Sep 20 2011

RESEARCH AGREEMENT

Civ 5 is weird! I’ve been playing it on and off for the past few days and it’s… nice? Balanced? But… a bit too balanced, possibly. I haven’t felt like there’s any actual possibility of making a bad decision. In fact, what with the advisors, the recommended worker improvements, opposing civs coming to you to make deals and so on, the game will play itself perfectly adequately if you just follow prompts at random.

And you have to sign “research agreements” now instead of trading research? What the hell is that about? 😀

Anyway, this week, I’m wrapping up the portals build of Vigilance (oh my goodness this has dragged on long enough). I’ll also be starting work on turning those Fight Back screens into glorious pixelly reality, which will be interesting. I’ll finally have to figure out what I want the level backgrounds to look like – that’s going to be tough.

Let’s see if I can get to Friday and be able to say that Vigilance is FINISHED FOREVER. I fixed up some title screen stuff and implemented scoreboards today, so it’s going alright. Onwards!

Sep 16 2011

SAM HAXE’D

Sam HaXe work’s all done! Well, apart from tidying up loose ends and submitting a patch to Sam HaXe-Open project, but that can wait. The result:

Yup! It now supports enough of the SWF format to import the Newgrounds API. I have the achievement system hooked up and everything.

It’s been weirdly nice doing something so technical. It feels like I’ve spent most of my work time this week tabbing between a hex editor, an SWF decompiler and the SWF specification PDF, manually decoding the bytestream in Notepad to sniff out I/O bugs… but it was fun, in a way. I’ll have to do a game project soon which is super complex to program and scratch that tech itch 😀

Getting that API to link properly was the hard part, so I’m already halfway through implementing it in Vigilance. Onward to next week, getting back to games development, and hopefully shipping this portals build!

Sep 14 2011

PODCAST

I got interviewed for one! Against All Expectations – Episode 9. Leo (@limbclock) asks me a bunch about my background, Beacon and Vigilance, what the plan is with Fight Back, Mac stuff, HaXe stuff, Finland stuff… taking in things like the unfortunate name conflict with Chevy Ray’s Beacon (spoiler: totally my fault!) and how Vigilance was partly inspired by an RPG Maker game.

Hell, I’m not going to go on about the Sam HaXe work I’m doing right now. There’s plenty about it in the podcast. 😀

Some interesting stuff kicked off over the weekend. Ars Technica put up this post about contract clauses from game development studios which specify that anything employees create, even in their own time, is the property of the company. (My personal opinion: it’s taking the piss!) I sent this on to Jas Purewal (@gamerlaw) who, being super awesome, wrote up a whole article addressing the legal situation, sharing what developers think on the topic, and giving sensible real-world advice on how to deal with these issues. If you do any kind of software work yourself then give it a read, though I guess it’s written for a UK audience so the legal stuff might not be universal.

Right… back to implementing the SWF spec!

Sep 13 2011

ADVENTURES WITH SAM HAXE

Oof. I was hoping to get some serious work done on the new build of Vigilance on Monday, but it turns out Sam HaXe – which I use to link my SWFs – doesn’t properly import a bunch of things from SWF files, like morph shapes or button objects. That means I plain can’t use my sponsor’s API just yet.

So I’ve downloaded the source and I’m fixing Sam HaXe. 😀 It’ll probably take a few days, as I’ve got to extend how much of the SWF format it understands, and I guess I’ll be writing another technical Flash-games-in-HaXe post after that. There are some pretty good arguments for not using HaXe. I’m really looking forward to Fight Back and getting to actually use HaXe’s strengths!

Sep 09 2011

FRIDAY?

Man! It’s often helpful keeping a three-posts-a-week schedule, but sometimes I just don’t have anything to post. Today is one of those days. However, the reason for it is a good one: Vigilance now has a sponsor!

I’ve spent the past two days working on the necessary changes for the sponsored version. It’ll be out shortly once those are done, hopefully next week. Then I’ll finally get to close the door on Vigilance and get on with overhauling Fight Back, which should let me post a ton of new pictures and music tracks and videos with new cool stuff for months. 😀 Sit tight!

Sep 07 2011

FUTURE VISION

I’ve spent two days adapting Fight Back for higher res and I still haven’t touched any of the code! I’ve just been mocking up new gameplay and menu screens in GIMP, trying to get a handle on how the game will look.

Menu wise, I’ve decided to break things up a lot and go for a clean, simple layout that’s a bit like Rez:

I’ll probably put some soft-focus stuff on the right, like ship schematics or something.

In-game – ignore the actual detail in the background, it’s a quickly filtered snap from Google Maps just as a placeholder 😀 The ships are higher resolution but the same size on screen, and I’ve put in the new dual energy bars instead of the old heat bar:

If I end up targeting Flash Player 11 or download, I may end up doing 3D backgrounds for this.

The next job on this project is to go into the code to decouple the rendering from the game logic. This is going to be messy, but when it’s done I’ll be able to drop in all these new assets no trouble – and probably still support the old resolution, if I feel like it!

It’ll be interesting seeing how Flash copes with doing about 8 times as much work. The higher resolution means there are six times as many pixels to draw each frame, and that shot above has one graphics layer more than the original – for vignetting. I think I’ll probably end up targeting Flash Player 11 just because it’ll hardly run on low end PCs otherwise 😀

Sep 05 2011

FORWARD

Right! I think I’ve got a plan. I am going to push on with Fight Back for now, but I’m not committing to making it a big thing just yet. Right now I’m going to focus on making it the best damn Flash game it can possibly be. I’ll keep my options open. In a few months from now, I can make the decision: either start work towards a big, shiny HD version for cash money, or ship it for Flash and move on. There’ll always be more projects to take up!

Not much else to report. At the moment I’m balancing some contract work with sorting out the portal versions of Vigilance. It’s a fair bit of work! I’m going all out with the various portals’ high score tables and so on. Who knows, right? I have to test the waters first to see if it’s worth doing next time…

I’ve also finally got Vigilance under 10MB, which is well overdue. Major lesson learned from all this: Flash games have to be small! It’s hard being a Flash developer and an audiophile 🙂

Sep 02 2011

ROADMAP

Well, work on Vigilance is completed. I’ve spent this week on a contract project that leapt out at me from nowhere, which should be good money. Some time next week, though, I need to move on to other things…

Here’s an old shot of the main thing I’m considering.

Yup. FIGHT BACK is back on the radar, and I’m plotting a course to take it from “cool prototype” up to “finished product”.

Aug 31 2011

SURFING THE WAVE

Fear Is Vigilance went up a week ago. It’s now been played over 6,000 times, which is more downloads than Beacon got in that time! It’s shown up on RPS, in a PC Gamer roundup, on Reddit (hi Reddit!)…

Well, the real traffic to Flash games comes from people hitting Flash portals. I’m putting together a portal-friendly version of the game to send out shortly. It’ll have prominent links back to my site here, no sitelock, and I’ll probably put together a 10MB version as well for those portals who object to a larger file.

However you look at it, Vigilance is a commercial failure. I’m going to make a few hundred dollars from MochiAds, but that’s terrible money for a few months’ work. Still, it was a lot of fun to do, it was a valuable experiment, and seeing people enjoy it really does make it feel worthwhile. Thanks for playing and commenting – it makes all the difference 🙂

Aug 28 2011

A SLIGHT AMENDMENT

Spent Friday and Saturday playing Deus Ex: HR. SO GOOD.

Anyway, back to work. I’ve just patched Fear is Vigilance to fix a bug that stopped IE8 users from playing. That’s not cool! My server host sorted out the issues with Apache, too, so the server’s responding and everything even with lots of traffic. BONUS.

As a bit of a celebration for all this, here’s some of the Fear Is Vigilance soundtrack for download 😀

– Vigilance – Charity (Title Theme)
– Vigilance – Get Violent
– Vigilance – Ending (Long Mix)

This is the original version of the ending track, before I cut it down to make the ending a sensible length. It’s extra epic!