifer where he flies around attacking you, instead of running on foot. Working on the mesh at present.
-Level needs more gore.
-Death scenes for all enemies.

The Damned is truly nearing completion. All 3 levels are quite fleshed out now, and are loading nicely into a placeholder mc on the title screen, and all in all I'd say it was about a month and a half from going beta to alpha.
Sweeet..

I of all people know it's not a perfect game. It's a bit sparse in places and doesn't feel like there's enough action going on, but I'm quite satisfied with it as a first-time game. I'm reaching the point where I'm ready to move onto the next project, which at the moment in my head is a remake of the C64 classic Samurai Warrior. The Damned 2 will come soon in the future though, and it will absolutely blow away the first one.

Update Central

Greetings peeps,

Yes, I have been busy. Just had my Japanese style wedding a few days ago, and boy am I glad that's all over. Anyone who's ever had an 80 year old relative sing karaoke at their wedding will know exactly what I'm talking about.

But somewhere inbetween in between the sake drinking and the speech-making, I managed to find the time to sneakily work on The Damned, and in fact I have quite a few updates to report (as if anyone reads this shit).

The third level is going well now. I rewrote the entire enemy spawn function, and also made the decision to reduce the dimensions of the sprites. It's amazing how much faster the game runs now, and without any serious compromise in visual quality. Sure, the monsters look a bit blockier when they get close, but the extra frames of animation more than make up for it. This was the way I should have had it from the start.

Got the little Crow dudes running around in there now, and I FINALLY invented a method that works successfully in simulating fog with movieclips. Further more, the modified weapon code is functioning well now, and can accommodate any other firearms I decide to include (not likely until The Damned 2). Another addition (though still in testing) is the implementation of a power-up symbol that gives you extra shotgun rounds if you shoot it. It's done but needs a cool sound effect.

One last amendment is the inclusion of a new beastie. Yes, I thought just having CrowMen to shoot might make the level a little bit bland, so I've gone ahead and designed my own Garrador/Dr.Salvador hybrid. No name for them as yet (any suggestions?). I downloaded (oops, rented) Friday 13th the second part the other night and the whole sack on the head thing was working for me. My character doesn't wield a machete, but a karambit, an ancient Indonesian style hunting tool. It's a lot uglier.

Check him out;



The other day we were chit-chatting on FlashKit about C64 remakes, and I was thinking how I'd love to remake the Friday 13th game. Making a Jason character now might save me some time in the future if I ever do pursue such an idea.


More to come real soon!